Children Will Listen

I often wonder how my children will remember these last few years in our family's life. For, just as they have all become thinking beings, they have watched the demise of Mommy's job and Mommy gleefully home to meet school buses (after years of never, ever being there), the stretches of Mommy unemployed and questioning every activity and every ice cream cone that would cost money that wasn't coming in, and Mommy's return to work and virtual disappearance for most of the work week. Were they very little, I could count on their forgetting all of it by the time it would matter. But they are not little. This all has to be going in and shaping how they will view work, and parenthood, and stability (financial and otherwise). This is not my parents' generation, when discussions of stress and money happened in separate rooms after the children went to bed. This is apartment life, where virtually no room is really separate, and more often than not, I am the one who goes to bed first, meaning discussions often happen with an audience.
 
Will the fact that I was home for a while--that they got a taste of Mommy there to deliver forgotten school books and transport kids to afterschool--make my going back to work an even harder piece of their childhood memory? What will resonate most--my losing a job, all of us having to change spending patterns, my depression at the job market, or my euphoria (at least some days) from being back to work? And will I be able to see the effects now, or will they appear in the job and life choices they make, their overall sense of security, their relationship with money?
 
I have read statistics about job loss being one of the most stressful events in a person of family's life, and, while I know for sure that we have experienced it on a somewhat minor level, the emotions were not minor, and I imagine the effects on me--good and bad--will last a long time. I just hope that my always listening children can use those effects for good--to learn resilience and adaptability and a bit of financial wisdom. Then, whether or not the bank would consider this last year worthwhile, I will know it has been this way for some sort of good.