My department has a summer intern with us right now, and he is so earnest. So enthusiastic. So smart. He’s eager to get to work each day, fired up in anticipation of whatever assignment will fall to him that morning. He has pithy, inspirational statements, penned in red and black on 4-by-6-inch note cards, pinned up on the walls of his cube. Nothing “Jack Handy”-ish — none of that “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, dogonne it, people like me” stuff that gets parodied on comedy shows. Just the stuff the rest of us learned in school, stuff that applies to our trade, stuff that we assume we know but probably need to remember.

When did the rest of us stop being like that?
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When I nearing the end of my first maternity leave, my husband happened to mention to a neighbor from a few blocks away that I would be going back to work soon. She gasped, and asked, “So, who is going to raise your child?”

A new friend of mine recalls how, when she first mentioned returning to work, other new moms she met told her how sorry they were for her. And after story time at the library during my second maternity leave, someone I barely knew kept saying it was such a shame I couldn’t “find a way” to “do what’s best” for my children. (News flash! If your paycheck pays the mortgage, continuing to earn the income with which to pay it is, in fact, “what’s best” for your children!)

We’re quick to say that all moms are working moms, but if that’s really the case — and I believe that it is — let’s take things one step further: Staying home with your kids is a career choice, not a moral imperative.
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In the past, when you worked for a company you represented that company in anything you did. Now, though? You still represent your company, but in order to stay competetive, you also have to represent yourself.

That’s where personal branding comes in.

Earlier this week I was a panelist at Media Branding 2.0, an event hosted by personal branding guru Dan Schawbel, where we discussed personal branding, social media, and how to make yourself stand out in the crowded media landscape. The audience was made up of entrepreneurs, marketing and PR professionals, and members of the media who wanted to learn more about how to use social networking to their advantage, but the lessons on personal branding can be applied to anyone, in pretty much any field. All you have to want to do is stand out in a crowd — you define what that “crowd” is and how you navigate within it.
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Studies shows that parenting doesn’t make you happier than you already are — old news to anyone who has tried to salvage a marriage by having another child, I think, and probably old news to anyone who is going through or has survived either the Terrible Twos or the Terrible Teens (or both).

But I think there’s a non-parenting take-away from the studies: If you’re relying on other people to make you happier, you’re not going to get what you want.
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I read a great post at Strollerderby a couple of months ago, about former First Lady Laura Bush and how she hid her real view on abortion and gay marriage from the public while her husband was president, only telling Larry King this past May that she was in favor of both being legal. Former First-Lady hopeful Cindy McCain also came out in favor of gay marriage, a position she may have held in private for years but didn’t acknowledge in public until long after her husband’s bid for the White House was over.
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I’m in full-on decluttering mode, secure in the belief that, even if you can’t tell I’ve gotten rid of anything, every little bit counts and eventually it’ll look like I’ve really done something.

While in the basement, ruthlessly culling the piles of junk I’ve held on to for years, I came across a purple Rubbermaid bin filled with my old journals. I mean old — one of them dates back to when I was 12, an overly dramatic 7th grader who wore pink denim and turtlenecks and wondered whether her friend David liked her and felt bad because she broke Peter’s heart at the dance. Others were written during the first years of high school, with notes passed during class pressed between the pages, documenting things I was too young to realize that I’d always remember, even without a written record.
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I had a housework-related epiphany of sorts the other day, and realised two things:

1.) My well-documented tendency to clutter isn’t about hording but about time management. A gut-wrenching first-person story about hoarding, written by my friend and former colleague Mike Rosenwald for the Washington Post Magazine, made this clear to me: It’s not that I can’t bear to part with things, or feel a need to own multiples of things, but that I feel like I don’t have time to sort through it all and so I save it until such time that I do. And, let’s face it: All working moms know that huge chunk of free time isn’t coming soon, no matter what the researchers say. So I might as well get to it.

2.) The biggest thing preventing me from clearing out the clutter was the fact that our storage areas are already full of stuff I probably don’t need to keep anymore. And I need to empty them out before my husband has a cleaning tantrum and does it for me.
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A newly released Boston College study called “The New Dad: Exploring Fatherhood Within a Career Context” indicates that the times are a-changing, at least in the workplace: Modern fathers may be dealing with a problem similar to that which working mothers know all too well.

“Men are facing the same clash of social ideals that women have faced since the 1970s — how do you be a good parent and a good worker?” Joan C. Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California, told the New York Times in a piece published on Sunday (which was Father’s Day, natch). “This is a pretty sensitive indicator of the rise of the new ideal of the good father as a nurturing father, not just a provider father.”

That ideal, however, doesn’t necessarily extend into the office. For the most part, it’s still assumed that if a sick child needs to be picked up, the mother’s going to be the one to do it, and if the dad has to work late, mom’s there to pick up the slack at home. Which makes me think that maybe we need to stop talking about work-life balance and start thinking up ways employers can make things more equitable for all working parents, male and female.
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This year for Father’s Day, my husband told me that all he wanted was a day in which to do the things he wanted to do, as opposed to all of the things he had to do. Happily, these want-to-do things include planting the garden, spreading wood chips, trimming hedges, and watching as much World Cup soccer as he can without having to change over to The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or SpongeBob SquarePants.  So it was super-easy to get him exactly what he wanted.

(Personally, I think that single moms should give themselves a little something on Father’s Day, whether their kid’s dad is in the picture or not. Ditto for single dads and Mother’s Day. You fly solo, you get both days.)

But if the day snuck up on you this year, as Easter did with me, and your partner prefers something from which he can tear off the wrappings, a good book makes a great gift. Here are five that might mysteriously appear on my spouse’s nightstand:
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I finally got around to watching Iron Man (crazy schedules + expensive babysitters = two working parents who don’t get to the movies all that often). And I loved it.

I have a thing for superheroes in general — my childhood idol was Mighty Mouse, in fact, and I’ve passed my love of The X-Men on to my kids. But Iron Man appealed to me even more than super hero movies usually do, not because some otherworldly avenger/defender swoops in to save the day, but because Tony Stark creates his own superpower.
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