Tag Archives: working mom

Working Mom Blues

17 Thursday May 2018

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Even though I work from home, I still face many challenges other working moms do, and some unique to work from home moms.

For example, my youngest is home sick today, and was yesterday as well. And that’s the struggle of being a working mom — it doesn’t matter that I am under the gun with a big deadline this week, and had an important meeting I had to cancel, and have a long to-do list of mission critical stuff otherwise. It all screeches to a halt, or a slow crawl at best.

I am not sure how moms who work in an office do it — I can’t imagine I would be able to hold down a traditional job and take off as many days a year as kids get sick. I wonder how many working moms are forced to make this choice — send your kids to school sick or send them to daycare sick. Neither is ideal, both for the sick child of course, and because this only spreads the illness around to other kids.

If I worked at a traditional job and had to take the day off, I’d go without pay but at the same time I would not be trying to do what I have been for the past two days… try to work in bits and spurts anyway. When you work from home and run your own business, there really is no “on the clock and off the clock.” Or one has to be really strict with themselves, because it’s just too easy for those lines to blur.

Not that I am not thankful I can make a living from home. At least I am not working 9 to 5 and then commuting on top of that three hours a day. I know many working moms face that situation, and I can only imagine what that schedule must be like. Grueling.

I suppose what I am feeling and am trying to say is being a working woman and being a working mom are two different worlds. And the worlds “working” and “mom” don’t always fit together so well.  In fact, I often feel like I am doing a half a$$ job at both.

I know being a SAHM has its challenges too, everything does (and I am not implying being a SAHM is not a job in itself, clearly it is!) But part of me wishes when my kids had a sick day, I could just spend it nurturing them without feeling anxiety about all the things I need to get done for work that I can’t, yet also feeling guilty for not being able to simply be in the moment with a sick kiddo either. To add to it, I am now sick myself.

It’s times like this I really resent who ever sold society on this working mom bit and that because of that I was raised to think I somehow could do it all, and all at once, and not skip a beat, and if I couldn’t I was some kind of a failure. I’d really like to slap that someone (or multiple somebody) right now! Instead I write about it, push back on the crazy or at least call it out, because somebody has to, right?

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant. It helps to get it off my chest. (Not that I really had time to write it but better than just stuffing the emotions, or blowing up, hopefully my taking the time to write this not only helped me feel better, but will help someone else, too.) This too shall pass. Back to double duty, and really I am just going to do my best and try to feel while maybe not perfect, it is enough, and try to have a cheerful heart despite the current situation. As I often remind myself when I get in a funk, things really could be a whole lot worse (My child could have a serious illness instead of a minor one, I could have no work or income and we could be losing our home, etc.) and for that I am thankful they are not!

What do you think? Please share in the comments.

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The Enjoli Girl

17 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Fempire

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I may be dating myself, but when I was a young girl there was a perfume commercial with a very catchy jingle that pretty much summed up the times.

It went:

“I can bring home the bacon

Fry it up in a pan

And never, ever let him forget he’s a man

Cause I’m a woman

Enjoli!”

Granted by today’s standards this song symbolizing the liberated modern woman  ideal of that time almost sounds sexist. Were it rewritten today it would likely leave out the frying things up in a pan, or never letting him forget he’s a man, but trust me, at the time it was edgy.

Fast forward to today. Studies show women are more dissatisfied with their lives than they were in generations past, marriage rates at at a 93-year low, depression and other mental health issues are at all time highs, and things haven’t quite panned out the way they were supposed to.

So now what? When do we stop demanding more rights and concessions and change, and start realizing that’s not the answer? Realize that maybe the plan was flawed, and trying to have it all and all at once was actually a set up to fail?

I wish I knew how to fix this big old mess. I think talking about it openly would be a great a start. And admitting what was supposed to be the answer has actually led to other problems, more problems, unforeseen problems.

Trouble is, it’s taboo to talk about such things (feminism a fail?!?! What?!?!), but if we don’t talk about it, how can we understand it? If all the changes over the past forty or so years haven’t led to a better, happier life for women (or men or kids), where do we go from here?

What do you think? Please share in the comments!

 

 

Balancing Family and Work

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in parenting

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I found the quotes in this article about Kellyanne Conway turning down a top White House appointment very interesting.

