The Catholic Working Mom's Guide to Life. JoAnna Wahlund

      Most of the books and blogs written for and about Catholic mothers take for granted that the bulk of their time is devoted to their household and children. These publications support and encourage women in their vocations as wives and mothers, but seem to assume that these are women’s only vocations.

      However, many Catholic mothers have felt called by God to work outside the home, serving others with their talents. Many Catholic mothers have determined that they must work, even if they’d prefer to stay home, in order to provide for their families.

      While all mothers work hard on a daily basis, mothers who earn a wage in addition to the responsibilities of their roles as wives and parents often face a unique set of challenges. With multiple vocations, it’s all they can do to keep up with the bare minimum of housework, cooking, and laundry in addition to working twenty, thirty, forty, or more hours per week (plus the time it might take for commuting and daycare drop-off/pickup).

      I am intimately familiar with the joys and challenges of this hectic lifestyle, because I lived it for more than a decade.

      My journey as a Catholic working mother began on May 17, 2004. As I watched the pregnancy test turn positive, my heart rejoiced, but my brain said, “How are you going to afford a child?”

      That was a question my husband and I returned to again and again over the next several months. I was working full time, and he was working part time while going to college. I was a fairly new college graduate working in an entry-level job, and my income alone would not cover all of our expenses. We determined that, after the baby was born, we could work opposite shifts for the first six months to avoid paying for daycare; after that, we would reassess.

       “Even though I would actually love to be at home more but can’t, I love [the Catholic Working Mothers Facebook] group because it is filled with faithful, strong Catholic women who are living their faith out in the real world. This doesn’t make us any less of wonderful mothers than our SAHM friends, and it allows us to be a witness to our coworkers, customers, and others we wouldn’t otherwise interact with were it not for working outside the home.”

       — Erin G.

      As the child of a working mother, I assumed that returning to work after my six weeks of unpaid leave — which was all we could (barely) afford — would be a matter of course. But after my first child and eldest daughter was born on January 13, 2005, I found that, unexpectedly, my heart longed to stay home with her. I had underestimated how incredibly difficult and heart-wrenching it would be to leave her in another’s care—even my husband’s — while I went to work.

      We revisited our financial situation time and time again, especially after my husband made the decision to postpone his education and start working full time, but our calculations always ended the same: we needed two incomes, even after the cost of daycare.

      As my child grew and I tried to make friends with other Catholic mothers in my area, as well as online, I slowly began to realize that I seemed to be unique in Catholic circles.

      Most Catholic mothers with young children in my parish and in online groups were stay-at-home-mothers (SAHMs), but I was a Catholic mother with a young child who worked outside the home.

      I found it difficult to relate to the Catholic SAHMs who didn’t have to figure out how to juggle meal planning, cooking, laundry, and cleaning while absent from the home forty hours per week. No one could empathize with my struggle to balance spending time with my daughter and husband on weekends while struggling to complete all the household tasks that had piled up during the week.

      The other mothers I met had never had to play “The Sick Time Shuffle” with their husband, trying to figure out who had the most paid time off left and whose boss would be more sympathetic to the need to call in sick when the baby was ill and couldn’t go to daycare. They’ve never had to figure out what to do when the room in which you pump breast milk at work is constantly in use by others.

      There were non-Catholic moms with young