Motherhood Turned Career

I've spoke about my opinion on this subject before, that I think motherhood should be viewed as a career.  Now I've actually gone and done it.  I'm now co-owner of a daycare with my best friend and it certainly is Motherhood times 10.  I now kind of understand what it must be like to have triplets as there are 3 babies to care for every day, plus my two, plus 6 year old twins after-school.

I love that I get to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to work, not to mention the fluffier and funnier looking the socks the better.  I'm the anti-fashionista and I like it this way.  Sure I spend most days with some degree of snot, spit up or other bodily fluid on me, and sure I got an accidental hand full of poop when one of the babies was carefully concealing a poop splosion, but I just can't help but laugh about it afterward. It's not anything different than I've encountered during my four years as a mom.  Even when there are 3 babies crying I have a great friend there to help me laugh off any feelings of being overwhelmed. 

I think it's safe to say that I've slipped into my new career quite seamlessly.  I went from sitting in my cubicle like veal to feeling fresh air (weather permitting of course), playing games, reading stories, and hanging out with some pretty cool little people, not that I don't miss some of the co-workers I no longer see.  As expected, the pay is not all I dreamed it would be, but we're working on it.  All the stress that I had before has melted away and I never worry about getting in trouble for talking to my co-worker too much.  I don't have to sit through any more awkward annual reviews where I try to play up my awesomeness to people who don't really care all that much about me anyway.  Not to mention that every day is take your children to work day. 

If anything it's made me a better mother.  I've really watched and helped my children acquire new skills.  Hannah has started reading and she works on writing her letters every day.  She is using scissors well and has found a love for putting puzzles together.  My son has found new children to give hugs to and play with besides his big sister.  Sure we're on our second nasty cold in two months and both kids got their very first ear infections last week (in both ears), but hopefully their immune systems will be equipped to handle the onslaught of germs they'll encounter when they start school.

I used to think that if I just made more money and had more time off then I'd be happy in my career.  But here I am making less money,working 10 plus hours a day and I couldn't be happier.  I sleep like a baby at night and I never ever worry about what the new day will hold for me.  I know any stress I feel will quickly be replaced with laughter.  I can pull my kids in for a snuggle whenever I want.  I can snuggle little babies and know with 99 percent certainty that I will never again have baby fever.  We do need more kids enrolled because life is still life and there are always bills that need to be paid, but at least know I know that I won't have to pay with my sanity.

Redefining Happiness

Ask any mom if they were happy before they had children and I'll bet they say yes.  They had freedom, energy, creativity, and their youth was on their side.  A few days before my daughter turned four, my mother said to me, "How is it possible that just four years ago you had no children?"  That was a lifetime ago I thought.  Four years, two kids ago I considered myself to be happy.  I was a newly-wed, coping with being a cash poor home owner.

I was happy at the time.  But from the moment my first child was born, I decided that happiness was a moving target and in fact, I didn't know just what my capacity for happiness was until I looked into the eyes of this tiny person that I had created.  It's safe to say that I had no idea just what I was capable of until I had children.

I never knew just how much I could love another person.  Despite losing my dad at a painfully young age, I didn't know until I became a mom just how much I stood to lose in this world.  It is that ever painful reminder, that gaping hole that losing a parent creates in ones life, that reminds me nearly every second just what can be lost, without warning and without any regard for what I consider fair.  It's the grindstone my emotions are constantly sharpened against.  It's the reality we all know but seldom acknowledge, filtering in with painful clarity when a little blurriness is actually necessary to get through the every day routine of life.

When I was in high school, friends would ask me why I was single.  That was the high school equivalent of being unhappy.  The truth was that I never really cared to be in a relationship.  I actually prefered to watch the high school melodrama unfold from the sidelines instead being caught in the web of adolescent romance whose rules and affections moved and changed with a swift breeze.  Then in college, while wallowing in homesickness I did something I had never done before.  I gave my number and a chance to a boy I had never seen before and didn't know at all.  I don't think I could have imagined at 19 that he would be it - my whole notion of love and trust and the model relationship I never saw growing up.

Falling in love with my husband was to that point in my life, the single scariest thing I had ever experienced.  It forced me to let go, be out of control, give someone this power over my happiness that I had somehow imagined to be the gesture of a weak person who didn't really think that they alone were all they needed to be happy.  Falling in love turned out to be the mirror that I always wished I had.  My husband allowed me to see in myself the person I always wished I was, the person I had been all along.

