When Crista McClure decided to have a child, she already knew that she wanted to be the major influence in that child’s life, which meant that she planned to quit her job as a product manager for a marketing information company.
She went about planning her future in an orderly fashion, finishing an MBA just before the birth of her first daughter, Kyla, now 3. She figured the training would help her launch her own business from home so that she could blend full-time mothering with income-earning potential.
But what she didn’t plan for — didn’t know that she needed to plan for — was the isolation and loss of self-identity that would come with leaving the professional working world. Nor did she foresee all of the problems that would accompany starting a home-based business.
So last spring McClure, 32, mother of Kyla and Danielle, 1, founded American Mothers At Home, an organization to help others manage the transition from workplace to home while keeping their sense of self-worth and an income.
The organization provides members a bimonthly magazine, At Home, discounts on products and services, guides to other local and national support services for at-home mothers and information on at-home businesses, including those most compatible with caring for young children.
McClure and other writers for the magazine offer advice on how to market a company, how to manage time with children and professional responsibilities and, for women who want to earn money at home but don’t want to run their own businesses, how to determine which at-home work offers are fraudulent and which are genuine.
The magazine also offers ways for at-home entrepreneurs to network with each other.
The organization has about 100 members, but McClure hopes added benefits and a shift in focus toward helping at-home mothers find paid work that is compatible with raising children will allow her to reach her 1,000-member goal by next spring. About 40 percent of the membership comes from San Diego County, the rest from around the country.
American Mothers at Home is McClure’s second entrepreneurial undertaking. After her older daughter was born, McClure and her husband, Stewart McClure, started a mail-order software company from their home. However, after about a year the McClures decided that the venture, selling software to legal professionals, wasn’t economically feasible.
“It was a learning experience, something like your first child, I guess. You do your best with your first business, but sometimes you just don’t know enough yet.
“After that I floundered for a while. I had just had my second daughter, and I’ve found that after you have a baby your emotions go up and down a lot, and I was having a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, a hard time trying to figure out what I could do with my life.”
McClure began work as a fundraiser for the Eye Crisis and Counseling Service, a social service agency that provides help to women who are victims of domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse and children who have been abused or neglected.
“At the time it was the perfect place to find myself, which is why I still work for them,” McClure said. “When you have your first child, I think it’s almost impossible not to start thinking about other families. You really have to come to grips with the fact that not all children have the same kinds of chances, the same opportunities that you’re trying so hard to give your own kids.”
Even though McClure found her volunteer work very satisfying, she said, she felt important elements were missing from her life.
“I think now, looking back, it was clear that I was looking for my passion in life.
“All my life I’ve always been a jack of all trades, interested in doing a lot of different things, which is fine, and it means that I’ve gotten to experience a lot of different things that I otherwise might have missed.
“But at that point I felt that I really needed to find my way, and so I asked myself what it was that I felt most strongly about. And when it came to me — it was so obvious it was, like, how could I have not seen this before? What I feel most strongly about in my life right now is the importance of staying at home with my kids, and I realized that a lot of other mothers must feel the same way.”
McClure said she began American Mothers at Home by investigating what other resources existed for at-home mothers. Her research and advice from friends, family and other mothers led her to focus on business opportunities for mothers who are at home with children.
“Part of the reason for our focus is that, as anyone who has kids knows, children are very expensive, and it can be a real strain on a lot of families to have to meet all those new expenses at the same time that the family is losing one of its incomes.
“But even if the family situation is such that they can be comfortable with only one income, then a lot of women still want to earn money. There are a lot of women — and I certainly count myself among them — who are used to the gratification of getting a paycheck every week. And they miss that.
“I’ve always been very career-minded,” said McClure, who majored in computer science at San Diego State University and got her first programming job the day after college graduation. “I’ve always been used to having all the energy that I put into my career rewarded more or less immediately.
“And, of course, there are a lot of rewards to parenting along the way as well. But it’s also clear to me a lot of days that raising children is a very long-term project, and a lot of the rewards are pretty long-term too.
“Being able to earn money while being at home with your kids allows you to keep some of those benefits of the professional world without giving up time with your children,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect solution, of course. It’s hard to work at home, and it can still be very isolating. And balancing the demands of children and a business can be very frustrating. But for a lot of women, if they get into the right kind of business, it can make a big difference in their lives.
“In talking to other mothers, one of the problems that comes up over and over is the problem of being isolated, and that’s one of the issues that we address in the magazine and simply through the existence of the organization itself.
“Some of what we’re doing is providing the kind of reinforcement and support that before they had children women would have gotten from their jobs. That’s really what some women need. And what other women need is practical advice on how to set themselves up in business, and we provide that too.
“One of the hardest things for mothers who had been working and are now at home is that what you do as a mother really doesn’t get noticed,” she said. “Motherhood is not a profession. It’s not a role for which you get rewarded. Your identity in today’s society really comes from the job you hold and how much you make, so if you don’t have a salary, then you’re invisible in a lot of ways.
McClure said that while it is difficult enough for mothers who are determined to stay at home, it can be even harder for mothers who haven’t decided between staying at home and returning to work.
“You get mothers who want to be at home but feel guilty about not earning money, or maybe just feel guilty about leaving their careers,” she said. “And then they think they really should only want to be at home, and so they start feeling guilty about feeling guilty. And then feeling guilty about feeling guilty about feeling guilty. Part of what we want to do is help women sort out those issues and find a balance for themselves.”
McClure said she is happy with the choices she has made in her life, even though they required her to make a fundamental change in her ideas about who she wanted to be.
“All the time that I was growing up I always assumed that I’d get a job with a company like IBM and work for them for 40 years and then retire. The kind of career my dad had.
“And maybe if I didn’t have children, that would have been the path I took, but I do have kids and so I have to find a different way to balance my life.
“What I’m doing is partly because of the influence of my husband, who is very entrepreneurial and runs his own (contracting) business and who has really taught me a lot about the advantages of working for yourself. Right now I hope that I never have to got back to working for anyone else, no matter how old my kids are.
“But I’ve also changed because of my children and because of the fact that I am now a mother,” she said. “I love my children more than anything, and I am going to be here for them when they need me growing up. But I’m also good at other things. It’s important for women to be reminded that they can be good mothers without being nothing but a mother every hour of every day.
“There are still days when I have doubts, when I find myself looking in the want ads just to see what’s there. That doesn’t happen as much now, but I think it’s natural with any decision as big as the one to stay at home to wonder about whether it was the right choice.”
Her volunteer work with women who are facing poverty or abusive situations has helped her keep the problems faced by mothers like herself in perspective.
“I’m the first to admit that it can be difficult to stay at home with small kids. And if it’s been one of those days when they’re sick or just especially clingy and you haven’t talked to another adult for 12 hours, you find yourself saying, `Why am I doing this?’
“But then you talk to a woman who’s in an abusive situation or someone who has to wonder every day about how she’s going to feed her children and you come home and you just say, `Oh, I am so lucky.’
“But while it’s important to keep in mind the fact that there are other women who are a lot worse off and whose problems may be much more critical than your own, it’s also important to acknowledge the fact that everyone has their own fundamental needs.
“What I’m trying to do is help women meet those needs, whether it’s trying to ensure that a woman has a safe place to go so she won’t be beaten up or whether it’s trying to help a woman find the support and renewed self-confidence that she needs to be happy.”