Now, no doubt Conway has been working non-stop for the past year plus. She has a super quick wit, a resolve of steel, unwavering loyalty to her candidate, she’s tenacious as a bulldog, obviously driven, passionate about her beliefs, and doesn’t back down when the media attacks. She broke through the “glass ceiling” by becoming  the first female campaign manager for a presidential candidate. And her candidate won, to boot.

One would think she’d jump at the chance to be a central figure in the new administration, after all she has done. She’s certainly earned it. But no. Why? As she puts it:

“And when I was discussing my role with other senior campaign folks, they would say, “I know you have four kids, but…” I said, “There’s nothing that comes after the ‘but’ that makes any sense to me, so don’t even try.” Like, what is the “but”? But they’ll eat Cheerios for the rest of life? Like, nobody will brush their teeth again until I get home? I mean, it just—what is the “but”?

No doubt she’s missed a lot of her children’s lives this past year. And she recognizes that.

And she continues:

“And I do politely mention to them that the question isn’t, would you take the job? The male sitting across from me who’s going to take a big job in the White House. The question is, would you want your wife to? And you really see their whole—would you want the mother of your children do that? You really see their entire visage change. It’s like, oh no, they wouldn’t want their wife to take that job. So, it’s all good.”

Good for her for recognizing her children will only be young for a short time, and that being their mom during those critical years is also a very important job. And that she is the only person in the world that can do it.

Sure she could hire childcare, have family watch them, or even employ personal nannies. But none of those people would be her children’s mom, and she knows it.

It seems rather than viewing her decision as, “throwing it all away” she seems to get there are seasons in a woman’s life. Politics will be there when her children are grown (maybe she will be the first female president?) but her children’s childhood will never come again.

Imagine having Kellyanne Conway as your mom, pouring all that into you. What child wouldn’t want a mom like her in their corner?

 

 

 

 

A Question for Other Moms?

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

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I have a friend who at one time had four children under the age of five, none of them twins. One thing I noticed, was she was nearly always in the kitchen.

Of course one reason was because all those people were nearly always hungry, so cooking was a needed task. And she enjoyed cooking and was good at it.

But I realized another possible reason for her retreat to the kitchen after noticing the same with my own kids — one of the few times my kids will entertain themselves and give me a bit of peace and quiet is when I am cooking!

I get the same effect, but less so, when I am housecleaning. The kids might interrupt but not nearly to the degree as if I try to sit down and browse the web, write a post, read a book, etc.

I am curious if other moms have noticed kids chillaxing while mom is cooking and/or cleaning? Are there other times you notice the same?

I realized why women didn’t rule the world shortly after having my first child, btw. Kids can prevent a mom from getting stuff done more than anything…. it seems! Lol.

Another thing I am realizing more and more. They grow up quick. Someday I will miss all this as I sit in total quiet reading a book and wishing the kiddos were still little! Sniff.

What do you think?

Parenting Red Pill Kids

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Red Pill

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In a post a few days back about a real life red pill conversation I had with a gentleman in his 60s, I didn’t include a story he told me then that I think really illustrates how much things have changed when it comes to parenting and raising kids in the United States today.

He told the story of helping out a local farmer every summer as a kid. He’d go in the morning, starting at 10 years old, and spend the day with the neighbor. The tasks were age appropriate, for example at 10 he would ride along on the hay baling machine and jump on and off to open and shut gates, and do various other small tasks a child can easily do but that are very helpful to getting the overall job at hand done in a timely manner (if the driver is hopping up and down opening and shutting gates all day, well it slows things down versus little Jake riding alongside, spending the day outdoors, watching older boys and men work, and learning to be useful.)

As he grew, he took on more tasks. Tasks he had watched the older boys get to do with envy before. (Buck hay bales! Run equipment! Drive the tractor!) They became rites of passage, tangible signs that he was growing up. Mastering them was a privilege, not a chore.

For his help,  Jake would get $2 a day. Now this was likely sometime in the 50s, so that wasn’t such a bad wage back then, he says, and by the end of the summer he could have $100 saved up. What did he spend it on? School clothes. Such an idea today may seem unthinkable — making a child earn and buy their own school clothes? God forbid! That’s borderline abuse! But Jake didn’t see it that way, in fact his eyes twinkled as the memory came back to him of being a kid, flipping through the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and picking out “his” school clothes.

