Every year it happens, and every year I feel a combination of relieved and panicked.

School’s out. My homeschool kid took his last final, and my public school kid has her last one in the morning, which is a half day. By lunchtime tomorrow, it’s officially summer in our house.

Having grown up in the northeast—where school started the Tuesday after Labor Day, and due to excessive snow days usually ended the third week in June—I am still, after all these years, always vaguely surprised to realize that it’s only mid-May and the kids are done. I like it, though. My husband is on the university’s schedule, and even though I know there will be days when I’m shouting, “Everyone out of my office! Scoot!!”, it’s nice having him home more and the kids off at the same time. I like that we can usually get in a camping trip or two before the rest of the world is on summer vacation and/or the southern temps here soar to 100+.

When my kids were little, summer meant figuring out camp and other scheduling issues so that I could continue to work. Now that they’re both teens, I can simply tell them to go away, I guess. Ha! But I find myself wanting to work less, and trying to figure out how to best balance everything this season.
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(Pictured here: Not me. You can tell it’s not me because she’s actually asleep.)

For all of my big talk about staying organized and learning to adapt to the ebb and flow of a flexible schedule, reality remains… messy. Sometimes I feel organized and capable and on top of things. Sometimes I feel like I am holding on by my teeth. And this week, I feel like one of those “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” books.

I’m a day late writing this post, even. Because this week somehow started off okay but quickly went off the rails, and I don’t even know how it happened. On Monday, things were under control. I was getting stuff done. Today—Friday—I foolishly tried to take a nap to maybe catch up and it didn’t go well. I would like to blame this on the school year ending, but it seems to me that a week like this one happens every so often no matter what I do. You’d think I could figure it out, by now. You would be wrong, though.
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I love to tell people that we homeschool my son. Love it. Even with homeschooling becoming more commonplace, it always causes folks to do a double-take. I don’t look like a homeschooler. I am neither a religious fundamentalist nor an overly-crunchy earth-mama hippie type. (Neither are a lot of other homeschoolers. But you know, stereotypes abound.) My daughter attends public school. And so folks always seem surprised.

The best part, of course, is that people who would never dream of homeschooling (spoiler: I used to be one of those people who would never in a million years dream of homeschooling) have a lot of questions. And mostly those questions pertain to my son—is he keeping up? Does he ever see other kids? Doesn’t he miss regular school? The answers are yes, yes, and not really. (When someone outright asks me if my kid is socialized—like maybe I keep him in a box under my desk—I cannot be held responsible for any snarky response I might blurt out, though.)

We’ve eased into it; our first year, he went to a homeschooling collab nearly full-time. This year, he’s gone half-time. And the coming year? I think we’re going to do a full curriculum at home, finally. We’ve found our groove. But even when people know I work full-time from my home office, it’s rare that they’ll ask how I manage it.
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I feel like I should preface this by admitting that back in 2006, I was part of a BlogHer panel called “Mommyblogging is a Radical Act.” As much as I’ve never been a fan of this particular term, way back then—seven years ago, which is like, what, maybe 49 years ago in Blogging Years, right?—I thought it was important that the blogging community have an honest discussion about what it means to share about our experiences as parents. I have no regrets about being part of that. At the time, that sort of blogging was still sort of new and different and we were all figuring out what it meant.

But that was seven years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then… including that many of us who were simply sharing our day-to-day for the sake of finding an outlet and community are now paid to write. Many of us are freelance writers running our own small businesses, working full-time (or more), and the fact that we write about our children from time to time is either incidental or just a fraction of the work we get paid to do.

And yet, good lord, the world is just so reluctant to let go of that term “mommyblogger.” Most of the time I don’t care; what’s in a name? I’m just doing my thing, getting my work done, living my life, whatever. But then there always comes someone wanting to take that dismissive term and use it as the cornerstone of painting every woman with a blog as a silly little moron.
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The best thing about the home office is how you can easily move from work to other activities, and between them at will.

The worst thing about the home office is how you can easily move from work to other activities, and between them at will.

(Both of the previous statements are true, by the way.)

I’ve been grappling with the advantages and pitfalls of working from home for years, now. Some parts of it I’ve totally figured out—at least for me—and I can say without reservation, for example, that I’ve pretty much got the whole science of getting dinner into the crock pot in the morning down to a science. I’m also pretty good at fitting a couple of loads of laundry into my day, and it not only gets the laundry done, it means I have to get up from my computer and stretch and walk around a bit. Win-win.

