Category Archives: Working Mom

Dear Craigslist

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Thank you for making our Christmas mind-blowingly awesome. I mean I knew you were awesome years ago when I bought that wicker loveseat from that girl in Broad Ripple who obviously hadn’t looked at the pier one website to realize she was selling me the same exact piece of outdoor furniture for 20 bucks that they are still currently selling for 200. And the time James sold his old desktop Mac to that kid who was so freaking excited to be getting his first computer that I think he, his dad and James might have shared a tearful moment. And just this fall when we bought a washer and in so doing embarked on a day long adventure that included a new vacuum belt, the most amazing Cuban food we’d ever eaten and some heartfelt conversations about parenting with a radio DJ in Beaverton. So you know, I was already impressed.

But this Christmas just really couldn’t have happened without you. On a limited budget with kids who are in that perfect age where excitement hasn’t met expectations and beliefs and traditions are just being formed, we put together, with your help, a pretty freaking magical Christmas. Primo asked Santa for a parking garage that if bought new would have cost us almost 200$, money we do not have. The same day, I went on Craigslist and then drove a much longer distance than anticipated to buy that same parking garage for 30$. Even with gas money factored in, it was a major score. We hid that parking garage under boxes in our garage feeling victorious. Then two days before Christmas, still not knowing what to get Segundo, I browsed the kid and baby section of Craigslist and happened on a cherry red wooden kitchen set complete with retro fixtures just minutes after it was posted. I sent its owner an e-mail (as it turns out I was the first of dozens) and after a minor scare that she had abandoned me (she didn’t send me a reply e-mail with her address and pickup arrangements for 12 hours), the kitchen, for about an eighth of its original price, was ours.

On Christmas morning, the boys were beside themselves. Segundo had not formally asked for a kitchen but once presented, looked amazed at his good fortune and promptly set out to make us breakfast. And Primo had his request granted, a powerful moment for a four year old. A moment where he shrieked and said, “Santa brought me what I wanted!” and where James and I looked at each other with such gratitude and love and accomplishment. We did it Craigslist. You and me and James made our boys’ Christmas morning awesome. Thanks a bunch.

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Chaos, you win…

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One of the main reasons I was not good at staying home was that I go crazy when the house is in chaos, which any of you who have children knows is pretty much all of the time. I would sweep the kitchen floor only to have some small person with a cracker traipse through and spread crumbs hansel/gretel style every way they walked. I would wipe faces and butts and countertops only to have them snottyy, shitty and syruppy all over again. I didn’t handle this constant redoing well. I needed something to stay done for longer than eight seconds and nothing about raising small kids is neat or finished or without a smeared handprint for long.

This is why I am a much happier person when I work away from the home. I get things done and they stay done. It is a simple need but having paperwork on my desk that goes from folder to folder in levels of completion is extremely satisfying for me and involves no crumbs. And that satisfaction mostly makes me capable of putting up with a little more chaos at home, wiping runny noses with more grace, answering rapid fire four year old questions with more patience, fishing my makeup brush out of the toy box or the recycle bin or the couch cushions with more forgiveness.

But. When I clean the house from top to bottom on a Saturday morning while the boys are out picking out their dream power wheels jeep at the local toys r us and then within all of a blink of an eye the whole house is thrashed as soon as they walk through the door, I feel a little defeated. The chaos wins. Which is ok I guess. The boys probably won’t remember how clean our house was for a short minute this weekend. Hopefully they’ll remember decorating sugar cookies and how fun it is to smear sprinkles into the crevices of the table top. They’ll remember wrestling and playing high-flyer challenge on the living room floor and then having a picnic dinner of popcorn, celery with peanut butter and puppy chow (chocolate covered crispex). Hopefully they’ll remember all that and not how crazy their mom gets when they don’t put their rain boots away in the bench. And besides, tomorrow is Monday. Neatly stacked papers await.

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Technology, it’s not you, it’s me…

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted here in this forum. I have plenty of excuses: busy with work and still settling into the new house, spending time with the boys and starting into the holiday season. But mostly, if I’m honest it’s that I’ve been feeling a strong animosity towards the computer, most notably the internet and all of its time sucking grandchildren. Some of this feeling is my own sense of how much time I can drain by sorting through my google reader or catching up on e-mails, reading the news headlines or looking through weeks of facebook status updates. And I spend so much time on the computer at work that it is a relief to leave it at the end of the day. But a large portion of this negativity has been a sort of jealous/annoyed paranoia that James spends more time tweeting, blogging or linking to our world than he is actually living in it. I know this isn’t true and in my more magnanimous moments I can fully acknowledge how very present he is, how actively he interacts with the boys and fully engages me in conversation. But then there are days where I feel so closed off, so excluded from whatever is so enthralling on the computer screen that I become a passive aggressive tyrant. I make snarky comments, get excessive amounts of housecleaning done (as a sort of indictment on his lack of productivity) and in what I assume is some sort of statement on my superiority, spend little to no time on the computer. This behavior, needless to say hasn’t really accomplished a meeting of minds.

