My dirty little secret
I recently took a new job here in the newsroom, largely in an attempt to find a better work-life balance.
I'll be working slightly fewer hours, and I'll take home a whole lot less work every night. It's still a night job, though, so my chances of seeing my husband more often haven't suddenly improved.
Even with this change, though, I'm sure I'm still going to have that pervasive feeling of underachievement. You know what I mean: the feeling that, no matter how hard you try or how much you do, it's not enough for anybody.
I think this feeling is a dirty little secret almost all working moms carry. It's such a dirty secret, in fact, that I've found it hard to admit this feeling to other working moms -- even though we regularly talk about whether we use our breasts for food and what we've tried to get rid of our stretch marks.
I have always been one of those annoying overachievers. I raised my hand in class so often that my teachers finally stopped calling on me unless everybody else had given up. I was in way too many extracurricular activities -- and I was a team captain or a group officer or something in all of them. I got merit-based scholarships to college, and I kept my GPA well above the required level.
So I don't take well to failure. Or to "acceptable." Or to "adequate." Or to any of those other words that mean, "Yeah, you're doing OK, but I sure thought you'd be doing better."
But this is where I find myself more and more often lately.
I'm a much better cook than I used to be, but I don't foresee an apron with "Chef Gulli" coming my way as a Christmas gift anytime soon.
I'm a so-so housekeeper with grand plans for what the house should look like and a way-far-below-acceptable tolerance for crap in the wrong place.
I just hate laundry. I have no nice words to say about that.
I want to be a peppy, fun mom with all the right answers and the two best-behaved and best-groomed kids in the world, but the truth is that I'm often so tired that I spend way too much time on my couch, making up excuses for why I can't play with Sam right then.
Except for peering at him through bleary, half-closed eyes as he grabs his stuff for work in the morning, I haven't seen my husband in three or four days.
I love my job, I know how to do it well and I often have ideas that could possibly be great -- if I weren't too tired to shoulder the responsibility of implementing something new and seeing it through.
And I can't tell you the last time I took a bubble bath just for me.
Do you have this feeling? Do the find the just-for-mommy articles that advise you to "just lower your standards" at all helpful, or do you want to strangle the pages they're written on?
Beth · March 14, 2008 11:49 AM
My mother-in-law told me something very wise when I went back to work and was worried about having to balance everything: "You can have it all, but you can't have it all at the same time."
I recite that to myself as I see the breakfast dishes still in the sink and the crumbs under the table while walking out the door in the morning.
Janet · March 16, 2008 1:39 PM
I slack in the areas that I deem less important. The dishes can wait. Our bedrooms do not need to be tidy because after all we are the only ones who see them. So what if some nights we order pizza and my daughter doesn't get a homemade well-balanced meal. We will survive.
What is important to me, is playtime with the babies and the few minutes of time I have with my hubby.
I do the best I can at work. I keep my perspective on work by reminding myself that if I were to fall of the face of the Earth tomorrow that my clients would not miss me but my husband and kids would. ;-)
Lyzz · March 29, 2008 12:16 AM
I try to keep this in mind -when the kids are older, what will they remember? That I did the dishes everyday, or that we played outside every nice day, went to the park and read together. And I firmly believe that my kids benefit from me working the night shift, because it forces my husband to be more of a hands-on father. I think it's good for my son to see his father in all sorts of roles: provider, housekeeper, nurturer, etc.