Working (On) Motherhood
with Leah
I'm Leah, and in a lucky twist of fate, I've landed my three dream jobs:
book editor, writer, and mother. Since having my son in December 2008, my
work-life has been in constant flux - full-time? part-time? freelance?
working at home or in the office? It depends on the day and which way the
wind is blowing - and figuring out how to keep it all going is a constant
challenge. Heck, I'm still getting used to the idea of being someone's
mom.
Check out my profile on Work It, Mom! and my personal blog, A Girl and a Boy.
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Some days it sure feels like I’m trying to do it all myself, but even in my darkest woe-is-me hours, I know that I definitely, definitely am not. It would be hard to overlook the hands-on support of my does-more-than-his-fair-share husband, and then there are the “it takes a village”-style friends and family who are a part of my son’s life too, but when I take an even bigger step back and look at all the balls I’m juggling on an average day, and I see how impossible it is to do that alone, I realize how much I rely on not just a village but a sprawling network of helpers (paid and not) to keep things running (relatively) smoothly, and I imagine most other working mothers do too.
You might not have thought about it this way before (especially since the word tends to have negative connotations), but whatever you want to call it, chances are that if you work, you have to outsource something, if not several somethings. What do you outsource?
A lot of us rely on child care–whether it’s a nanny in the next room or a fancy daycare facility in a downtown office building or Grandma swinging by a couple of times a week–but sometimes that’s just the beginning. Do you have a house cleaner who comes a few times a month? Do you eat out a lot, or bring prepared food home with you? Do you order groceries online and have them delivered to your house? Do you use a diaper service? Do you send your kids to a tutor for help with their homework? Do you call a gardener when the weeds grow higher than your youngest’s head?
I know one mom whose work hours prevent her from taking her daughter to and from school each day (and the bus doesn’t service her area), so she hired a private driver. I know another mom who’s such a talented scrapbooker she’s been hired to create photo pages featuring other people’s families (and this while she has two kids and a job of her own).
I know there are moms out there who somehow manage to work from home while taking care of their kids and their homes and their yards and the cooking (does not compute; have they learned to work in their sleep?), but I think even those women–and probably even the full-time stay-at-home-moms with no formal job responsibilities–get outside help that allows them to do everything else they do.
And you know what? That’s nothing to be ashamed of, even if the word “outsourced” does leave you feeling a little cold. So let’s put it this way instead: Who makes it possible for you to “do it all”? Who are the people in your proverbial village?
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Believe it or not, I truly don’t outsource anything. But I am a full-time stay-at-home mom plus a part-time work-at-home mom with a freelance job and various other writing and consulting projects. One of the reasons I stayed home is so that I can have time and be around to take care of all the household stuff–and then, also, BECAUSE I am home full-time, we don’t have the money to outsource, well, anything. Still, fitting all that in without outsourcing anything is hard. I may not work in my sleep, but I don’t have much down-time. Some days none at all, honestly.
Shannon | March 16th, 2011 at 7:14 am
First and foremost, my husband is always, always doing more than his fair share. After that, our Daycare lady, whom we pay, but if I’m being honest, she’s underpaid for all that she does for our son, and for us. After that, my workplace, which has a very liberal work-from-home policy. Additionally, we have an awesome network of friends in town (not so much family, unfortch) who always offer to watch our son, and for free. And lastly, the support I get from friends via Facebook and Twitter when I just need to know that I’m doing OK, even when sometimes I feel like I’m not.
Jen | March 16th, 2011 at 11:49 am
Jen, I couldn’t agree more on all that stuff. Paid or unpaid, help is help, and it’s been great for me to shift my thinking from “If I can’t do it alone, I should try harder” to “I can’t do it alone, and look at the great community and support system that has formed, which might not exist if I were trying to be SuperMom.” And yeah, on some days having online friends feels like outsourcing my positive thinking; if I don’t think I can do something, I have friends who will tell me I can!
Leah K | March 16th, 2011 at 11:55 am
Daycare (7 days per week - 5 days at a center, 1 morning with a Nanny, and one day with my sister); monthly maid service; lawn service; some occasional handyman work; I take the kids to restaurants a few times a week, and my sister cooks our biggest weekly meal on Sundays. I would have taught my kids swimming, music, art, and languages myself, but I pay others to teach them since it’s affordable and convenient and allows me to make better use of our together time. (I do still work with them on each of these and other things. But having them learn the basics elsewhere is helpful.) I do a lot of my non-food shopping online, which I guess is a sort of outsourcing since it saves me from going from store to store.