Tonight while driving home, I looked at my kids faces in the rear view mirror and I thought about how everything I believed about happiness now centers around them.  They made me realize that I will do whatever it takes to spend as much time with them as I can because they define happiness for me now.  The fact that Hannah and Jayden love me, depend on me, and because at this moment in time I can safely say that their happiness depends on me, I have defined happiness as being worthy of them.  I owe it to them to pursue my dreams with passion because I have spent too much of my life thinking I didn't deserve to have all my dreams come true.  I think that despite all my fears that my imperfections as a mother will somehow change them in a negative way, I know that I am one of the only people on this Earth that gets to make them smile and be the mirror that they need in order to see the amazing people that they are.

Being a mom has made it pretty clear to me, this one amazing truth, that happiness is not something I have the luxury of hoping will happen.  I must make it happen.

The Mommy Track

Work and Motherhood should be synonymous, but for some odd reason they are not.  When talking about outside paid employment, motherhood is viewed as sort of a detour on the road to career advancement - a maternity leave during which you bond with your baby then promptly enroll them in daycare and mother them on nights and weekends.  Well that is the way it used to be thought of anyway.

It's so rare to find a stay at home mom these days.  They are going extinct at a rapid rate.  Society tells us that we simply cannot afford to care for our children "full-time" and besides women are independent and career oriented and should want to reach for the brass ring with the same zeal as our husbands.  But what happens when you trade in the brass ring, for dare I say it, a teething ring?

When I was pregnant with my daughter I expected to return to work full-time and enroll her in daycare, as most moms now do.  I was totally fine as long as I operated under the assumption that I simply had no other choice in the matter.  I was fine with my assumption oh until about three days after my daughter was born.  I called my grandmother to tell her the good news and she asked me if I was going to return to work. When I said yes, she asked me, "but why you wanted that baby so much?"  That is one of the few moments I can point to in my life and say see this is where it all changed.  She wasn't saying it to be mean or criticize my choice, she simply saw choices that I did not.

She was an immigrant to this country from war-torn Germany.  She raised three kids alone for the better part of their childhood.  She worked damn hard on farms, in factories, and for wages that may have made my first job after college look like I had made it to "the good life."  Work was life for my grandmother.  Motherhood was life too and the two things were not in fact separate ideas.  I did a paper for college about her work history and in every answer to my questions about work, she infused paid work with family work.  Without knowing it, she was saying that for women, the realm of work is not one thing, paid employment or work in the home, it's both simultaneously.

So after crying for weeks about a question I hadn't expected to shake me to my core, I started thinking about what would really make me happy.  I talked with my husband, then my mom, then finally my boss.  I did something up until this very moment in my life I found so very daunting, I asked for what I needed to make me happy.  I wanted to work part-time so I could spend time with my child and still contribute financially to my household.  I arranged with my boss to turn my full-time job into a job-share so that I could work part-time.  My mom agreed to watch my child (and later my two children) while I was at work.  And as a happy consequence I made a great friend in the co-worker and mother who was able to work the other part of my job. 

I was lucky that it worked out.  I have been happy and now all my stitching of my ideal life is starting to slowly unravel one stitch at a time.  All the knots that hold together my work/motherhood life are coming undone. 

My job is undergoing a major transition and there is a possibility I could be laid off.  My mother broke her foot and is in the hospital and afterwards will need months of rehabilitation and help herself.  It's like I'm back to that very moment when my grandmother questioned what I was going to do about work and motherhood.  The difference is, she recently passed away and she can not ask, so I guess I have to ask myself again - What's it going to take to make me happy?

I look for jobs online that require me to work full-time.  I think of how much more we would struggle if I stayed at home.  I look at my children and think of what it took to bring them into this world.  I know now, thanks to my grandmother, that I do in fact have choices, but she never said they would be easy ones to make.  I can think of just one thing that would make me happy.  Just one.  Again it hinges on the cooperation of others, it hinges on timing, it hinges on a future that I can not see or touch in this moment in time and like anyone else would be, I'm scared.  So I cling to today.  I take help when it is offered and say thank you instead of struggling in silence.  I try to think of getting through today and tomorrow and try not to assume anything more about the future than that. 

