Superwoman (not!)

I can bring home the tofu bacon, fry it up in the aluminum-free pan, and never, never, never… oh forget it. Seriously, what was I thinking? Working 40-50 hours a week yet being there three days a week to pick up my girl at lunch time because she prefers to nap at home. Trying to keep a neat, clean house with a toddler and husband doing everything in their power to the opposite end. Trying to cook healthy meals more often than eating out. And so on and on.

I have had a couple of seriously rough weeks at work and as a result, my working-mommy-guilt has peaked. I have had a couple of meltdowns that I really wish my daughter didn’t know I was capable of. So what does super bright mom decide to do? Make it all up to everyone by over doing it in the domestic bliss department.

Instead of eating lunch Friday, I cleaned. I planned an elaborate baked ziti dinner, taking advantage of grandma’s kindness to let my girl play there while I rushed to get it in the oven. Then I spent three hours Sunday researching and buying for a home made Halloween costume.

Uh, ya, best laid plans and all. Dinner was met with derision from my husband (its a texture thing) and an intriguing wolfish neutrality from my growth-spirting daughter who is currently so constantly hungry that I could feed her cardboard coated in paste and she’d gobble it up.

And the costume. Because I am so overwhelmed with work and the disarray of my neglected home, I chose a pattern well outside my ability level. So, while trying to cut it out on Sunday, I suffered a complete meltdown. Two good things about this particular meltdown, though. My daughter napped through it and it lead to a useful realization.

Overdoing it in some frantic domestic make-good doesn’t help anything or anyone. It makes me more stressed out (no fun for my family) and hell, they’d rather just chill out with me over a frozen pizza in a dirty-dish-strewn kitchen wearing store bought costumes than watch me stressing over cheese sauce and indecipherable pattern directions.

Ya, the well-intentioned mom in the line at Jo-Ann fabric is probably right, children really value homemade costumes (she’s made all of her two kids’ for 8 years). They also value friendly mothers who are not institutionalized.

Playground Talk

Yesterday, my daughter and I drove to a playground in one of the many well-to-do nearby towns. We got there just after four and, as expected, there were quite a few kids since it was after school hours. It seems to be pretty standards playground etiquette for moms to make polite conversation while their young kids struggle up ladders and climbing walls. This is a nice break from “normal” social mores in CT, in which you aren’t supposed to speak to any strangers lest they be outside your socio-economic class.

It is fairly unlikely to make actual adult friends at a CT playground, but at least it gets you out of the house and off the toddler conversational plane for an hour or so. Yesterday, I met three nannies, three actual mothers, and a dad. The latter was particularly awkward, and I feel bloody sexist about the whole thing: His daughter was playing beautifully with another girl about her age and his son and my daughter were imitating each other climbing up then sliding down various slides. Thus we trudged around the playground on a parallel trajectory for a good five minutes before he ventured a bit of idle chatter. Any female parent would have already said something pleasently inane about how cute the kids were and the conversational ball would have been off and running. But I admit that not only did it take an awkwardly long time to start a conversation between we mixed-gender care givers, I was suspect of his motives for another full 10 minutes.

Ultimately, he turned out to be one of the friendliest people I’ve met in ages. And fancy this: he, his wife, and two kids just moved here from Telluride, CO. (Yes, that’s why he was so friendly! He’s not from here!) Turns out he’s been a stay-at-home dad for four years and is just re-entering the workplace, while his wife has pursued a very demanding career. They too are raising vegetarian children… long and short: what a nice chat. As my daughter and I left, I noticed another dad on a lonely circuit around the playground. He was wearing the Connecticut workingman’s uniform–blue shirt and khakis–so I’m pretty sure he was another kind of fab dad. The kind that gets off a hard day at work and scoops up his 18 month old to toddle off the playground for an hour before dinner. He was, however, doing it sans playground chat-mates.

