Episode 2: What it really means to be a stay-at-home—if you get divorced
The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast
Kate Anthony
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2018
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What no one tells you when you sign on for that "partnership agreement" (or "joint venture" as one of my friends calls it) of being at SAHM, is that you end up deeply subjugating yourself. As a stay-at-home-mom, you relinquish almost everything in service of raising your children, while your husband's path remains fairly unaltered.
And that's backed up by research. According to a recent study, women's standard of living in divorce decreases by 27%, while men's actually increases by 10%.
It's not just that you're subjugating yourself financially to your breadwinner husband. Your friendships slip away. Your hobbies. Your body. Your hormones do a crazy dance for far longer than anyone likes to tell you; and all of this lasts far longer — and is far harder to put back together — than you ever think possible.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of the Divorce Survival Guide podcast, where we have real, honest, smart, and sometimes even hilarious conversations about co-parenting, separation, and divorce, and all that goes along with that. |
| 0:21.4 | I'm Kate Anthony, your host, guide, life coach, and all-around expert in all things divorce. |
| 0:35.9 | When I got pregnant, I had just lost my job managing what would turn into an incredibly |
| 0:43.6 | successful fitness operation, fitness studio, but at the time it was being financially run into |
| 0:50.1 | the ground. I was also an actor, and while I still had to have a day job, because most of us do, |
| 0:55.8 | I've been doing pretty well in theater and television for most of my life. For those of you who |
| 0:59.6 | don't know, I started my acting career when I was three, when I was one of the kids on Sesame |
| 1:05.0 | Street. And being raised by actors in New York City, I had access to some pretty insane opportunities. |
| 1:12.0 | By the time I was 12, I had the kind of career that most actors would kill for. |
| 1:16.7 | When I was 23, I had my picture in almost every newspaper and magazine across the country |
| 1:22.4 | because of a highly controversial TV movie that I starred in, in which we had what I think is the second lesbian |
| 1:29.3 | kiss in television history, which was in 1994 a really big deal, even though the TV movie |
| 1:36.6 | is on HBO. So all this to say, I had a career, and it was not an insubstantial career. |
| 1:43.2 | It was quite a good career. But pregnant, I wasn't |
| 1:46.8 | exactly taking Hollywood by storm. At the same time, my husband's work started to pick up. After years of |
| 1:55.2 | struggle, our finances were starting to be in a really good place. So good, actually, that we decided that it wouldn't be |
| 2:03.8 | necessary for me to try to find stable work while I was pregnant, because that was going to be fun, |
| 2:09.5 | and that I could, might be able to have that idyllic life where I stayed home and raised |
| 2:16.0 | children while my husband supported us financially. |
| 2:19.7 | I felt like I hit the jackpot. |
| 2:23.1 | This was everything I could have dreamed of. |
| 2:26.1 | I imagined baking cookies, creating fancy dinners, snuggling with my baby while he cooed up |
... |
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