Balancing all the various facets of my life has never been my strong suit; sometimes I manage better than others, but the fact remains that even during my “best” times I often joke about my life being a series of “short attention span theater” vignettes. I race around, wearing my various hats—I’m a mom! I’m a writer! I’m a wife! I’m a volunteer!—and if things are going relatively well, most everything gets done and I feel pretty good.

But right now I don’t feel good. In fact, I pretty much feel like crap all the time. I’m tired, I’m cranky, and the last however many months of stress have definitely left their mark. I’m working less, ostensibly to give me the time to take care of everything else, yet I feel like I’m accomplishing pretty much nothing in every area of my life, at the same time. (It’s a nifty party trick, if you feel like accompanying the final “TADA!” with a demonstration of exactly how long it’s been since you bothered to, say, dust your house.)

And then came the inevitable question: “What are you doing for you?”
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I am blogger, hear me… pimp myself?

In my experience, there are two kinds of bloggers out there: Those who write because they love writing, and those who write because they love attention. (Occasionally you find a third type: those who love writing and love attention, but overwhelmingly I would argue most bloggers are one or the other.) Now, you could make the argument that someone who only loves writing would never put their words “out there” for others to see, but to me having an audience reading what you write is part of the overall process. I love to write, but I also love to share that writing with others.

I don’t love attention so much, but of course to some extent it’s part and parcel of the blogging life. Put a website online and people are going to see it, comment on it, want to interact with you—that’s kind of the point. But as an introvert writing online suits me because I an interact with others in a way that’s limited; responding to comments and emails is easier for me that lots of face-to-face interaction.

Every now and then, I find myself receiving some sort of nomination or award and then I’m… deeply conflicted.
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It used to be that I spent summer feeling pulled in twelve different directions; feeling like my kids weren’t getting enough of me, feeling like I never got enough work done, feeling anxious for school to start and then guilty that I wanted it to, etc.

This summer has been different for a variety of reasons. With one kid in the hospital, nothing feels normal, ever, and so our family has taken to referring to this time as The Summer That Wasn’t. Even if that wasn’t the case, though, my youngest is nearly a teenager—if I felt like I had to work a non-stop, “regular” schedule in the summer months, I could do that, now. There wouldn’t be any “Mom! Mom! Hey Mom! Moooooooom!” going on. (Okay, that’s a lie. That still happens, but when I tell him to stop he laughs instead of throwing himself to the floor for a tantrum. Heh.) Still, our family schedule is off and the beginning of school changes things.

This week my husband went back to teaching at the university and my son went back to attending our beloved “Hippie School” (a homeschool collab) three days each week. Yesterday and today I had the house to myself for the bulk of the day, and I was free to work unencumbered.
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I think I’ve been pretty honest, both here and elsewhere, about how tough this year has been for my family. For months I think I tried to operate on the assumption that the Bad Stuff was temporary, and if I could just tough it out a little bit longer, things would go back to normal and that would be that. (Ah, naivete. I miss you!) By the time my kid ended in the hospital for the third time, though, it became clear that 1) this wasn’t going away and 2) any new normal we might someday attain would be very different.

During the first hospitalization I all but stopped working. Slowly, once my daughter was home again, I tried to pick up where I left off. Then she went back into the hospital and I stopped again. Then she was home but things were still busy and stressful and I really hadn’t even gotten my feet back under me when this last hospitalization happened, and now she’s been away for far too long and I’ve continued to struggle with finding that elusive groove where I can get stuff done.

I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on what my continued difficulty is—aside from “life kind of sucks and it’s hard to care about anything other than my child right now” which may be true, but doesn’t excuse me from working—but I accidentally figured out a way to jump-start myself again.
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Tomorrow is Independence Day here in the USA, and most everyone around me—if you believe the television and radio—is getting ready to kick back at a barbecue with some frosty drinks. Independence in this country is heavily about charred meats and the right to imbibe alcohol. Oh, and there’s also the Blowing Stuff Up aspect, I guess.

Me, I’ve had a rough few months. My family is having a difficult year. For a while there, I didn’t know if I was even going to be able to continue working, as flexible as my freelancer’s schedule supposedly is. The idea of simply taking tomorrow off to hang out with my family feels crazy in the wake of recent life. It definitely feels like I should take the day to buckle down and catch up on work. After all, most folks will be taking the day off, so maybe I’ll finally catch up!

I’m not going to do that, though. Part of what I’ve lost over the last few months is any semblance of balance in my life. Work has suffered, yes, but so has everything else. I’ve become someone who merely reacts, rather than acts. My life feels like a series of crises, and I’m just here with a fire hose turning towards the nearest fire, then the next nearest, etc.

