I have a thing for inspirational quotes. It started back when I was in high school, I think — in the yearbook, seniors each got an entire page to do with as they liked, and it was traditional to include at least one, usually several, quotes. So I started collecting them in a little fabric-covered book, which I still have. I filled that book, started a second one, and then just kept jotting them down on random post-it notes and scraps of paper. Eventually, when I got an email address in the 1990s, I started collecting them in a folder online.

I came upon a stash of those little scraps of paper while trying to declutter my house, and all decluttering ground to a halt while I re-read these snippets of inspiration. Some are long, like The Desiderata by Max Ehrmann (which begins “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence” and offers up wisdom in every line), but others are short and sweet.
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With five kids, two parents who work full-time, a 75-pound black lab who sheds hair like he’s desperately trying to clone himself, no housekeeper, and my tendency to clutter, I don’t need to tell you that my house isn’t pristine. It’s not filthy — in terms of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization’s Clutter Hoarding Scale, we’re not more than a 1, the lowest score. But still, I wouldn’t happily eat off of the floor or anything. (My toddler is far less discriminating.)

The other day, my husband went on a cleaning tantrum. He started with the kitchen, moving things off the counter tops and scrubbing the stove and swabbing the backsplash with powerful detergents. He tossed the newspapers I’d left languishing in a pile on a chair and wiped down every surface he could find while I worked in the next room.

I was grateful. I was also mortified. I appreciated the fact that he recognized I was overloaded and couldn’t get to the cleaning myself, but still… it made me feel like I’d failed, somehow.
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I’ve just finished twisting our 12-year-old’s curls into about eleventy-billion tiny, two-strand twists, and my hands are still slick with conditioner. The little two are tucked in bed, stuffed animals clutched in their sweaty little hands. The other big kids are playing “Rock Band” with my husband, just a couple of feet away from me in the family room. It’s past bedtime, and bits of conversation (like “We should be concentrating our efforts on Killasaurus,” and “Daddy! We should play San Francisco now!” and “That’s such a sweet song and then they hit you with the ‘f’ word…”) grasp the edges of my concentration as I try to write.

I could — should, really — go to another room so I can get my work done. I mean, the work has to get done. But I’m loathe to leave. Even when my husband hands me the mic and asks me to sing “Maps” — an obvious sign that I’m not going to get much done if I’m also expected to sing lead — I don’t go.

Sometimes, the thing that really gets in the way when I’m trying to juggle work and family is myself.
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When I went back to work after having my first baby, I was working days while my husband worked nights. He’d hang out with our baby during the day, then take her in to the office at the start of his shift. My shift ended when his started, and he’d hand her off to me and I’d take her back home for what I called my Second Shift with the kids (my first baby was also our fourth child).

I often said that the thing that made returning to work after my first maternity leave most manageable, for me, was the knowledge that my baby was spending the day with her dad instead of with someone I didn’t already know and trust. So Carolyn Hax’s piece over at The Washington Post today really struck a chord with me.
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My home office is tucked into a little alcove near our master bedroom, a gap between my closet and my husband’s, just wide enough for a small desk pushed up against the window. My dinosaur of a computer takes up most of the space under the desk (seriously, the computer is older than three out of our five children — my Palm Pilot has more memory), and my behemoth of a monitor eats up most of the desk top. When I need to scan or print something, I have to rearrange components and put the printer on the floor.

I used to have a proper home office, back when we first bought the house, before our youngest two were born. That room became the nursery. I moved my large desk into a corner of the guest room and took over most of the closet with my file cabinets and, um, crap; then we turned the guest room into our oldest daughter’s bedroom, and I downsized my workspace in order to cram it into that alcove.

