A familiar scene at our house: I tell my spouse that I have to go check my email real quick-like, and then before I know it it’s forty-five minutes later and he’s standing in the doorway with a red-eyed baby and a cartoon exclamation point quivering in the air above his head. It’s obvious what I’ve been doing: I start with Very Important Work Email and then, inevitably, I take that one itty-bitty sidestep over to personal email and then, what the heck, it’s blog emails and blog comments and Flickr, and then, whee!, it’s a full-force backslide into YouTube and iPhoto and iMovie and iTunes. Down the Internet rabbit-hole. iCarumba.
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I love being a mother at a time when there’s such widespread conversation and openness about the hard parts, the ugly parts, the unshowered-for-days parts of parenthood. Entire communities are built on such openness–this site being one of them–and it’s always a comfort to know that whatever I’m going through, I’m not alone. But sometimes I wonder if sharing the bad has made it hard for us to also share the good. Sometimes I feel that truth in parenting has come to mean we only dish about the dark side, that being honest only ever means exposing our worst selves, and that no one wants to hear about the time you kicked butt, took names, and did something awesomely, perfectly right. 

What do you think? Does it sometimes feel like we have to talk only about the bad stuff, the blunders, and the downright failures in order to be part of the motherhood sisterhood?
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I spent last Saturday in my sweltering home office racing to complete an assignment I told my supervisor I’d have done on Monday, no excuses. Because I only work half-time now, it takes me twice as long to complete my projects, but because I never want to be the weak link in the company chain, I’m always agreeing to impossible deadlines and then kicking myself later as I try to steal an extra hour or two (or eight) from my so-called free time (so-called because that’s what I’m working for: free). 

Parents (and mothers especially) often find themselves the subject of extra criticism in the workplace–we don’t take our jobs seriously anymore, we receive special treatment, we suffer from mommybrain–and perhaps it’s those judgements at the heart of my situation: I’m working longer, harder, better now because I’m forever trying to prove that I’m not the weakest link, that motherhood hasn’t compromised my work ethic.  

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