What I said was perfectly clear and consistent. You chose to try to parse it your way. Nice try.
I stayed home my 50% of the time. Every Tues. Thurs and every other Friday Sat and Sunday. 7 out of every 14 days. And, my kids (two of them 20 months apart) had a great time with me as I did my own work the other 10 hours a day. I knew how to do this since my father was also a work at home dad designing lighting systems from his office at home and raising three kids.
Ask grandma. She’ll tell you that your 16 hour a day child care job is just a joke.
My mother, my grandmothers, and most of my ancestresses worked their backsides off at home, whether living in the suburbs or in the countryside. Though the children were on deck every waking moment and needed supervision, teaching, etc., no one was “bored” and thinking of things to do; like them, when I was able to stay home my days were productive and full of constant work: the shopping, cleaning, cooking, errand-running, and sewing a family requires, as well as taking care of animals, painting the house, volunteering at church or charities, maintaining a vegetable garden, homeschooling the kids, etc. All of these things of course not only improve the minds of the children—homeschooled children are famous for lapping public school kids on exams, college admissions, academic prizes, and other scholastic honors—but free the husband to devote a lot of time to his career.
To bring us back to the subject of this thread, women who choose to be housewives: there is no way that a woman who works full time outside of the home has the time or energy to give as much and do as much after work as the woman who is at home from the time she gets up in the morning. If you don’t get home until 5:30 or 6, you can’t possibly be there to help your kids with a difficult math assignment when they get off the schoolbus at 3. You still have hours of chores and errands to do, cooking and perhaps laundry and other responsibilities, and there are only 24 hours in a day, possibly four hours between the time you get home and the time the kids have to be fed, bathed, and in bed. Call the involved mothers piddlers if you like (not clear on precisely what sort of insult this is intended to be, are you perhaps suggesting that we suffer from urinary incontinence?) but there are only so many hours in a day no matter how smart you are.
Now that I’m compelled to work at a full-time job outside of the home, I certainly don’t have the time or strength to give to my family as I used to, and we all feel the lack very acutely. Though I’m an unusually organized and productive person, there is no way everything that needs to be done can be done in four hours.
I don’t understand what pleasure you get out of denigrating the accomplishments and labor of others who are leading perfectly valid and productive lives as housewives. We appear not to have the same values at all. In any case, I’ll give you the last word so you have ample opportunity to criticize those of us who devote more time to our homes and children than you do. Be my guest . . .