The new stay at home Mom

This spring, being a stay at home Mom means than I am staying at home while my children travel the world.  My 22 year old son is touring South Korea with his college a capella group.  My daughter is doing manual labor as part of a missions trip to Haiti.  My husband and I are home, in Michigan, working to support their lifestyle.  Did that sound just a tiny bit jealous?

When I was a sophomore at Purdue, efforts were underway between the business program and the language programs to create an international business major.  Since I was a business major with a french minor, I was a candidate.  As such, I was offered a scholarship to attend school in France for the summer.  All expenses paid except airfare.  Before the days of airline deregulation (yes, I am that old), this was something around $2,000 -- about $1Million in today's dollars.  It was almost as much as a year at Purdue, meant giving up the summer job that was a critical financial component and was therefore completely unattainable.  My parents were both working but there were two more educations to fund after mine and money was tight enough that I had to add water to my shampoo bottle at the end of the month to make my monthly allowance last.  I mentioned it briefly to my mom but knew the answer before I asked.  Someone else got the scholarship and the first international business major at Purdue.

Now, my kids did not ask for any money for either of their trips.  The singers funded their own trip with a year's worth of paid performances and fundraising requests from alums.  The missionaries each sent out 100 fundraiser letters and expect to have raised all the money they need to pay for the trip.  Both of my kids will be sleeping in dorms/hostels and on floors, eating little and working hard (if 2 gigs a day can be called hard, moral advantage daughter here).  Ultimately, the difference between me at Purdue and my kids today is that they can imagine such a possibility exists and can put together a plan to achieve it.  AND they can expect to have other people understand this and support it as well! 

We had dinner with some friends last week whose son is living in Australia and daughter in South America.  The opportunities for global living in our global economy were unimaginable 30 years ago.  So I will put aside any petty parent-child jealousy, celebrate these amazing and wonderful opportunities and scour facebook for any photo updates.  Being the stay at home mom is not so bad.  But after we are done paying for college . . .