I’ve tried to come up with language to explain how his computer time makes me feel, as if there is always something he would rather be reading about online than spending time with me, like the laptop opening is an end to a conversation or that I am failing to engage him if he goes in the other room to check on his fantasy team. But there is also the paradoxical support I feel for his blog, for the community of dads he has built almost entirely online. I just don’t want him to be on the computer when I am around.

I know that his weekdays are busy with the boys and he doesn’t get undivided time to post on the blog until they are in bed at night or when I am around on the weekends.But I also know that all the time he spends on the computer isn’t necessarily 100% productive activities. So then there comes an element of judgment not only for the time he spends on the computer around me but also for the quality or productivity of that time. I’m not sure how to get over this. Because I have no desire to issue some kind of edict on the amount of time and the types of activities that are acceptable for James to use his computer. We’ve discussed this extensively. So far there hasn’t been any kind of neat resolution.

We’re meeting each other as best we can. He is pairing down some of his commitments and subscriptions online and I am trying to not interpret every moment on the computer as an act of war. So, you know baby steps. But in this tech driven world, I can’t help but feel that I’m the one that needs to make the most change. Neither James nor I has a smart phone; we don’t even have a television. We are a relatively low tech family. I know it could be much worse. But I’m also sure that our boys interest in technology will only exponentially grow. And I need to figure out how to keep balance, how to engage with my family while still allowing for this technology in our lives.

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The Gender Imbalance Re-envisioned

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This weekend James and the boys and I drove the hour long trip to James’ parents house so that James could help his mom and dad cater a wedding. James has banquet serving experience from his years in Santa Barbara giving him as many stories about movie stars at events as he does ideas for wine pairings. So his mom’s catering business benefits from his experience. He set up serving tables and ordered the cake lady around and created centerpieces for forgotten tables and arranged the food and joked with the guests and made sure the bride had a linen napkin to wipe her frosting-ed fingers with and in general made everyone believe that he is the most capable person you’ve ever met.

As they were setting up the wedding, the boys and I came over to the reception site and observed. I spread a blanket on the grass under a tree and watched James move around the tables and twinkly lights with purpose and confidence. The fact that James is capable is no news to me. He is infinitely better suited for running our house and raising our kids and makes it look very easy. And I sat on the blanket eating a lunch he had packed for me and the boys to eat, knowing it would be nearing lunch time while we were out. This fact had not crossed my brain until I had two clinging kids mobbing me with requests for food and James whipped out lunch.

The thing that surprised me a little while I sat there was that we are progressive in more ways than just the working mom, stay-at-home-dad genre. In the stereotypical roles, you have the bumbling dad who needs to be told what to do and the uber-capable mom who runs the ship. I don’t think either of us fits that role entirely but truth be told, I’m more like the bumbling dad than I am the uber-mom. I forget to bring diapers and I leave my wallet at home; I am an excellent secondary caregiver.

I think that James and I are good at recognizing ways to help each other and complement each other in really remarkable ways when it comes to raising children. But in much the same way as I’m sure many of you working parents occasionally realize, I realized that I could be doing more. Just because James is capable does not mean I am off the hook. Just because he always has his wallet and the boys’ blankets and knows where the keys are, does not mean I shouldn’t get better at doing those things as well. Because he has to be good at them to cover over my space-cadet-ism. I don’t want that to be all on him. And if we are breaking down stereotypes in our gender roles, it’s not progressive to just trade one role for another. We have to participate in a partnership. Some days I am good at keeping up on my end, others, not so much.

