Thoughts about breadwinning & breadmaking

I’m at home today; making applesauce, doing laundry, preparing a client’s tax return, and working through my own family’s tax returns. And thinking, as I work, about work: about the paid kind, and the unpaid kind, and how my life is balanced between these two.

Sometimes I feel as though I have “the best of both worlds” – because I am married, and because my husband has been the primary income-earner in our household in the years since our children were born, my family’s economic well-being does not teeter dangerously out of whack if I don’t contribute to the household’s coffers. However, Mr. MoneyGal’s role as the main breadwinner is also partly by default, because this isn’t exactly what we had planned.

(I love how “bread” in “breadwinner” has both a figurative sense and a literal one: my husband makes the figurative bread – money – so I can stay home and make the literal bread. Right?)

I’ve just started reading Neil Gilbert’s A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. And I’m also grappling with an article I have committed to writing on family tax policy, namely how to navigate the tax code to maximize income-splitting opportunities for Canadian families. (And because I am intensely interested in how tax policy affects Canadian families, my research for this article has taken me down long, extravagant detours into the history of Canadian welfare and social policy.)

Gilbert’s book places the contemporary situation of North American women in a particular crunch: “Today,” he writes, “women have more control over the course and rhythm of their lives than ever before. They also struggle with more choices about how to achieve self-fulfillment. One of the most challenging decisions concerns how much of their labour to invest in the work of motherhood and how much in paid employment. This book is about that choice.”

While this blog is not about the struggle with that choice, it is fully informed by it. I know how difficult it is to get unbiased, clear and useful financial information - and that making decisions about family life is much easier when you can separate out the financial side of the equation from the emotional side. And I know that for many families, the decision about whether mom engages in paid labour is in large measure a financial one.

So I am here, in this little space on the wide-open Internet, to think through family finance with you. What do you need to know? How can I support you?