Missing: Brain Cells

I have a fairly responsible job. I meet deadlines every week and am often asked to participate in larger organizational strategy, new product launches, and the like. So it is fair to say I have, in some circles, been considered to be a fairly bright woman. No more.

I heard many rumors that giving birth lowers one’s intelligence, but I’d always figured it was like brunettes (like me) telling jokes about blondes (like Amanda). You know, the non-moms being a bit snarky about the breeders. Uh, no. I won’t say that my brain cells actually left my body via the afterbirth, or that they were necessarily absorbed osmosis-style by my wee fetus, but damn if they didn’t disappear. It could be the fact that I almost never have the luxury of focusing on one task any longer; it is amazing what I can accomplish one handed, or while also reading a story, or with one window of my screen on work while another one is open playing Bugs Bunny Classics on YouTube (okay, I’m a bad mom, too).

But today takes the cake. I just realized I have house guests coming Sunday. From France. I actually wrote the date on my calendar for these same dates Next Month. I know that I could save up for breast augmentation to undo some baby-related damage, but what about my IQ? Do they have vanity surgery for that?

The Other Type A

Out at a coffee shop this weekend, I spied a lovely toddler peaking at my girl over the back of a comfy chair. I said hi and eventually her pregnant mom came over to our table to introduce the girls. In the way moms do, we struck up a conversation and they joined us for a stroll over to a nearby river. Turns out she and her husband just bought a weekend home in our town (as so many New Yorkers do). My husband and I moved here about eight years ago from the city so this mom and I had lots to talk about: weighing the pros and cons of city life against those of the country. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to career. New York is the Mecca for both my husband and my careers, as it is for so many others, but we made a lifestyle choice that involved rerouting our career paths when we moved here. And like so many others, this mother finds herself crossing and re-crossing the difficult intersection of work-life balance…

She and her husband are both attorneys. When their first child was born, she’d been working in the public defender’s office. She’d harbored hope that a “state job” would be less demanding in terms of hours at work than her previous private practice, but the reality is that lawyering is demanding, period. So when they had their first child, the couple made the decision for mom to stay home.

Well, sure, mom loves staying at home and raising her wonderful girl. But just before she became pregnant with their second child, she found herself longing to return to the challenge and stimulation of work (the couple doesn’t need the second income). She explored a variety of options like non-profits, but truly valued the work she’d done prosecuting domestic-violence offenders at the DA’s office. Then she went to a lunch of lawyer moms. She heard one story after another about nannys and daycares, lack of flexible schedules, and the myth of quality time. The moms with the “best” work-life balance managed to get home “early”–at six p.m. or so–to spend two hours with their kids before bedtime. Then they return to their home PC to squeeze in the rest of their workday. She left the lunch feeling that she’d made the right choice: Invest a decade or two in raising quality kids, then find a way to return to the workforce.

Yet here she is, only a few weeks later, envying the way I’ve managed to hang on to (a facsimile of) my career, while still having a lot of time with my daughter. This bright woman’s brain is downright antsy; it needs a workout. But she’s struggling with how to find the perfect balance between work and family. This is a woman who has probably always done everything well: work, home, fitness… straight As in school and (if only figuratively) in everything else she’s ever done. But as far as I can tell, there is no “perfect” balance. There is no right answer to whether or not a mom should work, and if so how much. But no matter: ‘aint nobody giving out grades for this, mom. And you know what? You’ll work it out.

Strangeness on a Train

As mentioned, I traveled into the city for a conference this week. On the way home, I got stuck on a train as the result of a bizarre storm in which high winds and lightening were taking down trees and tossing them across the train tracks. (Why don’t more people carry chainsaws?) I spent five hours making a 1h 15m train trip on two train rides broken up by an hour sojourn on a school bus.  As if the trip itself weren’t dreadful enough, some passengers became irate over a missed stop and others even more so about the delay caused by the passengers hitting the emergency stop to try to get the conductor to back up the train to the missed station. One actually threatened to strike the conductor. Oh yes, this trip was a laugh riot. Once I got to my train station, I got my first taste of the storm that caused all of this trouble… (it stayed just ahead of us the whole time)… as I trudged miles through the parking lot to get to my car. When I got there, soaked, my car was in about six inches of standing water. Ya, that was nice in sandals. Needless to say, when I finally got home, I was stressed beyond recognition. My husband and daughter greeted me at the door. I sat down to remove my sloshy shoes and my girl walked up to me and touched my cheek in the most gentle, loving way. “Mommy, were you stuck on a train?” Yes, honey. “Mommy, you are alright now.” Yes. Yes I am.