In honor of the holiday (not to mention because I just can’t take it anymore), that all ends this week.
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I am practically the neurotic poster child for being ready for anything when it comes to freelancing. I’ve been writing here for years about all of the things you need to take into consideration before going into business for yourself—everything from handling your taxes to having redundant computer backups to making sure your work is diversified enough that one client or one particular area of expertise can’t take your business down if there’s an economic downturn.

I dropped out of Girl Scouts, but that doesn’t mean I ever stopped loving Being Prepared. The truth is that I am given to anxiety, and knowing what to expect—or that you’re in a position to weather even the unexpected—is the best offense against that anxiety.

And it’s true that I have come through several disaster-level (smallish, but still) setbacks as I’ve plodded down this path, learning as I go. I’ve had the catastrophic hard drive failure without appropriate backups in place. I’ve had the IRS slap my knuckles before I turned over my finances to an accountant. I kept going even when layoffs were happening all around me (and sometimes even to me).

Today I want to tell you about two things emergency-prep things; one, I did just right. The other, I got all wrong.
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(Pictured here: Much happier teens than the ones currently living with me. Clearly they’re actors.)

When my children were preschoolers/young elementary age, I remember thinking that I would give any amount of money to have ten—heck, five—uninterrupted minutes to myself while they were awake. Little kids are a lot of work. They’re demanding; they need you constantly. They can’t make their own food, they need help with dressing, bathing, packing up for school, doing homework, just about everything. They need close supervision so that they don’t attempt to “fly” off the kitchen counter (my son) or flush random objects down the toilet “just because” (my daughter).

Little kids are exhausting.

Working from home and parenting little kids is an exercise in constant frustration. When I first started freelancing, I never worked while the kids were home and awake. It just wasn’t possible. I did some work while they were at school, then finished after they went to bed. That was just the only way to make it happen.
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The harsh realities of my life right now are… less than ideal. I am still struggling with a continuing kid health crisis on the home front, and the havoc that’s wreaking on my career. Things get better, I start trying to get back to working more, then things get worse and I work even less, etc. [Pro tip: I find that I simply cannot recommend chronic illness as a "growing experience." I'd rather we have a little less personal growth and a little more feeling like life is manageable, thanks.]

Professionally, I am scaling back on everything (again!) and begging for mercy from my clients (again!) and feeling very much like a failure because I can’t seem to find my equilibrium. Personally, i am worried sick (literally, though my health issues are paltry compared to what my kid is facing), exhausted, and feeling like a terrible mother because I can’t fix this. And yes, logically, I know it’s not for me to fix. Emotionally—particularly when, say, my child is crying “FIX IT!”—I feel like… a failure. (Do you see a pattern emerging, here?)

So rather than focusing on the (rotten) reality, I thought a bit of fantasy would be more fun.
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There’s been a lot of talk lately in politics and sociology about choices, particularly when it comes to mothers and whether or not they “work.” I use quotation marks because—as we all know—most mothers, most parents, work pretty darn hard, whether they have jobs outside of the home or not. Not that there aren’t exceptions, but stay-at-home vs. work-outside-the-home vs. work-at-home… they’re all just different flavors of people doing their best to make the right choices for their particular family.

I chose the graphic here because it makes me laugh, that “oh how true” kind of laugh. There’s easy, and then there’s life. I don’t think many people have a truly easy life. I think we’re far too quick to judge and dimiss others’ choices as being wrong or too easy, in all sorts of ways.

My goal today isn’t to weigh in on the so-called “mommy wars” or get into politics. I just got to thinking about my own life, my own choices, and how—just like the picture—there’s easy, and then there’s life. You make the best choices you can, and you hope they work. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they work until they don’t.
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Whenever someone asks me, “So what made you start freelancing?”, one of the answers I always give is that I wanted a schedule that was more compatible with my kids’ needs. After my divorce I realized that single parenting with a regular 9-5 job was more than I could handle. (Man, my hat is off to anyone who manages that. I’m apparently just not that organized.) I wanted to be there in the morning and again when they got home from school in the afternoon, and I wanted the freedom to be able to work late at night so that during the day I could volunteer in class or take a kid to a doctor’s appointment without having to turn my schedule inside-out to manage it. I wanted the flexibility, because my family comes first. I’ve always said my family comes first.

Well, my family still comes first. But after having that premise tested quite a bit over the last couple of months, I realize that I accidentally became very attached to this career of convenience of mine. Oops!

My daughter has spent 20 of the last 40 days in the hospital. Half. Of the remaining days, she had doctors’ appointments on most of them, or was home needing care, or was at school and called for an early pick-up, or otherwise needed a lot more from me than she otherwise would.
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