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2. I used my driver’s license far more than my degrees. I got my driver’s license after a short course and a couple of lessons in 11th grade. My post secondary education took six years of hard work and yet, for years, I used my driver’s license far more than my formal education. And on one level I felt like I was short-changing myself, those who educated, trained and believed in me by doing this.

3. My kids think I did nothing. They saw me cooking, cleaning, driving, volunteering and even writing, but they know what a “job” looks like and they don’t think I had one.

4. My world narrowed. During the years at home with my children I made the most wonderful friends, women I hope to know all of my life. But living in the suburbs among women of shockingly similar backgrounds, interests and aspirations, narrowed the scope of people with whom I interacted. In the workplace my contacts and friends included both genders and people of every description, and I was better for it.

5. I got sucked into a mountain of volunteer work. Some of this work was deeply meaningful and some of it trivial in the extreme. It is very easy to feel as though you are doing something whether it is sitting on a hospital board or raising funds for a nursery school. Volunteer activities involve a flurry of activity but, at the end of it, those who are running the organization carry on and your job is over.

6. I worried more. Being around my children so much of the time gave me the chance to focus on them at a granular level. And I feel fairly certain that neither they nor I benefitted from the glaring light it shone upon us. Helicoptering takes time, and I had the time. If I had worked outside our home I would have still worried about them but might have confined my concerns to more substantive matters.

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7. With my husband I slipped into a more traditional marriage. Before our children were born and when they were young, my husband and I did the same job. We left in the morning together and came home together to stare at each other and at our small children through a blinding haze of exhaustion. In every way my husband sees me as his equal but in the years that I have been home our partnership has developed a faint 1950′s whiff. He doesn’t ask me to run to the dry cleaners or fish store, but let’s be fair, they are both closed by the time he gets home.

8. I became outdated. Through the 1980′s and into the 1990′s, I worked in banking on Wall Street in a technologically cutting edge department. Just as I mastered every new computer it would be whisked away and replaced by newer faster models. I was au fait with software the public wouldn’t see for years and anything I didn’t understand was explained to me by MIT-trained analysts. I have kept up with technology but not in the aggressive way I once did in my job. In my world I often use my young adult kids as tech support and endure their snide remarks and eye rolling, knowing deep inside that at one time it was very different.

9. I lowered my sights and lost confidence. But far and away my biggest regret about my years at home was that I lowered my sights for myself as I dimmed in my own mind what I thought I was capable of. I let go of the burning ambition I once held because I didn’t feel as though I could hold it and three babies at the same time. My husband did not do this, my children did not do this, I did this. In the years that I was home I lulled myself into thinking that I was accomplishing enough because I was. I was raising my children and, as any parent who had spent a day with a child knows, that can fill all of the hours in a day. What I hadn’t realized was how my constant focus on my family would result in my aspirations for myself slipping away. And despite it being obvious, I did not focus on the inevitable obsolescence that my job as mom held.

If I could wind back the tape, have a do-over, what would I have done differently? Looking on at my grown and nearly-grown sons, I am grateful for the gift of time we had. Yet, I wish I had tried to keep a finger, a toe or a hand in the working world to ease an eventual return. I did not have a job well suited to part-time work, and work at home was technologically impossible at the time. But, the solution required imagination, not capitulation, and with hindsight, I would have recognized that over time, my parenting and career would both ebb and flow, but neither would — nor should — ever end.