Work it Out

I am lucky enough… no, strike that. I’ve worked for decades to get to a position of responsibility and trust in my organization (alright only 7 years in this actual organization) in which I work from home three days a week and make a 1.5 hour commute the other two. In fact, I have an enormous amount of flexibility in my work schedule. As long as I meet all of my deadlines, with quality product, all is well. The less pleasant aspect of this flexibility is that when our daughter is sick, most times I am the designated parent to stay home with her. (Yes, if I have a big meeting or travel, or something, my husband stays home.) Sometimes, this means I choose to, or have to, take the day off. Sometimes it means I have to get a full day of work done around caring for my sick child. I recently had one of these latter days. We were rushing to meet a deadline at work and I had to review a great deal of material by the end of the day or we wouldn’t make it. As such, I had a wee flaccid child lying on the sofa, head in my lap, while I contorted into a position that would allow me to work on my laptop on the arm of the couch without disturbing her. And I’m lucky to have this option, most working moms don’t.

Yet I have one co-worker (that I know of; there may well be others) who makes remarks about how “nice it must be to get to stay home with a sick kid” while she “has to work.” Of course any mom or dad who has had the joy of watching their child miserable and in pain would not consider this a “nice” alternative to going into work and focusing on a job they truly enjoy. What is extra charming about this passive-aggressive interpretation is the implication that I’m not working, despite the fact that all of the work I needed to get done did, in fact, get done. In addition to the “luxury” of getting puked on and sick with worry, I guess she figures I also have a magical gnome who gets the work done while I sip margaritas on my yacht.

Traveling (Wo)Man

I am sitting on the terrace of my room at the Camelback Spa & Resort, 7:30 a.m., 71 degrees with a gentle breeze stirring up the scent of dessert flowers. Days rarely come lovelier. Only I ache for my little one and her father, my husband. Mine is a challenging, satisfying career with perks like working trips to beautiful places like this. Yet mornings like these perfectly capture the dichotomy of the working mom. I spoke with a woman yesterday who “wouldn’t miss this show for anything,” as it is essential for her to make the connections she need to be a successful media representative of one of the largest publishing companies around. Yet this same woman took a read-eye last night, and planned to rush off the plane, head to Dunkin’ Donuts for Munchkins to take to her six year old son’s class birthday party. Wouldn’t miss that for the world either.  

And perhaps even more telling of the difficulty of this balancing act: my conversation with a lovely, female, executive vice president at a company everyone would know. She has battled her way up the ladder with style, finesse, and yes, compromise. She doesn’t have any children but has an almost uncanny knack for recalling the names and ages of everyone else’s kids. I’ve never asked if not having kids was a conscious choice, but when I talked to her over a drink, she moved me in her belief that we must work to bolster the confidence of every teen girl we meet, to help them see their potential, that we must be “good aunties.” I can’t help think she’d have made a pretty great mom, too.

And perhaps even more telling of the difficulty of this balancing act: my conversation with a lovely, female, executive vice president at a company everyone would know. She has battled her way up the ladder with style, finesse, and yes, compromise. She doesn’t have any children but has an almost uncanny knack for recalling the names and ages of everyone else’s kids. I’ve never asked if not having kids was a conscious choice, but when I talked to her over a drink, she moved me in her belief that we must work to bolster the confidence of every teen girl we meet, to help them see their potential, that we must be “good aunties.” I can’t help think she’d have made a pretty great mom, too.