How to respond to the people who say “WeLl CaN’t YoU jUsT wOrK fRoM hOmE?”

[kristiwhitten]

@mahyrah My organisation has been working from home since way before covid, I managed to avoid working from home until our government threatened 10k fines per employee who could wfh but wasn't.

I have two kids.

Ever since June 2021 my life has been a combination of battles without any wins.

The kids don't care if I'm on a work call
My husband thinks I can wash dishes during my ten minute break
My boss thinks my kids can magically fly to school
My husband does nothing around the house cos I am always home so have more time for chores
My stakeholders think I drink champagne at 0900 because things take so long to process.
My daughter was removed from daycare last year because we sold an investment and the income put us above any subsidy and I can't afford $220 a day so what choice did I have.
It was stressful having a child at home with me but we got through it but kids have needs and managers give employees deadlines. I do not recommend working from home with a child it's not fair on the child or the job. So just tell your people, your partner can support you while you stay at home with a child and that you feel really lucky to have that opportunity.

 

[bow2me]

@mahyrah “Childcare is a full time job.” People should recognize this as truth, if not they’re idiots.

 

[ramdomin]

@mahyrah I am a SAHM and get this so much. My kids are older though but my teen daughter deals with mental health issues and it can be exhausting cause their is always something with her going on. And then of course I clean the house often and have lots of appointments for me and my daughter. How can I focus on a job and a teen daughter that also often keeps me up at night even at times. It would be too much.

 

[kitchenunits3]

@mahyrah My MIL watches my daughter and she went out of town for two days. We didn’t have anyone else to watch her so we just tried to tag team those two days. It was HARD and I barely got any work done lol. I know it works for some people but I could not WFH and take care of my baby full time or even half time lol

 

[tlb73737]

@mahyrah Maybe it comes from a good place? I'm a housewife/SAHM and it can be overwhelming, there's a loss of identity that comes with it. Having a side hustle can help by giving us a corner of our lives where not not just mommy and some small independence.

 

[jasonalonzo]

@mahyrah My mom has been saying this because I’m going back to work and baby has to go to daycare.
Constantly asking if I can just cut expenses to stay home and when I explain I can’t, she tells me I need to find a WFH job so that I can stay home with the baby.

Like obviously I want to stay home with my baby all day and I’ve thought of all the possible ways I could, but it’s just not an option with our current finances, and getting a WFH job isn’t feasible either because I can’t give my baby my attention and work at the same time! It’s very hurtful to be basically told I’m not doing enough for my baby by sending her to daycare.

 

[iwant2learn]

@mahyrah That's been said to me too but only by people who have no kids.

 

[wopette71]

@mahyrah Yeah I’ll work from home, thanks for offering to watch my child.

 

[pandie]

@mahyrah I don’t think I could even speak if someone said that to me. I would just have to do the thousand yard stare. I have a reasonably flexible job, but when I had no daycare the entire month of January and my husband and I were trying to juggle watching our baby and working? It was awful. The day we got back into daycare, I had to resist the urge to thrust my baby into the daycare lady’s arms and then go skipping away, singing like a Disney Princess. I adore my daughter, but I never want to have to be in the position of trying to be full-time worker and full-time mom at the same time. Trying to do both made me terrible at both, and it made me feel like a terrible mom because my baby wanted me all the time, but I couldn’t be there either for or with her.

People who say that need to try it for 1 week. See how easy it is.

 

[tenaea]

@mahyrah If it's that easy then tell them to take your baby to work with them.

 

[lldefectedll]

@mahyrah Not a mom, but I lurk here to try and figure out if I want to be after years of being on the “Absolutely not,” side of the fence.

This was my boyfriend’s response. My current job is WFH and he figured “If you already WFH you’d be able to take care of a baby while working at home too.”

 

[lrt12]

@mahyrah Working from home is not always possible depending on the type of work involved. AI work often requires an infrastructure to support things like training, debugging, and deployment that may not be available to those working remotely.

 

[lrt12]

@mahyrah You can point out that AI technology continues to make advances and has been applied successfully to a variety of real-world tasks and applications, so there is plenty of potential for AI to help solve the problem at hand.