What I think I didn’t start really considering until recently was how it’s not just having the physical office here at home that makes things kind of blurry. I mean, yes, I’m working here and not somewhere else, but I’m also writing about my life, my family, my kids… it feels like everything that matters to me is kind of all knotted up together. That’s nice, sometimes, but it can also be confusing. And a little scary.
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I’ve mentioned it here a few times, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a lot of detail about the fact that we are now—technically, anyway—in our second year of homeschooling my 13-year-old son. His first year out of public school, we enrolled him in a 5-day-a-week program, and so my responsibility in terms of that homeschooling was limited to showing up for field trips and filling out our state-mandated homeschooling paperwork each month. Hooray for programs where you can be a homeschooler without having to do it yourself! I had been quite apprehensive about the switch (even though it was absolutely the best thing for him), and was happy to find a program that worked for us.

As we wound down that first year, we looked back and took stock of the changes. The good news was that stepping away from public school had absolutely been the right choice. The not-exactly-career-enhancing news was that our beloved “Hippie School” program—while absolutely the right social environment—was perhaps not completely what my son needed, academically. Feeling grateful for the flexibility of freelancing and working from home, I got over the last of my reservations and we decided to drop his out-of-the-home enrollment to three days/week. I am now actually homeschooling two out of five of my work days each week.

I stacked the deck in my favor, though. I’m smart like that.
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I made a giant mistake today. Actually, it was a tiny mistake, but it felt like a giant one to me. It felt bad.

But let me back up a minute, first.

I mostly talk, in this space, about deliberate business decisions related to my career as a freelance writer. I don’t talk about my personal blog all that much because, honestly, while the personal blog certainly opened the doors that allowed me to make a career out of writing, my personal blog isn’t “work.” I make very little money from it, and other than a handy sort of living portfolio, it doesn’t figure into my professional life nearly the way almost everything else does. When I’m talking about “making my living as a writer,” that’s not what I’m talking about.

On the other hand, the personal blog is how it all started, and it’s where I’ve been writing the longest, and it’s (arguably) what I’m most “known” for, so it’s not unimportant. And I’ve been writing there coming up on nine years, so it’s all old hat for a pro like me, right?
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If you work from a home office, chances are you’re already well-acquainted with the phenomenon where everyone else in the world who isn’t a freelancer assumes you just don’t have a job. (Do I sound bitter? Maaaaaaaybe just a little.) Show up for one middle-of-the-day event and suddenly everyone assumes that “flexible schedule” means “I would be happy to put down the bonbons and appear at your beck and call as often as you’d like.”

I’d love to say this happens more often if you’re a parent—small people in our care seem to come with various obligations at school and elsewhere—but I’ve heard plenty of similar stories from my child-free colleagues as well. Sometimes people expect that if you set your own hours, you must always be available. Funny, it doesn’t exactly work that way.

There are actually two separate issues just about every freelancer I know has to grapple with at some point, regarding scheduling:
1) The expectation that you are always available,
and
2) How much structure you require in your day to get stuff done.
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Well. Here we are, almost at the end of 2012, and I think we can all agree that it’s been… uhhhh… kind of A Year. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the worst part. Between the deaths and the illnesses, the various miscellaneous crises and the broken bones, I think it’s safe to say that 2012 is pretty much my least favorite year of… well, ever. (Beating out the year my first marriage imploded, even. It was a bad year, folks.)

Part of me wants to curl up and mourn the massive hit my business took this year, and part of me wants to pat myself on the back for still having a business, given everything that’s happened this year. But then I think I hardly deserve that pat, either, because the nature of many of this year’s crises meant that letting the business go under wasn’t ever an option (financially, anyway).

Now that we’re at the end of the year, I’m ready to look forward and try to figure out what comes next. Only this year, it feels so very different from years past.
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Part of the reason I wanted to freelance instead of working a “regular” job was so that I could be more available for my kids, and my schedule more flexible. So it’s at times like this I remind myself that this is exactly what I wanted.

See, right now I’m in a cabin. In the mountains. With my son’s school! Or, at least, many of the children from my son’s school. Many lovely, delightful, oh-my-gosh-so-very-loud children from my son’s school. We are on an extended field trip and I’m sure it’s going to be lots of fun… even if I cannot hear myself think, at the moment.

But it’s okay, because I have my computer, and my wireless modem, and even though I’m theoretically helping to shepherd way too many kids as they run around in circles and scream at the top of their lungs (I’m sure it’s educational, somehow), I’m also managing to sneak away to do a little bit of work.
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