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On saying no

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An old post from when I was the stay-at-homer, just after Segundo was born:

I think of myself as a much better parent than I actually am. In the past when I saw frustrated mothers wrenching the arms of petulant children in the aisles of grocery stores, I shook my head disapprovingly and thought how I would do it differently, how I would use words to explain why the world works the way it does and how I would instill feelings of compassion and goodwill in my children by example. But that was all before I actually had a two year old who drives his trucks forcefully over his newborn brother’s head, who runs out into the street in the flash of an eye and screams to eat grapenuts cereal when I give him kix (silly me). As the author of the book I just finished said about her two year old, she must constantly “foil his attempts to kill himself” and I might add, foil my own attempts to wring his skinny little neck. Because obviously grapenuts will not kill him but the process of explaining to me that he wants one thing over another gets him and me worked up into such a lather that one of us ends up screaming and crying. And in these moments, I am irrational. I yell and snap and have even been known to wrench an arm here and there. Because thinking of a way to explain to him that he must not propel himself down the ravine of our backyard atop his riding truck takes too long. I must snatch him out of danger, not explain to him how to make good decisions so he keeps himself firmly planted on the cement of our back patio. No one warned me about this part of parenting. I thought that if you are a level-headed relatively laid back person in regular life, that you might be mostly that same person as a parent. Not so. I mean, I do have my good moments where he and I excitedly make connections between the ducks on the stream near our house and the ducks in the books that we read or that Grandpa Tom Tom does indeed have an RV like that one on TV and many others. But I am not the parent that I pictured I would be. I am the type to breathe a sigh of relief when they are both asleep because I am no longer on lifeguard duty or give in and feed him chocolate easter eggs because I don’t want to fight him and explain the nonexistant nutritional value of the candy coating. In short, I am more impatient and lazy.

There was a great article in the most recent Wondertime magazine where the writer argues that lazy parenting might actually be good for the kids-ie they are more independent, lower maintenance and more easily adaptable. And I am just now watching the View where barbara and whoopi (we are on first name basis) are talking about their grown children coming to appreciate them and developing friendships with one another as adults. I know this reality with my own mom, realizing how much she loved me even when (or especially when) she sent me to my room to scream about the injustice of not getting LA gear sneakers. So I know I can redeem myself. And in the mean time, I’ll probably let him eat grapenuts, snatch his truck away and say the thing I said I never would: “because I said so”

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On being alone

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Now that we have kids, there are seldom times when I am purely alone. There are always merely seconds before someone is coming through a door or waking from a nap or else there is the sound of them from another part of the house, in the process of needing something. Even when they are asleep, James and I are together, talking or mutually zoning out to a show or a book.

I’ve never been particularly good at being alone anyways, even before kids, before James. I’ve always had a roommate or sister, a friend or job to fill time and space with talk or activity. So I haven’t really missed this solitary time.

But this weekend and through the long stretches of days until Thursday night, I am on my own. The boys are still in the Midwest on vacation while I had to come home early to work because I hadn’t accrued enough PTO to take the whole two weeks off. And while I miss them, I am reveling in being alone. It took a few false starts on Saturday, I have to admit. I started doing chores and organizing my closet but then I stopped and put the clothes back in the basket to be put away later. And I went out for breakfast. All by myself. And then I went garage sale-ing and browsed the St. John’s Farmer’s market and saw a movie and explored 20,000 square feet of antique mall in Sellwood. All by myself. It was marvelous.

I’d like to think that I could do all of this when the boys were in town, getting away for an afternoon by myself or even brought James along on this same string of aimless shopping and eating and being entertained. But I wouldn’t; I don’t. There is something about having someone with you or waiting for you that changes the direction or the productivity of your activity. When they are home, to wander on my own, there is a sort of permission required, not because James needs to grant it but because (as for nearly everything I do) I feel a certain guilt for getting the better end of the bargain. And when we go out together, there is a mutual respect for the comfort and interest of the other so that I wouldn’t have wandered the fourteenth aisle of the antique store, knowing that James might be losing steam.

But I didn’t have any of that and so I kept going, on to the next thing that crossed my mind.  And in this way, I criss-crossed the city and arrived at home only when I had run out of places I wanted to wander, when the sun was going down and when I had the first two disks of Madmen to watch with the luxury of sleeping in the next morning.

I’ll be ready to have them home Thursday, excited to be surrounded and needed. And I know that this aimlessness will be stale by then, the solitude much more lonely. But for this weekend, I appreciated being on my own. I was even good at it. Maybe for the first time. It has taken the intertwining of family to teach me this and I am grateful to learn it.

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Shuffling Chores

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When James and I made the decision to switch roles and I went back to work, we had an honest conversation about chores. We acknowledged our individual talents (he picks up the entire house in a fluid efficient swath that would take me five times as long; I deep clean and organize in ways I’m not sure he is even aware) and divvied up the tasks in a reasonable reflection of the time available and our personal preference. I still did all the grocery shopping, he still paid all the bills, I cleaned the bathroom, he mowed the lawn. But the actual transition of chores was much less portioned and rational. I couldn’t quite let go of the way I used to run the house. The level of crumb on the kitchen floor, the frequency of laundry, the return of pillows to their correct place on the couch. I felt like I did it better.