I spend a couple or four hours there every night after the little kids are in bed — which is usually about two hours after I get home from my regular full-time job. My at-home nook is quiet, and the window is nice (plenty of natural, um, moonlight, I guess). I was pleased with it for a while — and then our big kids came up for an extended visit and there I was, upstairs, in solitary, shackled to my clunky desktop and my workload when I desperately wanted to be downstairs with them.
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There are times when you’re juggling work and parenthood and more balls end up on the floor than in the air. When that happens to me (like it did today), these are a few of the things I do to try to pick those balls up and keep juggling:

1.) Re-do your to-do list. I write one out every morning as soon as I get to work, and today I looked at it and noticed that I’d written things like “clean the blue bathroom” and “make lasagna” and “put winter coats away” — things that didn’t need to get done immediately (and things that I couldn’t possibly do from work, anyhow). So I threw that list away and started over, this time writing down only the things I absolutely had to get done before I went home. The second list was much shorter, which made me feel much better. And I actually got most of it done.

2.) Cut yourself a little slack. I don’t know about you, but I don’t own a cape. (I did, once, during an brief fling with the SCA many years ago, but we won’t go there.) Since I don’t own a cape, I can’t be Super Woman. There will be times when I can’t do it all, and today was one of them.

3.) Take a break. It was gorgeous in Boston today, and I went for a walk. In the middle of the day. Even though we were a person short and work was piling up and I had a stack of stories to edit. It took just 15 minutes, but when I came back I felt recharged. Yay, sunlight!

4.) Give yourself a treat — now. The usual advice — motivate yourself by setting a goal and getting a reward when you reach it — doesn’t work for me. I find myself thinking, “Well, I’m not done yet, and that cheesecake is just sitting there, taunting me.” So, have some of the treat. A little smidge. Even if you think you don’t deserve it. Because, really, you do.

5.) Draw the circle. Someone once told me that the best way to draw a circle is to start by drawing a circle. Sometimes, the only way to get it everything done is to start at one end and keep going.

On a recent national holiday, as I was scrambling to figure out how I was going to juggle work and childcare, I realized that I didn’t actually have to drive in to the office that day and, for some reason, my kids’ daycare was actually open.

My husband didn’t have to drive in to the office, either. But he’s so used to having to catch up on work from home, and I’m so used to having a big bunch of freelance irons in the fire, that it took us a while to see the potential in the situation: Work (optional) + daycare (open) = pre-paid childcare and time to ourselves. Alone.
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In one of my all-time favorite movies, This is Spinal Tap, aging rockstar David St. Hubbins muses, “It’s such a fine line between stupid, and … clever.”

There are times when I traipse across this fine line daily, at home and at work. Usually, though, I’m going from clever to stupid.

The Clever: L.’s hideously croupy cough resurfaced a few weeks ago, and I took her to the doctor. Our pediatrician wasn’t in, so the appointment was with one of her colleauges, whom we’d never seen before, but hey, my child was sick and had been for a while, it was starting to affect her sleep and her school, and so I took her in.

The Fine Line: The doctor we saw didn’t know us, didn’t take more than a minute to listen to her breathe semi-deeply exactly four times (without coughing), and didn’t take more than 30 seconds or so jump to a big conclusion about me — that I must be an overly anxious, first-time mom who felt guilty about sending her kid to daycare — and diagnose accordingly.
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When I first saw the ad, in a post over at Get in the Car!, I thought it was a cool, retro snapshot. And then I took a closer look.

(You can, too. Just click on it.)

There’s something Rob and Laura Petrie about the whole thing, but the pots on the stove look kind of like the modern-day, hard-anodized cookware I love. The husband’s got that “casual Friday” thing going on, and the wife looks like maybe she just got home from work, in spite of the apron. The backsplash is kind of 1970s, but there’s no avocado- or goldenrod-enameled appliances in sight.

And yet… the ad pretty much flies in the face of everything a generation of women fought for. The journal entry clinches it: “Tuesday. Today I found the perfect paper towel! Viva is so soft! I used it to wipe sauce of Tom’s chin, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. Is Viva really paper?”

Please pass the soma! As if we working moms weren’t stressed out enough, now there’s this resurgence of 1950s ideals to contend with.
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One of the things I always tell other parents — especially other working moms who are struggling with their juggling of career and motherhood — is that they shouldn’t feel guilty for letting their little kids watch TV if they need to get their work done.

It’s something I really believe is OK. It’s something I do more often than I’d like. And it’s something that makes me feel like a total hypocrite because, half a lifetime ago, when I was a nanny, I never turned the TV on when the kids were around. Ever.

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