Hello my gorgeous, awesome, and totally put-together Full Time, All the Time readers.  It’s been a while hasn’t it?  I hope you haven’t forgotten about me while the fabulous Miss Britt held down the fort here.  I’ve been on an unexpected blogging hiatus.  I wish that I had witty reasons for my short-term leave of absence, but the truth is that life smacked in the face.  Then the gut.  Then push me down and kicked me some more.

In other words, I suffered through my first Summer Break as a working mom. Then right when I felt like I was getting it all in control, life sucker-punched me in the face with Kindergarten.

When my son finished preschool in June, we decided (and by “we” I mean, I thought I had the best idea ever) to let our son have a real summer.  We spent lots of time at the pool.  I spent countless hours shuttling between home and a morning-only summer camp.  We played outside with our neighbors.  Saw nearly every PG or G movie in the theaters. And my son finally found bravery to ride his bike without training wheels.  It was fantastic.

I also spent hours upon hours working late into the night to make up for the lost hours during the day. 
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I spent last weekend at a blogging conference in Chicago.  Although the conference was targeted primarily towards female bloggers, I had the honor of moderating a panel of three male bloggers, two of whom were also dads.

Although they were there to talk about blogging, it was something they said about parenting that I want to share with you.

Dads want to be parents, too.

Scratch that.

Dads are parents.

And they consider it just as much a responsibility and a job as mothers do.

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Maybe it’s because I was basically raised by a single mother.

Or maybe it’s just because I have a more dominant personality than my husband.

Whatever the reason, I’ve come to realize that I tend to think of my two children as my kids first, our kids second, and his kids when I am blaming their forgetfulness on his genes.

When it comes to making decisions about discipline, I am the long arm of the law in my house and I have final say on how poor behavior will be handled.  By the same token, when a child is sick or summer vacation leaves me with a 9 year old who needs child care during the day, it’s my job to figure out how to adjust work schedules and make new arrangements.

I’m not saying it’s fair - I’m just acknowledging that it’s how it is.

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I recently had the conversation with my boss about potentially going part-time.  With my son starting kindergarten in August, I’ve felt the overwhelming need to be at home.  It surely isn’t a desire to be a SAHM; I love and I need to work.  But there’s been this all-consuming feeling that I need to be home at least part-time. 

There are two people on our team that work part-time, so I know that my boss is open to the idea.  In fact, she herself has worked part-time in the past.  After the birth of her first daughter, she came back from maternity leave working three days a week and slowly moved back up to full-time.  She understands the need to work less hours.  But she also offered a very strong opinion on what it would do to my career.

Essentially, if I went part-time I would be giving up any and all opportunities to advance. 

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Gruff, unreasonable, and known to once make a co-worker cry, my spouse has been trying to make changes in his demeanor.  He knows the way he acts could possibly get in the way of future advancement. In the past year, he’s become a very different guy.  He’s made friends with co-workers (we’ve even invited a few over for dinner), goes to a monthly poker night, and has softened his tough-guy image. 

Except in one arena: he hates going out to lunch with his co-workers.  His team goes out to lunch as one big group about every two weeks.  They pick a fancier restaurant than my spouse is comfortable with and tend to rack up a big bill that often includes alcohol.  At the end of the meal, each person is expected to split the bill equally regardless of whether they ordered only a small plate or had three martinis plus an appetizer. 

My penny-pinching partner is practically having bleeding ulcers over paying 30 bucks for a lunch that he didn’t really enjoy. 

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I’m planning our summer vacation.  It’s nothing fancy – a trip to the South to see my Grandmother.  One week of hanging out in extreme humidity, eating her home-grown tomatoes, and drinking glass after glass of sweet tea.  To say I’m looking forward to it is an understatement.

Only one problem: my spouse can’t get the time off.  It’s not month-end close or end of year craziness.  It’s not that he doesn’t have the time off.  It’s because at his company people just don’t take vacation.  Like ever. At his company, it’s acceptable to take a day here or a long weekend there.  But an entire week off?  Practically unheard of.

My spouse isn’t alone.  In a study by Orbitz, the online travel company, one-third of respondents said they took five or fewer days of vacation in the past year. One in four said they felt their bosses did not encourage them to take vacations, and one in three said they stayed connected with their office via phone or computer while on holiday.

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I had to take a morning off this week to register my son for Kindergarten.  A month ago, I had to take an afternoon off to get the last of the immunizations required to register him for Kindergarten.  Two months ago I had to wake up at 5am to stand in line to get an appointment to register him for Kindergarten.  Plus I spent a few more hours filling out form after form, getting original copies of all our bills for proof of residency, and checking then re-checking we had everything we needed to register him for local public school.

If Kindergarten is this complicated, then I’m never gonna survive college applications.
The last two months have been so stressful in our house.  I’ve got a pretty good grasp on our day-to-day operations.  As long as there isn’t any emergency or last-minute schedule change, I tend to do pretty good at balancing what I’m balancing.  But the amount of work that went into just getting ready to register my son for school nearly put me over the edge.

How I am ever going to make it through the school-age years working full-time?

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Every morning when I get to work, I say a little prayer of gratitude for having a supportive boss.  I’ve had my fair share of terrible bosses in the past and to work for someone who’s actually a good person is a nice change. 

In fact, it’s downright liberating.  I’m lucky that my boss is a working mom who understands working mom issues.  She’s encouraged me to flex my schedule to allow for play-dates and has never once rolled her eyes when my family is sick once again. 

I think I’ve probably worked for some of the worst bosses in the world.  Or at the very least the worst bosses in Silicon Valley.  I’ve had the micro-manager who put her team on a lunch schedule just to control her own need to know where we were at all times.  I had the dishonest boss that would tell confidential information to his staff and then pick a scapegoat to take the blame when that confidential information was leaked.  Or the manager that looked down on taking any vacation ever as if your vacation balance indicated your loyalty to the company.  

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I’ve talked about my need to relax here before.  You can’t read a website or a book about women without stumbling on at least one mention of getting some “me” time, or remembering to “take care of yourself”.

We’re reminded over and over again that the best thing we can do for the people who count on us is to take time to nurture ourselves.  Getting away, it seems, if only for the time it takes to enjoy a nice hot bath, is essential to our mental health.

My husband doesn’t get it.

He supports it.  He knows the need exists for me.  He is fully aware of the collateral damage that will result in me not taking care of myself.  But he doesn’t really get it.

Or rather, he doesn’t seem to need it for himself.

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About two weeks ago, Parenting.com posted an article suggesting that 46% of wives get mad at their husbands at least once a week. (We like to be quick with the current events here on Full Time, All The Time.  Sorry, Robyn!)  Angella posted her own response over at Committed: The Ties That Bond.  (Apparently they actually are caught up on current events over there.)

According to Angella, she is not “mad at dad”.  While Angella’s satisfaction with her husband didn’t shock me (after all, they have her write the marriage blog), I didn’t expect the number of commenters who agreed with her.

It seems my friends and I are the only women wanting to shake the snot out of our husbands on a regular basis.  (Well, me, my friends, and the other ladies in that 46 percentile.)  But even that’s not what surprised me the most about Angella’s post.

What got me thinking was one comment in particular by reader, SKL:

What if all moms, married or not, went into the deal expecting to be 100% responsible for the kids and the housework? Then they would be so appreciative of every tiny thing their husbands did in those areas.

As you can imagine, the responses to that comment were passionate and all over the board.  Modern women don’t like to be told that they should expect to do it all.

But does she have a point?  Would those of us who fall into that 46% be happier if we’d just learn to stop expecting anything from our husbands?  Or is that a load of pre-feminist crap?

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