Stay-at-home motherhood

Kelli Arena used to be a correspondent for CNN. In fact, she worked there for 25 years covering the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, among other beats. She and her husband have three children, so she was very much the "working mother." Writing for a recent issue of Guideposts, Arena described her initial reaction when her job at CNN was eliminated just a few days before Christmas:

"Part of me was actually excited---for the first time since my kids were born I'd be able to celebrate Christmas without obsessively checking my BlackBerry or getting hauled off at three in the morning to cover some breaking news story."

In fact, she described the evening she told her children about her job loss as being "one of those rare nights when I actually sat down for dinner with my family."

The more time she spent around her kids, the more she realized how much she'd been missing by simply not being there. Picking her older daughter up from school one day, they talked about the pressures of middle school. She wrote, "I was getting to participate in her life in a whole new way. All of my years at CNN I had prided myself on moving heaven and earth to be there for the kids' milestones. Suddenly I realized where parenting really happens---in all of the little day-to-day stuff."

With three children to put through college, Arena wrote that she knows she'll have to find another job soon. But her time at home has taught her what really matters.

The revisionist history of feminism would have us believe that mothers who dedicated their lives to raising children in pre-feminist times were demeaned and demoralized by it. The pressure from society to stay at home was oppressive and evil. More and more modern day women like Kelli Arena are discovering that there are great rewards to be had from being full-time mothers, to say nothing of the benefits their children reap. Society may smile benignly on both mothers who work and those who stay home. Now it's the pressure to survive economically that stops many women from being able to choose what they believe would be best for their families.