There is an old saying that if you have a job or a career and choose any other path besides full-time employment or choose to leave at the end of the day instead of living for your job, you are in fact on the "mommy track."  It's a term that was meant to put down women who choose to stand up and say that my family is just as important as my job.  I even had a professor in college who tried to discourage me when I told him I didn't plan to go on to grad school by saying, "What are you going to do then, stay home and have babies?" 

I was in my early twenties and didn't have a voice then.  But I do now.  I'm proud to be on the "mommy track."  Not everyone gets the privilege to be a mother.  But I will be blessed the rest of my life.  So while others are pushing their career up the track of success one piece of paper and project at a time, I take the track that meanders, that takes the short hill instead of the mountain.  I enjoy the view of my life as it sprawls out before me.  I know how this goes; this track is just a different segment of the same roller coaster. The difference is, I fill my car with my family and my hopes for them, not just myself.  It goes slower because there is more to pull.  It takes the hill over the mountain because what is an exhilarating rush of adrenaline to some, to others is just a rush of fear.  I don't know what's going to happen next any more than the next person, but I know one thing that perhaps others may not.  I choose to define success on my terms and I know I have more power than even I realize.  I can only hope that other women know that too.

Motherhood The New Career!

I have decided that we ought to be paid to be mothers. We work from sun up to sun down and even in our sleep we hear phantom babies/children crying or simply calling for us. Even the woman, like me, who can sleep through most anything will wake up at the smallest muffled cry when she has children. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the shower and heard my son or daughter cry for me only to realize that in fact it was perfectly quiet and they are both still tucked in and sleeping peacefully. What I'm getting at is that motherhood doesn't shut off, even in our unconsciousness.

If you work "outside the home" and you're a mother then you really work two full time jobs. In my case one and a half. Since I work "outside the home" part time you can count that as my half a job. I hate that 1950s term "outside the home." Work is NOT a place; it's a state of being. It's a to do list that never ends, replenishing itself the second one item gets crossed off. That is motherhood -WORK.

Even if a person LOVES their job. At the end of the day it's still a JOB. So if you have a CAREER is it different? Is the To Do List outlined in glitter? Do you skip to work? Do you hum while doing menial tasks like filing papers, typing notes or sitting in a marathon of meetings? My guess would be a big fat NO, but then again I have a JOB. What that means is that I work for the paycheck, the occassional pat on the head if it's offered and the chance to keep my brain from turning into baby mush. I often wonder if I would forget how to speak "Adult" if I were home by myself with my kids all day. I like my JOB, but I know there is no UP; there is nothing to work toward in terms of advancement. Is that a CAREER? Wanting to move up toward something better, towards a position more full of responsibility and one hopes pay??

Is a CAREER a calling, a strong desire to do something you would do even if money were no object? Is a CAREER the willingness to step into a role (sometimes knowing that you will need to grow into that role) that is more responsibility and one hopes more rewarding as well. If that is the case, then why the hell is MOTHERHOOD not a CAREER? It's perfectly clear to me that we do it, the never ending to do list that is motherhood, with money being no object because it doesn't pay a dime. I happen to think the world would be a lot better place if it were a CAREER. There would be a hell of lot less war, crime, greed, and corruption.

It would be great to get paid for all the work I actually do. I am shaping a future generation and I do it while balancing a bank account that is always teetering on the edge of empty. That means that I'm constantly balancing many other things as well- my marriage, my children, my home, and my job. My responsibilities are hovering around me every second of the day. I'm proud to be able to contribute to my family's income, but I know that if I lost that income I could not afford to stay home and simply raise my kids. So it absolutely sucks on those days when my life and my responsibilites to all those that I love feels like a JOB. If MOTHERHOOD was given the proper respect it deserves, and if it paid just half of the amount good parenting would save our society in punishment of crime, then it would definitely be a CAREER.

Triage On The Parenthood Battle Field

If you have more than one child you have now entered the fun triage zone of the parenthood battle field. There comes a day usually early after you bring home baby number two when suddenly both kids are crying at the same time, and here comes the instant triage scenario: You do a mental checklist, trying to come up with an assessment of which child needs you most urgently at that moment. Is one child hurt and the other simply lonely? Is one child hungry and one is tired and cranky?

The mental checklist is long and we mothers go through it at a supremely fast rate. To outsiders it may look like we are playing favorites when we quickly rush to one child's side over another, but what outsiders don't know is that we fight the war of guilt that consumes us all the time. It's all because we had the audacity to have and love more than one child, all the while knowing that we are simply one person with the limitations of being one single person who can not possibly do all things for all children all the time. Then we find ourselves begging our children to wait, be patient, hurry up, quiet down, behave, the list goes on and on. All because once your family goes from "one child" to "one more child" we have inadvertantly given our children the upper hand. Now we are out numbered.

