Which leads me to conclude that Lerner undervalues what is perhaps the one factor that makes being a stay-at-home mom the most difficult: the sheer challenge of parenting all day, every day. The constant sacrifice of body and soul to another being. The unrelenting subjugation of your desires to another’s needs. The fact that sometimes you can’t even

Stay-at-home parenting is harder than I thought. Maybe it’s the fact that my child was colicky for the first six months of his life, and that even at eight months old, he—and, consequently, I—have yet to sleep through the night. Maybe it’s my own fault for setting unrealistic expectations for what sort of stay-at-home mom I would be: the kind who preserves her own produce, makes her own laundry soap, and still has time to put on makeup every morning. They do exist. Or so the blogosphere says.

For the last eight months I have wrestled with disappointment in myself for failing to be the peppy, positive, endlessly energetic mom I had hoped. Instead, I have spent much of my mothering career to date feeling sad, frustrated, and irritable.

Apparently I am not alone. A new Gallup poll found that stay-at-home moms are more likely than moms who are employed outside the home to feel negative emotions such as worry, sadness, stress and anger on a daily basis, as well as to have been diagnosed with clinical depression. Although the gap between the two groups of women is only 5 to 10 percentage points wide in most of these categories, the fact remains that as a group, stay-at-home moms are emotionally worse off than employed moms.

haron Lerner (author of The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation) dug into the contributing factors behind the Gallup data in a recent Slate article. Lerner credits financial strain and lack of appreciation as the two leading causes for the negative emotions of stay-at-home moms. She also references census data released in 2009 to show that today’s stay-at-home moms are more likely to be poorer, less educated, younger, Latina, and foreign-born than other moms.

In other words, the average stay-at-home mom is more likely to be a woman who stays home because she needs to, not because she wants to. Given the context, Lerner argues, the increased levels of negative emotions and depression among stay-at-home moms are understandable.

Ironically, Lerner’s article made this stay-at-home mom feel more depressed than ever. I’m part of the relatively small group of stay-at-home moms who have willingly opted out of the workforce. I’m not Latina or foreign-born. I’m not under significant financial strain. I have a master’s degree. And I have a strong network of family and friends telling me that the parenting I do is appreciated. And yet, I would be the first to admit that my emotional well-being has suffered since I became a stay-at-home mom.

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