But then I remembered that I hated being the one at home cleaning up after the rotation of messes, cycling through laundry in a resentful huff. And I noticed that while James let the clutter and crumbs build up for longer, he also built forts and loved being at home and so I adjusted to a slightly higher level of chaos. He also made this easier for me. Right before I got home from work, he would make a sweep of the most obviously chaotic and immediately apparent messes in the house and put it away, make the bed, wipe the counters. We met in the middle in a way.

And then just recently I was watching him fold laundry. He turned each t-shirt over one additional time to form perfect little rectangles, lined up each corner of the kitchen towels, folded each pair of my underwear. I realized he is better at this than I ever was. It isn’t just that I am putting up with a lower level of housekeeping, that we had to come to some sort of compromise between happiness and housework. If I scrubbed a table down three times in a day to James’ once, it still ends up clean. If the laundry builds up longer when James is doing it, it still gets washed, folded and put away to be worn again. I didn’t do it better; I just did it more. So now, about a year into this most recent switching of roles, I am seeing that chores are important, that they need to be done but that there is a spectrum to completing them. And that finding the way to get things done while still enjoying your role counts for a lot more than the placement of pillows or the presence of crumbs.

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Guest Post: Any Male Can be a Father, It Takes a Man to be a Dad

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Todays guest post is brought to you by Tiffany over at Mom-Nom. She is the mother of two and has a great blog for a mommy blogger. You shouldn’t follow her on Twitter but should go to her blog and read her funny posts and sign up for the many amazing give aways she hosts from some crafty folks. I flatly deny any story she may or may not tell about an alleged follower competition but just to be safe don’t follow her, follow me instead. If she has any cool give aways or funny posts I will tell you about them I promise. With out any further ado:


You see, James & I have a unique story. HE was having his own personal Twitter Follower’s contest with ME, WITHOUT TELLING ME ABOUT IT. So, you can imagine my surprise when he actually told me. about a contest. he’d been having for weeks. with me.

And, you can see why I was a little shocked when I ventured over to his blog and discovered how great it is. I mean, who has private competitions with someone that doesn’t even know their competing and still rocks? This dood ==> James. That’s who.

And honestly, here I am rather intimidated. I mean…I’ve never written on a dood’s website before. You guys take it easy on me okay? I’m all girly & fragile & shit.

(For the record, I won the contest.)
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At 20 years old I had the daunting task of finding someone who was willing to be a step-father.  I took me four years.

You see, I wasn’t just looking for an every-other-weekend/three nights a week step-father, but a full-time dad.

I would describe this task as stressful & aging. And…well, mostly aging.

I liked to tell myself I was “hand-picking” someone. You know, to make me feel better about the situation an all. While this situation isn’t quite so unique now-a-days it is still very eye-opening and very stressful for a single mom.

I believe most women marry the man of their dreams – imagining the father he will be. I also believe most of them are living in a fairy-tale land, that doesn’t exist, when they picture life after kids.  In my opinion, if you don’t have kids, the entire thought of having them IS a fairy-tale.

On the otherhand, I had the crystal ball in my hands… I could see into the future, before I married him. I could witness his evolution as he grew more accustomed to having a child around. I could watch as he fell in love & I like to think that I helped shape his evolution as a father.

You know, cause I like taking credit for good stuff.

I even had a list. I’m crazy like that.

He has to be:

  • Christian (preferably Catholic) & dedicated to raising his family in faith
  • Patient, I can’t handle a screamer. Two screamers give babies headaches.
  • Athletic (we like sports, what?)
  • Educated
  • Someone who can cook & clean. Not someone who would raise my son to think of housework as a “woman’s work”
  • But still handy, cause I need someone to fix stuff. Ya know? When I break stuff. From screaming. (Can you say hypocrite?)

But really, all I wanted was a man that could show my son true, unconditional love. I wanted him to witnes a man who loved his family, his children, his wife & his life completely.

Do I feel like I had an edge on other women because of this all-knowing eye? Yes. I do, actually. The first six months – or even the first year – of having a child as a married couple is a strange relationship-altering time. Yes, most couples make it but there are usually some bangs and bruises along the way. For the most part, we got to skip this. You see, I was what I call a “ready-made” family. A package deal. A take it or leave it situation…I could keep going. But, I’ll spare you.

You see, I don’t tell him enough. And, he doesn’t read my guest posts, so he may never know…but he saved us from anymore broken hearts, unreturned phone calls, uncomfortable first dates, lonely nights at home & awkward school gatherings.

