Mike Maddock

I would personally like to thank the people at www.salary.com for putting a price tag on the stay–at–home mommy profession. These nice folks created a salary structure for stay–at–home moms based on the average salaries of professions which share similar duties as moms.

According to www.salary.com, these professions included day care center teachers, van drivers, housekeepers, cooks, CEO’s, nurses, and general maintenance workers. The figure they came up with for stay–at–home moms with two school–age children working 100–hours a week was $131,471.

Yes, I would like to thank www.salary.com for ruining my life. My formerly content, stay–at– home wife hasn’t been the same since she saw the figure attached to the salary.com job description. Now she’s marching through the living room carrying signs and chanting, “Money for mommies!” and “Fair compensation for the stay–at– home nation!”

She got up on the changing table yesterday and started chanting, “Union! Union!” She’s also made some adjustments, and estimates her personal worth to be over $200,000 because we’ve got three kids, and the 100–hour work–week is a complete joke to her.

“My time–card never gets punched out,” she says. “Anyway, they left off psychologist, coach, improvisational engineer, construction worker, sleep therapist, mediator, human napkin, waiter, minister, body guard, drill sergeant, pillow, busboy…”

She threw about 25 other things in the mix, but there’s not enough space in this column to list all her duties. My wife also wants to know where the compensation is for the damage her body has incurred due to motherhood. She says her stomach alone is worth a cool million.

My problem is that I would love to pay my wife, but I’d have to ask her for the checkbook. On top of all her other duties, she’s our family’s money manager too! Despite the picketing and chanting, the salary will have to wait.

My wife and most other stay–at–home mommies know the only payment (or even acknowledgement) they’ll likely get is the joy of watching their kids grow and prosper. Most moms probably won’t even get a thank you until their children become parents.

Why? Because kids won’t realize the stamina it takes to administer a bottle at 3 am over and over again or the strong stomach needed to change diaper after diaper or the courage necessary to drop off a child at school the very first time…until they have children of their very own.

Believe me, I wasn’t too appreciative of my mom until I had my first child. I’ve been thanking her every day since. And while I may not be able to pay my wife one cent, I am truly grateful she has chosen wiping noses and bottoms as a career path. Sure, the salary isn’t much, but our family is certainly richer because of her choice.

My wife will toss the picket signs away and come down from the changing table soon enough. She won’t get a check unless she writes one to herself, but she should always feel value…maybe not $131,471 worth, but the intangible kind that comes from knowing she’s got the most important job on earth. That may not be too much comfort when she feels like she’s buried under a pile of laundry or when most of her conversation for the day was about a purple dinosaur, but the rewards to her family are priceless. I know that, and her children will know it soon enough.