Stay-at-home motherhood is like running a small business and you're the only one who shows up for work

If you're a career woman thinking of ditching your day job to stay home with your children, here's a way to compare it to the work-out-of-the-home world. It's kind of like you're an entrepreneur running a small business. But every day you're the only one who shows up for work. Your customers are extremely demanding. They pay no attention at all to workers' rights laws. You are provided no breaks for meals, bathroom stops, doctors appointments, sick days. You have to take your little customers with you wherever you go and arrange safe transportations for all their appointments. You have no receptionist -- except for your answering machine -- and yet your phone rings off the hook. You run a 24-hour-a-day cafeteria and you have to be both cook, dishwasher and waitress for a particularly finicky group of diners who won't eat bread with crusts or chicken nuggets with a "funny" texture. You run a laundry service that specializes in removing grass stains from white baseball uniform pants and must have all uniforms clean for the numerous practices and games held throughout a week. You're in charge of the taxi service that not only ferries your little charges to school, practice and lessons but also packs the variety of equipment required for each event throughout the week. You have to have the car pre-packed with staples like the baseball glove and cleats, the swimming goggles and granola bars in the glove compartment. And God help the spouse who tries to switch cars on you one day to get an oil change. It's like someone misplaced your purse. Unless you're fortunate enough to hire a cleaning service like your office has to vacuum and scrub bathrooms and floors, those are the jobs you'll try to squeeze in after putting your customers to bed or on weekends when your spouse takes them to sports practice. And even if you do have a cleaning service, you're still responsible for picking up the clothes, toys, shoes, books and lacrosse sticks that somehow get strewn across the floor on a regular basis. Oh, and don't forget outdoor maintainance. Again, you might luck out and hire a landscaping service. But if not, you'll have regular lawn and garden work to tackle to keep you in the good graces of your neighbors -- whom you will need to rely on rather regularly. "Have you seen my son? He said he was going outside and now I don't see him." Ahhh! But then, when you pull an all nighter the reward is that your kid's fever finally breaks and that is always more rewarding the any accolades you might get from a boss.