I like to think I made the most of my situation. I took what life handed me (lemons, lets say) and I made delicious frozen lemondate margahitas.

Delish.

You dad’s are pretty rad doods. Who come in all shapes, styles and packages. And I, for one, can’t imagine life without you…now.

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Balance

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I am an assistant. This is hard for me to admit. I am not very important at the company where I work. I am new, true. But I am also very low on the totem pole in the grand scheme of things, which means that I deal with a lot of paperwork and spreadsheets and jobs that other people don’t want to waste time with and so have their assistant do it. That’s me. I’m the assistant.

This is not all bad. I get to work a very regular 40 hour week, have important but not stressful tasks and I am very much able to leave my work at my desk, far behind me by the end of the first segment of All Things Considered, crossing the bridge home in time for dinner. And I work in Human Resources giving me a broad exposure to all parts of the company and its power structure, the players and the decisions made. I enjoy this generalized cross section now. But I do hope to move up, be an expert, not be an assistant.

And this is why I have started to think about balance. Right now, it is easy for me to make specific quality time for my boys: when I get home, during the bedtime routine and on the weekends. They are young and so far have no schedules that we do not have immediate veto power over. They don’t go to school; they take long afternoon naps. I can carve the quality time out of their time to suit my current 8-5 schedule. And because they are young, I also have those lovely late evening and night time hours when they are asleep, to catch up, spend time with my husband, deep clean the kitchen, read. I even find a generous amount of time to sew and build, nurture a sense of creativity. We spend time with friends and family. Balance comes easily for assistants.

But if I move up–and for financial stability’s sake alone, I hope I will–then this balance will certainly come much more roughly, with more sacrifice and disappointment. The boys will be in school soon with events and sports and friendships that will take them away from home. Their schedule will start to dictate the time I can spend with them. The ease with which I leave my desk at 5 sharp now will give way to more hours and probably more responsibility and stress. I imagine sewing my own clothes will seem less appealing when I have the money to buy them. And the balance I have such wonder in now will certainly require a recalibration in both schedule and importance. I will need to evaluate and assign value to the parts to my life: my family, my creative interests, my work, my community, my new yorker subscription.

I hope I chose well. I hope I still stay up until 3 in the morning reupholstering the couch in the basement. I hope I am there for the bright defining conversations of my boys’ childhoods and also for some of the mundane ones. I hope I still lay on the couch in the evening across from James and talk what ifs. I hope I still read. I hope that for writing this now, I’ll be ready for it when it comes, that balance will come easy not just for assistants but for experts. Here’s hoping.

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Management training

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One of the really great things about my new job is my new manager. He is a sixties-ish Wisconsin native who has enough characteristics similar to my dad to make me already believe after two weeks of work that he will be great to work for. But even beyond his mid-western fatherly traits, he seems to genuinely be a good manager. Everyone who works for him credits his constancy and calm to making it through a really volatile time in the company’s history. And other departments, when I introduce myself say in a sort of longing way, “oh you get to work with Jim, Jim is great.”

And since I have not had the good fortune to work for many good managers, I am already watching him carefully, both to know how best to work for him and for my own sense of how I might be a good manager in the future. So far, what I’ve come up with is this: good management looks a lot like good parenting. The context and the stakes are obviously quite different but I can recognize key strengths that make or break both. For instance, Jim will drop everything he is doing to have a good conversation. On the parenting front, conversations sprout up in all sorts of environments where they might not be convenient–when you are on the way out the door, or mopping the floors or reading an awfully good magazine article–but stopping to acknowledge the question and respond is key to good communication. Jim also moves around a lot, sits in other people’s offices or when he has a question he comes over and asks, not through e-mail or phone call or yelled from his chair but physically moves to you. This is also key to kids, moving to their level and coming to them instead of always demanding they come scampering to you. He also trains an employee to do something and then has them do it, right there, right away with every confidence that they will do it. Every kid needs that. Patient instruction and then encouragement and opportunity to learn themselves.

There are lots of other ways management and parenting reflect on one another and I’m sure I am not the first to notice these ties. But it does have me thinking that I might not be ready for management any time soon. I am not particularly good at any of those things with my kids–addressing their questions patiently, moving to their level and interacting, showing and then letting them have independence–so I might be a ways off managing adults who need from me these same traits. I guess for now, I’ll keep working on listening and responding to the four year old’s bazillion questions and letting the two year old run full tilt down the hill to the park. I’m working on being a better parent and maybe in the process picking up some great management training.

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