As he put it, “I could buy way better looking school clothes than my parents would buy that way, and I got to pick them out myself,” he said with obvious pride.

Jake grew up, served in the military, married, ran a small business, raised a family of his own. He’s comfortably retired now (No pension or retirement plan either mind you, he saved that out of his self employed, self created earnings!) in his mid 60s, a self made man with a loving wife and self sufficient, well adjusted kids, respect in his community, and few worries. Jake has had and lived a successful life — in many ways he embodies, “The American Dream.”

Contrast this with recent a tale from another family, this from customers in their mid 40s, a very, very nice couple, childhood sweethearts, with two teenage boys, 18 and 16. As we talked about their oldest preparing to start college next year, I said how proud they must be of him. Uncomfortable silence followed.

“Yeah, we’ve got good kids…” they said, not finishing the sentence. I sensed there was something more. So I gently probed. Was he in trouble? Acting out?

“No,” they said. In their minds it was almost worse — their son started collecting Pokeman cards as a child, and still to this day it is still one of his core activities. Their younger son, 16, doesn’t want to even get his driver’s license. They aren’t sure why their kids are so passive, so reliant on them, so perfectly OK with NOT growing up. (No offense to any Pokeman collectors, please don’t take this personal.)

As we talked it dawned on me — unlike generations before, unlike Jake, these kids had grown up in a protective parenting bubble. There is in fact actually a movement to bring back that unsupervised, just kids, roaming around outside and engaged in imaginary play, playtime. Apparently it is much more important to normal human development than anyone realized.

The mother shared of how she was always there for her boys, how when they played outside she watched them, how when they need to go somewhere she took them, how they had very little unsupervised time, how when they needed or wanted something (within reason) their parents supplied it. They were “good parents” by almost anyone’s definition.

The mom mentioned a neighbor lady who basically shoos her boys out in the morning, and spends her day cleaning house and cooking while the boys play. Unsupervised!?! Outside!?! It seems almost shocking by today’s parenting norms. Yet, this mom wondered out loud if…maybe she should have done more of that?

I mentioned how different childhood may have been for us compared to today, as Gen X kids, and asked if either of them had been latchkey kids, like myself. Sure enough, the father said he had, and that he wanted more for his kids. He and his wife worked hard and lived carefully to ensure she could be at home while their kids were growing up. And these are good people, good parents, I believe they had the best of intentions and were doing what the society at large said was, “the better way.” But now, they fully admitted, they think their kindness has crippled their kids, and they aren’t sure if it is too late or if not, what to do now? I could feel their pain, they want their kids to be happy, healthy, and whole. That’s all they have ever wanted. They don’t know where things went wrong.

It’s a common parenting reaction to one’s own lack, to go 360 degrees the other way, but I would urge the middle is a better place to aim to correct for what one considers their parent’s parenting mistakes of the past. Maybe they were too harsh, to easy, too whatever.  The gut reaction is to either do the same, or to do the opposite. I’d argue the middle is usually better than the extremes of either end.

Jake and I marveled at how today what he did would not even be possible, except on the sly. Farmers can no longer hire local children under 16 to help out. And if they hire children 16 or older, they can only do so if they can pay them minimum wage. Today, it would be much more likely that a farmer would hire migrant farm workers, than a kid like Jake.

Is all this really  progress? Is it good? Or have we lost something we may need to get back? Let me know what you think in the comments!

(Note: I also know people who are Jake’s age who worked on farms as children except unlike his experience, the kids were expected to do too much, the labor was too hard, the tasks above what they truly were developmentally ready to do. This approach, as far as I can see, backfires, and is not good, does not seem to instill the same self reliant work ethic Jake has. So again, the middle is the often the sweet spot.)

 

 

 

 

Is a Woman’s Work Ever Done?

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Fempire

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In the early 1980s there was a perfume called “Enjoli” that was sold as capturing the essence of the post-feminist “modern woman” in a bottle. The commercial’s jingle went like this:

I can bring home the bacon

Fry it up in a pan

And never ever ever let you

forget you’re a man

Cause I’m a wooooman, Enjoli!

(And it continues so if you like, you can watch the whole commercial here. My apologies to readers who now can’t get the jingle out of their heads.)

Yep, she lived life to the fullest, she was the 24/7 woman. She could have a career, keep house, entice her man, read the kids a bedtime story while her man made dinner, and then they would hop in the sack and finish off the perfect day with some hot sex.

