Ditch the degree, pick up the diapers

It doesn’t sound like a story many men would want to hear.

Or one that makes much sense in times of runaway inflation, such as now: Your graduate wife will quit her job or shut down her business and stay at home to raise the children.

Yet, it isn’t that the situation that US President Barrack Obama, and British Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessor, Gordon Brown, are in?

Michele Obama was a hospital administrator, Sarah Brown a Public Relations practitioner and Samantha Cameron a successful businesswoman in the designs industry in the UK.

They all quit their jobs while their husbands were pursuing office.

In Kenya, many professional women are re-thinking their decisions to carry on with working at the expense of nurturing their families.

But while the vast majority decides to open business at home or negotiate some flexi- and work-at-home time with their employers, a few have the courage to quit working altogether.

It isn’t an easy decision to make, quitting work to stay at home.

So despite the pressure of life, is it entirely impossible to sit in the house, your impressive certificates stacked in the drawer or your business shut just to have enough time with your children and husband?

Saturday Magazine talked to a few women who decided to tread where the devil wouldn’t.

Bernice Wangari Mugo,

Mother of two, businesswoman

Before she quit work, Bernice Mugo used to import clothes from Kampala for her fashion and designer shop in Thika town.

But after she experienced the pain of leaving her baby with someone else, Bernice quickly changed her mind.
Bernice and her husband, Mugo Thuku, married in 2004 and moved to Roysambu in Kasarani.

In February 2005, at the age of 23 and while working as a production assistant at Cussons, she gave birth to their first son.

She quit her job at Cussons and reared her son for six months before she employed a nanny and started her first business selling clothes in a shop along Thika Road.

There was no question, at the time, that she needed the income to supplement her husband’s, who was working at a milk-processing company in Ruiru.

The experience was tough. For 12 months it was a chaotic life, juggling the business, phone calls from home that always bore bad news, and the tension of wondering just whether the baby was OK.