SKL | March 16th, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Child care and eating out more than we should. I would say those are the biggest helpers. I would LOVE a cleaner, but not in the budget. But still stuff falls through the cracks. Apparently, my child’s after school hours service project required me hiring someone to pick her up from the aftercare program AT SCHOOL and deliver her to the class meeting site also AT SCHOOL. That wasn’t explained so she ended up missing it, luckily she doesn’t feel too bad about it as it was a service place we’ve done as a family.
But it can’t all be done without help, or without some things not occurring, and sometimes both.
Mich | March 17th, 2011 at 11:38 am
My husband and myself work full hours, both at work AND at home. We do not take care of the same things, but all-in-all house work is distributed equally (although we do not always have the same opinion about the definitions of “clean”, “tidy”, “priority”, “essential”
Then we have a lady who cleans the house for 4 hrs / week, every week, which is a true bless and recommendable to everybody, even if you have difficulties to afford this.
Next, our 4-year old is in kindergarten from 7:30 to 14:30 and we have a full-day primary school for the 8 year old (not a common thing when living in Germany). The 12 year old sometimes comes home from school early, but since we always encouraged him (from the very beginning) to manage his homework by himself, he is OK with being a few hours on his own. Despite (or maybe because?) the fact that they have to do most of the learning themselves, the kids are doing well in school.
Four days per week our day-care lady (we pay her) picks up the youngest from kindergarten and takes him to our home where she arrives just before the middle kid. Our “aunty” makes sure that the kids eat their daily apples and feed our fish. She takes to kids to their musik lessons, to sports, to friends (or invites friends of the kids to our house).
At noon, all three kids get a hot & fresh cooked meal in the various places that they spend their weekdays and my husband also takes a warm meal at work. I do not mind not having a cooked meal, so we only cook ourselves during the weekend. On weekdays we have a bread meal in the evening, whereby we pay close attention to the fact that we have the meals together - no excuses for not atteding, this is our daily “family quality time” - a very important element of our family life. During the evening meal, the kids tell us about their experiences, we discuss what needs to be discussed, we make jokes, have fun, are sometimes serious, just as it comes up. For these evening meals we take at least one hour, but often longer.
We do not have television, which saves us lots of time. That time we thus spend on playing with the kids and / or reading them stories.
We all go to bed at the same time, approx. 9am, the youngest kids sleeping right away and the big one being allowed to do some further reading in his room. We ourselves to get to sleep right away (most of the time) so that in the morning (6am) we can get up easily and fully refreshed.
As our kids are all boys, they do not fancy clothes and so they usually wear the same clothes all week. Only if their clothes are obviously dirty, we make them wear something “fresh”. Saves us a lot of “washing clothes” and we have stopped worrying “what other people may think of this”.
We decicded not to join any sport- or other social club while the kids are still so small, as this would automatically implicate that we would have to sacrificy “familiy time”.
We do not have an answering machine and “friends & family” know that they preferably should call us during the weekend.
We have a large refrigerator and plenty of food-reserves in our basement, so that we always can serve meals, also if we do not have time to go any buy it first. When we go food-shopping, we preferably buy for the whole week (at least).
We are very strick with “private” appointments, ony 1 “bigger appointment” per weekend (at the max). In this way, we have enough time left to live an “easy life” during the weekend, something we all enjoy and certainly need in order to get the batteries re-charged for the working-week.
So in summary, we manage our family life through a combination of “outsourcing” and “deleting time-killers out of our life”. As a result, we feel that our life in in balance and that there is enough room for spontaneous deviation for the general routine. Of course, we too often feel tired and of course, our house alos often looks like as if a bombe has just exploded. However, we feel that this is only a temporari state, that will be over before we know it. And so, because we do not want to run the risk that we are “missing” the opportunity to see the kids grow up, we dicided to live this phase very intense “WITH” the kids, so that by the time we have had enough of that childhood situation, they will all be grown up, and we ready for the next, well-deserved phase of our life.
Marian | March 28th, 2011 at 3:40 pm