"Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I want to have a soul generated by love. I want to give thanks for my beautiful life by serving others. I do. But there’s a reason you only see elderly people staffing the volunteer desk at the hospital; working parents are hard pressed to find the time for such generous acts of service. And yet, parents who find a way to volunteer have the potential to make the greatest impact with their contributions.

The very thing that makes it so dang difficult to volunteer is what makes it so crucial that we find a way: our children. Our children, who require our time and energy and money, are always watching. They are learning what kind of adults to be. They are learning from us what matters; this is our chance to teach them the value of reaching out and helping others. Sure, we can read them stories and tell them how important it is to give back, but we all know that they mimic what we do more than they listen to what we say.

But how? How do we find the space in our schedule and the juice at the end of a busy day to do more than keep our own families moving in the right direction? It’s not easy.
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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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Working from home without childcare is like rock climbing without safety.  You may be able to do it, but it you fall it’s gonna cost you big time.  I did the working from home without childcare for 1 day a week for three years.  In order to do it, I had to drastically change the way I worked on that day.  Babies and toddlers can be 1000 times more demanding (not be mention impossible to resist) than whatever is going on at work.   

When my son was born, I demanded that I work from home at least one day a week.  Friday was the planned day.  The entire staff knew that I would be working from home and so the volume of issues that I dealt with turned to Monday through Thursday.  I’d make sure conference calls were strategically scheduled during during Sesame Street hour or nap time.  I purposely made my workload more administrative for Fridays.  Status reports on projects, submitting expense reports for reimbursement, catching up on the insane amount of email that I received the rest of the week, sending out meeting requests to my team for the following week. 

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Using an old cell phone that has been converted into a toy, my son pretended to email people on his “blackberry” yesterday evening.  He sat there for 10 minutes, thumbing the keys in remarkable similarity to my own style.  When I asked him to come to the dinner table, he casually responded “I’ll be there in a minute after I finish this email.”  In fact, he didn’t even look away from his “blackberry” when he responded.

I wonder where he learned that one?

I am living in a virtual avalanche of email.  Too much, too often, and too many accounts are bogging me down.  Between all of my email accounts, I easily read over 250 emails per day. 

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People always tell me how lucky I am that I have the opportunity to work from home.  And I agree, for the most part.  But working from home is not sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies.  I’ve had to re-learn working in a virtual environment.  It’s a different ball game.  While I do love getting to fold a load of laundry while on a conference call, my life can be totally unbalanced while I work from home.  And I’ve seen many a co-worker crash and burn when moving from the corporate office to the home office.

You may have thought of your office as distracting with water cooler conversations, idle hallway chit-chat, and that one person who always manages to burn the popcorn in the breakroom microwave.  But just wait until you are at home with a whole new set of distractions.

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I have a confession.

I’m not one of those supermoms who kicks ass in corporate pumps all day, just to come home and construct a perfect princess castle for my adoring four-year-old with nothing but glitter and love in the evening. I’m not that friend who brings home the bacon, fries it up in a pan, and neverevereverever lets you forget you’re a man. Seriously, I’m not.  The truth is, I totally cheat.

Oh, I don’t mean to insinuate that I’m doing anything dishonest.  I’m just suggesting that for me, “doing it all” means getting help.  In my case, the cheating comes in the form of a housekeeper.  Once a week, I have someone who comes to clean my modest home, and I admit to a thrill of coming home to almond-scented floors and sparkling sinks.  I know that tradition and society says that I should be the person who cleans my own house (and for most of the week, I do keep the house in order and tidy), but after working 9-hour-days, and coming home to take care of my daughter and husband in the evenings, the thought of spending my weekends cleaning the house sort of galls me.  So … I cheat.

What about you — do you cheat?  How?  Do you get pre-made meals?  Frozen dinners?  A laundry service?

Come on, you can share.  I won’t tell.

When I was a child, I was a major morning person.  I was almost always up before my parents.  It helped that I was incredibly independent too.  Before my mother even opened her eyes, I would have been up for a couple of hours - teeth brushed, hair combed, tummy full with Cheerios, and maybe even a little extra time watching Romper Room. 

In high school, I started to lose my early bird ways.  Having a part-time job that didn’t finish until after 10pm and a boyfriend who I just always had to call before I fell asleep translated into rushed mornings to get to school on time.  Don’t tell my mother, but my senior year in high school I was tardy to my first period class over twenty times in a single semester.

By college I had lost any notion of being an early bird.  Late night parties, hanging with friends, midnight movies, and all night raves made sleeping in until after 11am a standard occurence (ok and there was some studying in there too).  Whenever my dad would call around 9am on a Saturday morning, I tried my best to hide the fact that I only went to bed a mere three hours before.   

But it wasn’t until I became a mother that I became a bona fide night owl. 

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The company I work for is a relatively large, global company, and in my opinion, it has a surprisingly small law department: it consists of one other lawyer and a paralegal. As a result, my job can be really demanding – it’s not unusual for me to work more than 40 hours per week, and spending the odd weekend or an evening or two to drafting contracts or negotiating deals. Thing is, I actually feel pretty lucky: at most other companies similar to mine, working these hours would require sacrificing a lot of family time to make the job work. However, when I signed on, part of my deal included working from home several days a week – and on days when I do go into the office, I’m usually free to leave at 2:30 to pick up my daughter from her school. Sure, it means that I finish the day’s work many evenings after she goes to bed; however, not having to punch a clock means that for most of her waking hours, I’m available to her.

Again, I don’t kid myself: I realize that I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve managed to work a lot of flexibility into my gig. That said, I’m also pretty realistic in the knowledge that this “flexibility” may cost me as far as future career opportunities with this company, unless I’m willing to give it up – but to be honest? I’m okay with that – I became a parent later in life, and feel pretty pleased with what I accomplished in my working career prior to my daughter’s birth. Right now, it’s all about figuring out what I can accomplish as a mom.

I’m curious: how do you work flexibility in your lives so you can be the best working mom you can be? If you haven’t yet, how would you like to make that happen?