When one child is sick the choice may seem easy. You go to the child who is sick first. But life and motherhood are not so simple. Just because one child may need you a lot more, you still must tend to the other or others. My heart goes out to women who face impossible choices every day, who carry guilt that they can not untangle from their love and devotion.

I guess all we can do is remind them, remind ourselves, to look up from our medical kits and our bandages and our checklists to see that there are other nurses and doctors in this triage tent of ours. That love can come from more places than we can possibly imagine and though the feeling of responsibility seems so overwhelmingly ours alone, it simply is not. Our children get love and guidance from our close and extended family, friends, friends of family, co-workers and neighbors.

I think that because mothers are responsible for our children from the moment of conception a part of us never lets go of the ENORMITY of that responsiblity, but sometimes, just sometimes it's ok to allow ourselves to step back and let someone else take over. It's ENORMOUSLY important for us to relinquish the responsibilty to our spouse, mother, father, sister, brother, friend or anyone who loves us enough to take some of the responsibility off our plate. We, as mothers, can not afford to look up from our checklists one day to see that it is no longer our children on the triage cot, but ourselves.

Baby Poop And Other Fun Stuff

WARNING:THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE EASILY NAUSEATED.

Very few things really start the day off right like a big healthy dose of baby poop. It's my nice metaphor for life - Baby Poop. It's messy, it smells, it demands our attention and action, and we clean it half-heartily, begrugingly, and for the most part you wish someone else would just take care of it for you. Few people in life get excited about baby poop and those few people are yes, you guessed it MOTHERS.

In the first few months and years of your child's life, you spend an odd number of hours thinking about oh, here it comes again, BABY POOP. There is the wondering about what is normal or not normal - size, frequency, color, consistancy, etc. Then when my eight month old wasn't pooping and was so constipated he cried there was the fun of giving a supository to a crying baby - or as some of us know it - a butt bomb. As if shoving something up your infant's butt isn't weird enough - you watch for a few seconds/minutes for the explosion.

Oh the explosions I've seen in my life time. My favorite was when my daughter was sick and it was so bad I made my husband get this scissors because sometimes, no clothing is worth the price of washing putricity out of it. Now that my daughter is toilet training I wonder if the poop obsession will ever end. Will she ever tell me when she has to go or will my mom continue to find her pulling off a retched pull-up in secret. So where am I going with this? I'm not sure.

It just occured to me that it's a good metaphor for life. Life is BABY POOP, messy and necessary and suck-tastic. It's also a great metaphor for Motherhood because mom's touch, smell, and clean some of the nastiest things EVER. I have held out my cupped palms to catch my daughter's vomit, had poop on my hands more times then I can count, even got it in my hair once too. We are the caregivers and we take the shit. If we didn't love our kids we probably wouldn't do half of the things we do.

So why doesn't Mike Rowe follow us around when filming Dirty Jobs? It's man-tastic programing at its finest and I bet every man in every dirty job featured on that show wouldn't hesitate for one second when he comes home from a long day cleaning porta-potties, cleaning animal cages, or hauling trash, to hand off his son or daughter to his wife at the first wiff of BABY POOP. If you've got a husband, boyfriend, or even know a man who willingly changes stinky, baby poop, and especially if he can do it without making the vomit sound- buy that man a drink because lord knows it takes more intestinal fortitude for him to do what we do every day.

So if you've got a funny Baby Poop moment, feel free to share it cause god knows as mothers, sometimes we need a good laugh to get through life and oh yes the BABY POOP.

There is no "ME" in MOMMY

If you ask yourself at least once a day, "Am I doing the right thing?," "Am I failing my children?," "Am I a horrible mother?" LISTEN UP - you're perfectly normal. What I find most intriguing about motherhood is that rarely does a woman truly ask herself, "What about me?"

The first thing to go when you become a parent is simply "you." Short of changing your identity by joining wittness protection, you are in short a completely different "you" once you have children. If you're like me, you view your pre-child life kinda like a good old familiar movie you remember watching over and over. You know the lines by heart, but ultimately you are a spectator viewing your own past. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just different.

