work life balance

At my mom and baby group we talked about work life balance. I knew I would be holding my tongue, this is a sensitive topic. The group includes lawyers and stay at home moms and everything in-between. I did not want to offend anybody. New mom friends are so important, part of my sanity is being around other people like me who have a little one. I think also for Byrd it is important for him to be with other sweet babies. The discussion was opened and a woman from the south said how she felt bad about staying at home, like she had to apologize for it, when she worked that was her identity. Another stay at home mom cut in and said, you should feel that way, its okay, your work is your identity. Just hearing others voice these feelings, with no solution, just putting it out there, I felt some healing. And I realized how I have had a habit of asking moms what they do, even if they are stay at home and I know, but it seems that everyone does something. I think I have wanted to ask wishing the norm is the expectation that you do something, that it is normal to work as a mom, more normal than not to work. For me it is like I have been putting others on the spot as a counter balance in the universe to my mom and step mom who both have said how moms should stay home. My step mom recently said how she would not have children if she couldn't spend the first year with them. My mom told me once how I should take five years off when I have kids. They never said much about my career. When I got my PhD my mother did express how proud she is and how proud I should feel. My mother has mostly been a distant figure in my life, but she is making a come back. Her enthusiasm for the health and welfare of my family is refreshing. My stepmother's comparison of me versus herself or her kids, what she did and didnt have, the idea that I am wealthy because my Dad plans to leave me money in 30 years or whenever he passes away. There is great redemption when my mom tells me how hard it is to do a phd, how great I should feel. Though as a child she told my siblings I was not very smart, so bittersweet relationship always.
I want there to be the expectation that all adults work, that working adults can also have families, that moms and dads take care of children and households, that either moms or dads might stay home. And I have taken this out on moms around me, in the same way my stepmom is taking out her hard young motherhood on me, I am doing it to stay at home moms.
Shame on me. I think I am over this meanness now.
The discussion in mom&baby group had no resolution. Just jobs give us our identity and structure. It is uncomfortable and potentially isolating to stay at home with children.