When people ask me what I'm going to do now that I have a PhD, I enthusiastically respond that I'm going to stay at home and raise our baby. Most of the time, people smile in surprise and walk away thinking "So she's going to do absolutely nothing with her degree."
In a sense, they're right. I will not be applying any specific aspects of my research to child-rearing. I have learned very few "facts" that are relevant to SAHMhood; though my degree is in linguistics, I have just basic knowledge of child language acquisition, and no training whatsoever in important matters like teaching reading. If anything, I will be less than helpful when my daughter comes to me with a question from her grammar lesson, as a large part of linguistics training is to say that prescriptive grammar rules don't matter and our main focus should be describing actual speech. (When my husband painstakingly pointed out the sentences ending in prepositions in my dissertation, I didn't even bother changing them - gasp!) So in this way, I suppose one could say that I am indeed wasting my education, at least the last five years of my specific training.
Another rather utilitarian way to assess whether I am squandering my education is to talk about the money involved. People imagine the mounds of debt I must have accrued from nine years of college and grad school, they realize that I will not be bringing any money in to pay it off, and they are horrified. However, in my case, there is no debt. I got a full ride throughout (as I think I've mentioned before, this is one of the reasons I went straight for the doctorate instead of just a master's). I suppose someone could argue that the funds I received could have gone to another student, but this isn't always the case. When it comes to financial wastefulness then, I consider this aspect a draw.
Perhaps another way to accuse me of wastefulness is in wasting my own time. After all, once I realized I would become a stay-at-home mom, wasn't it a waste of time to bother finishing grad school? We could be on baby #2 by now!
I did briefly consider this. However, dropping out of grad school wasn't really an option, and not just because my husband (and family, and friends) would have wanted to kill me. I knew that I was supposed to finish my degree.
It was abundantly clear to me that grad school was God's plan for me. I don't know why (though I'm sure some of the relationships that I've developed were a big part of it), but this has been the path He directed me down. Now I'm moving into a different season. Maybe eventually there will be a time where I "use" my education, perhaps by teaching or writing, but right now it is time to use different aspects of that education. I've already put my research skills to work examining pregnancy and childbirth and parenting. Both the ability to skim and to read critically have been applied to the vast amount of literature out there!
Perhaps the most important thing you learn in grad school is perseverance: plugging along towards your long-term goal. It's important to persevere when things fall apart, whether the wrench in your plan involves a major change in your research or a child's major meltdown in the grocery store. Perseverance comes in handy when you do the same mundane activities day in and day out, whether that be tedious data analysis or reading the same book for the thirty-seventh time that day. Perseverance is necessary when dealing with difficult people, whether you're calling your flaky adviser for the fifth time or reminding your toddler of the rules for the fifth time.
So in the end, am I wasting my education? Some will still insist that I am, some won't. I don't think so, but usually I just shrug. The question to me is really immaterial at this point. The important question is, am I following where I am being called? Right now I can answer yes. And thanks to that, I can let the question of "waste" just roll off my back.