There are many fine ways to recover from our crazy days as working mothers. We can kick back with a book, watch a movie, fire up an exercise DVD, play a video game, goof around on social media, whatever your late-night, kid-free pleasure. Of course the best thing for us is probably sleep (sweet sleep, which “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care” and also means no one is asking me to wipe a butt), but unfortunately all that other stuff I mentioned might actually be undermining your efforts to get a good night’s rest.

A study conducted by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and published in the journal Applied Ergonomics (read the original here) showed that exposure to the artificial light emitted by tablets can inhibit the body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate our internal clocks. The study showed that two hours of exposure to a bright tablet screen at night reduced melatonin levels by about 22 percent. Other studies have shown that once you mess with melatonin, you risk increasing your chances of developing obesity, diabetes, and other health issues. I know several people who say taking melatonin supplements help them sleep better, which makes me wonder if cutting back on screen time at night—in effect letting the body naturally produce adequate levels of melatonin–would have the same effect.

Although vegging out in front of the t.v. or playing around on the Internet are easy enough traps to avoid if I put my back into it (and we all know that I’ll fall on my sword before I read for pleasure on a tablet), working on the computer until right before I go to bed is sometimes unavoidable. Sure, I’d love to take an hour to dim the lights and play soothing music and maybe dab my wrists with lavender oil before I slip into my comfiest jammies and drift off to dreamland, but the reality is I often workworkworkworkwork until I crash face-first into the mattress in whatever T-shirt I’m wearing and then wake up the next morning exhausted but grateful that I got whatever little sleep I managed snag. It’s easy to blame a night-waking baby for my poor sleep habits, but it might be more useful if I acknowledged the things I can actually control, like, for instance, my Candy Crush habit.

How do you engage with technology before going to bed? Is shutting it down part of your pre-bedtime routine, or is using it one of the ways you look forward to relaxing at the end of the day?

After a busy day of work and parenting, a lot of people like to end the night cozied up with a good book. Well, maybe not “cozied,” since recent research shows a lot more of us are choosing the cool glow of e-readers and tablets over the familiar warmth of paper books. And when I say “us,” of course, I really mean “you,” or perhaps “other people not like us old-school fogies with our quaint affinity for ‘pages’ and ‘bookmarks’/you’ll have to pry this printed book from my cold dead hands/etc.” We paper-book types are not yet a dying breed, but studies show we may be headed that way.
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My preschooler is on Spring Break this week, and while yes, it’s been great not having to start each day with the usual bleary-eyed flailing to get everyone fed and dressed and out the door before it’s time to come home again, I wouldn’t call this a “vacation” exactly, or at least not a relaxing one.
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Ever since having kids, I’ve said (and predict I will continue to say for a very long time), that my ideal working situation is part-time–whether out of the home, in the home, on a boat, with a goat…whatever. Most of my mom friends seem to feel the same way, which is why I was surprised to read that the number of mothers who say they’d prefer to work full time has risen dramatically in just the last five years. Mothers who say they’d prefer to work full time increased from 20 percent in 2007 to 32 percent in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey (link goes to an overview) of 2,511 working parents (both men and women) conducted at the end of last year. Are you as surprised by this as I am?
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When I was in school, I always prided myself on completing every assignment completely and being completely complete in everything I did. I thought this was all merely the functioning of a dedicated perfectionist (and certifiable nerd), but I’m wondering now if I also just had too much time on my hands.
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When you hear the label work-at-home mom, do you picture do you picture a woman who works from home and also happens to be a mom or do you think of a woman working at home while her kids are there? The label is up for grabs for anyone who wants to use it, and I certainly wouldn’t say that one definition is any more accurate or difficult or heroic than the other, but I will say, having now done both, that they definitely can be different, and at times vastly so.

I kind of hate the image I chose to accompany this post because the idea that “working mother” equals “woman on a laptop while holding a baby” is a misguided and/or uninformed interpretation of how many versions of work-at-home motherhood there are out there. And yet…here I am, the lady on a laptop while holding my baby. (We do not, however, wear matching outfits that also coordinate with the giant arrangement of fresh flowers giving a “pop of color” to our sparkling white kitchen. Right now, for instance, I am wearing green plaid pajama pants that belong to my husband, and the baby is wearing oatmeal in his hair.)
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A few months ago I read an excellent post by Liz from InnerTeub.com and I’ve been sitting on it for a while now, trying to think of something original to add to it here.
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At the top of p. 146 of Pamela Druckerman’s excellent book Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (read it! read it!), I found myself sitting and reading and then smiling and nodding and then getting up for a pen and paper so I could leave myself a note to remember to tell you about the brilliant thing she wrote about that old familiar friend, Working-Mom Guilt. Here’s what she says:
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My mom has a bit of a wild streak. “I wish I could dye my hair purple,” she confesses. It goes without saying that a fifty-something nursing supervisor talking to a bereaved family about organ donation in a conservative suburb would not pass muster with lavender locks, and so we go without saying it. When she retires, though, look out.
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I’m not big on resolutions.

Well, what I should say is that I’m not big on following through with resolutions. A year is a long time, and the fact that I’ve usually forgotten my resolutions by the end of January is a good sign I’m not going to stick with them through the end of the year.

This time, instead of going forward with my usual carefully constructed plan for failure, I’ve resolved(!) to set smaller, more achievable goals, to be tackled within smaller, easier-to-keep-track-of amounts of time. Rather than big, sweeping lifestyle changes (cut out junk food! make the bed every single day! learn to basketweave!), I’m aiming for more modest targets, ones that will hopefully, over the coming year (and maybe the rest of my life), add up to an overall sense of success and well-being instead of a dark cloud of dissatisfaction and failure. (Not that you can be that disappointed in botching your resolutions when you can’t even remember what they were, but you know what I mean.)

Because there are so many working parts to my life, I’m also setting up a kind of framework that will hopefully allows me plenty of room to have little victories in many different areas (and a few cop-outs as well). At the wise old age of thirty-three and a half, I’ve realized that doing well in one part of my life (say, office work) doesn’t always make up for feeling less-than in other parts (say, housework), ad so setting one small goal per month in each major category of my life will, in theory, help me get closer to that ideal state of balance and fulfillment. Besides, when you have a whole bunch of resolutions (seven per month times twelve months) instead of just one or two for the whole year, chances are better that even if I don’t have a perfect record, I’ll certainly have plenty to celebrate with champagne next December 31.

My goals list for January looks something like this:

Career: Send a resume and cover letter to at least one new potential freelance client.

Home: Bake an avocado pie. (I’ve never even tried one, but I’ve always been intrigued, and I love small goals that are also delicious.)

Social: Throw a good birthday party for my husband.

Marriage: Have an at-home date night at least once a week. (Something that involves actual conversation instead of just plopping down in front of a movie.)

Motherhood: Read a chapter book with my older son, just the two of us.

Fitness: Exercise at least 15 days in January.

Hobby: Put together one photo book for a gift.

Are you a big-resolution maker or a small-resolution maker? What are some of your goals for 2013?