I wish I could say that having children makes you completely selfless. That you are devoted 100% of the time to your child(ren)'s utter happiness, but this is real life and not the hallmark channel. There are days, especially when your feeling sick, tired, rundown, unappreciated, overwhelmed where you want to scream, "WHAT ABOUT ME???" You wonder, sometimes outloud, where's my help? Where's my vacation?" Hell most days I'd settle for getting in the car by myself and going anywhere, hearing silence and not being so utterly tired that I can appreciate it for more than the few minutes it takes to drag my ass to bed.

As a very introspective person, motherhood has been like riding a rollercoaster blindfolded. I always prided myself in knowing exactly who I am and what I'm capable of. But I have found myself, even hearing myself as I'm doing it screaming at a toddler, begging a baby not to cry, cursing a husband for working late even though I know it's for the benefit of our family but because I need help and god damn it there is no freaking end to my day. Parenthood doesn't have a pause button, a rewind, there is no do over so this is where the worry comes in "Am I failing my children?" "Am I balancing work and family or will the scale always be tipped?" God the worry doesn't stop. I simpy have to hope that we all escape parenthood and childhood without any permanent scaring. But I have decided at least for myself that there is no Right Way to be a parent. There is simply what you do and what you don't do and as long as you can appreciate that and the fact that you can't always control the outcome and for the most part you're ok with the direction you take, then you ARE a good parent and you ARE a good person.

I may wonder sometimes "Will there ever come a day where I have more than a 20 minute shower to call my ALONE TIME?," but while walking around my empty house after returning from urgent care a few weeks ago, I was a little freaked out by how ALONE I really was. I simply didn't remember what to do without children to take care of. So I cleaned, not my favorite past time by any stretch of the imagination, but I was used to feeling useful, needed, depended upon and completely loved nearly every second of the day and the temporary silence was utterly deafening. So I have traded in "ME" for "MOMMY." It's not to say there is no more me, there is just a new ME, a forever changed version of ME. Sometimes I may look back, but never with regret.

Insanity Thy Name Is Motherhood

So you feel a lot of things when you're sleep deprived...anxious, angry, sad, weary, hopeless. Last night was particularly hard. I got my daughter Hannah who's two to bed without a tantrum and I got my three month old Jayden to bed an hour early but then it starts..the mental clicking clock in my head. The insomnia of motherhood blows all my teenage and early adulthood days of insomnia out of the water.

My head starts going on and on it's time to sleep. Gotta hurry now cause the kids are sleeping and I've got maybe three or four hours before Jady wakes me to be fed and then god knows Hannah will be up by 6 am. My being on maternity leave and her entering the facinating new world of two year olds means that sleeping is sooo not her priority right now. So tick tick tick goes the clock...Hannah's sleeping..tick tock...Jayden's sleeping....tick tock and I've got to hurry before my vital sleep time is over. It's enough to drive any person insane. That's why motherhood is total insanity. We asked for this craziness. All the cute coos and smiles come with the price of a little lunacy.

I love motherhood don't get me wrong. I love my children. But forgoing sleep for a good six months before you can actually sleep 6 or 7 hours in a row is akin to torture. The seams of my mind seem frayed into a thousand pieces and I can no longer maintain connections that make it ok to feel like complete crap 90% of the time. Thank goodness for my husband shouldering a little of the craziness last night or I'd really go off the deep end. It makes me feel at least a little better knowing he feels as totally helpless and completely crazy as me.

I think that before we have kids we have these romantic notions of parenthood...just as newly engaged people have about married life. As if all your every days are going to be filled with the same bliss of one perfectly planned day. People who think that are quickly awakened to the commonplace nature of real life. Even though I'm more relaxed in my expectations of parenthood the second time around that old familar guilt creeps up and reminds me in my moments of bleery-eyed insomnia that there is no perfect parent. I can't help that I want to scream sometimes. That I'd pay good money just for one night of Xanex sleep with overnight babysitting. That sometimes even though I'll be glad later my kids won't have to be weened off bottles and pacifiers that I would give anything for one night where my breasts aren't the pacifiers he uses to soothe himself to sleep. The only joy I take in these moments is to know I'm an totally normal and that this is what parenthood truly is. All the joy comes with all the craziness and everyone who dares down this path goes through the same things. We love our kids that's why we do this at all and putting ourselves through torture for our infants only to hear them one day tell us they hate us...that my friend is insanity.