I was thinking back on this commercial over the weekend while I felt myself trying to keep up with this “have it all” lifestyle expectation and feeling like a miserable failure as it was one step from chaos collapse on all fronts. And once again was wondering is it just me who can’t cut it, or does any woman really “have it all?”

It brought to mind a trip I made to China and Hong Kong when I was around 27 years old. I traveled with my mom’s twin sister and her husband, who was born in China and raised in Hong Kong (they married when he was in the U.S. to go to college).

Thanks to my uncle, I got to see life in Hong Kong and China “from the inside” as we were welcomed guests into many of his family and friend’s homes.

Now at that time Hong Kong had only recently been handed back over to China by the British and the two cultures had not yet commingled much. Hong Kong was uber modern, densely packed, and it seemed like everyone worked 12+ hour days. I thought I had seen capitalism in the United States, but it paled in comparison to the capitalism that was Hong Kong. It was an island with seemingly one purpose — money, money, money.

One woman who was married to a good friend of my uncle had us over for dinner. She was a career woman, and like most households in Hong Kong, they had live in Philippine housekeepers. This woman was calm, collected, and stylish. Their apartment was impeccably furnished and had an amazing view of the city and the bay of Hong Kong.  At one point during the evening she turned to me, looking somewhat aghast, and said, “How do American women do it?”

Confused, and worried this was another curious interrogation about Monika Lewinski, I stammered something along the lines of, “Do what?”

“Why have a career and keep a house, too?” she responded. “How could anyone possibly think they could DO both?”

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone ask that question. The discussion went on and we came to the conclusion that it was the labor laws and minimum wage that made it impossible for American women who were not in the upper class to have live in help. Yet, I realized, we were still expected to perform somehow as if we did. Interesting.

In China, we visited my uncle’s youngest sister, born to his father’s second wife and secretly raised by her mother and supported by their father in China unbeknown to the rest of the family until his father’s death. (Multiple wives were not that uncommon in China just a generation before, and so my uncle’s mother and he and his siblings embraced her as their sister and they are now one big happy family, including the two wives!)

I got the feeling that this sister had lived a more privileged life than the average Chinese girl. She was well educated and had married a star of the Bejing Opera (Sort of the equivalent to a rock star in the United States.) She had been a career girl before she married but stopped working when she married. Her husband was away traveling, but we visited her, her mother, and the sister’s cute as a button one year old son. Also there was her live in nanny/housekeeper, a young girl from a poor rural village.

As the sister excitedly entertained us with stories of her life, her mother and housekeeper prepared and served us a wonderful tea. The baby sat with his mother when he was happy and content, but the minute he was hungry or fussy or dirty he was whisked away by grandma or the nanny, only to return when he was happy and content again.

The sister looked at me (I did not have children at that time) and remarked quite dramatically, “How could a woman possibly take care of more than ONE child? I am exhausted!”

Again, I did not know what to reply. Few American women had anywhere near the round-the-clock and live in type of support this “exhausted” young mother had.

These two moments from years ago came back to me this weekend, as I felt incredibly stretched trying to run my business during one of the busiest three day tourist weekends of the year, then scrambled about each morning trying to find some clean clothes and did load after load of dishes each night. I went out to eat twice with my new beau and tried my best to be alert and attentive even though what I really wanted to do was hide from the world and sleep. Great guy that he is, he completely understood (and even unloaded the dishwasher).

All weekend that stupid Enjoli jingle kept going through my head, mocking me for not being able to do it all and be it all while smiling and looking breezy.

But today I am starting to wonder, is it really me? Do I just “not get it?” Or is it just impossible? Can a woman really have it all, without paying someone else to do part of what women’s work used to be?

Born in the early 1970-s, I’ve never known a life where I wasn’t expected to get a education, have a career, do and be it all. In many ways I am the Enjoli woman, all grown up. And quite frankly, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So I am just going to say it, based on my experience and the frenzied lives of women around me who have tried to follow the same path, what a crock! Where do I get the last 20 years back?

Or maybe I am wrong. What do you think? Is the empowered and fulfilled post-modern feminist reality, or was it a myth all along? Or was it maybe, in America anyway, only reality for the few women born into a class who could afford live in help to do the work women have always done so they could live the Enjoli dream?