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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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?

As far as I’m concerned, my mother has always been the gold standard of parenting. She has endless patience, inspired creativity, and a perpetual sparkle in her green eyes. Even though we might not agree on things like how much candy is too much for a four-year-old (my answer: any and all candy because he loses his fool mind), I still hold her up as a model of the best of what motherhood can be.

This all makes it really easy to explain that the reason I turn into such a useless sack of personcloth when I’m around her with my kids is because I’m simply observing her fine mothering form. I’m sitting here taking notes and absolutely not just being a total slacker because someone else is there to take care of my kids. Why would anyone even think that?!

Ahem.

Truthfully, being around my parents (especially over the holidays) always makes me feel the following things:

1. I feel lazy as all get-out, because when the grandparents are around, I tend to sit back and take full advantage of the opportunity to relax on the couch instead of play Chutes and Ladders for the three frillionth time;

2. I feel thankful to have had such great parenting role models; and

3. I feel sad that we live almost a thousand miles away and only get to see them a few times a year.

Points 2 and 3 are easy things to talk about, but I haven’t heard a lot of other people share experiences similar to mine on Point 1. Maybe it’s that I’m overly aware of how I parent in front of mine because we see each other so infrequently. Or maybe it’s that I feel like a schlub when they come visit and I eventually realize I haven’t wiped any butts besides my own for days because someone else has taken over that particularly delightful parenting chore.

Tell me: When you parent in front of your parents, how does it go? Do you feel the need to prove yourself—to be supermom, the shining beacon of put-togetherness who has everything under control? Or do you, like me, become the world’s laziest parent because someone else is available to build block castles for three hours straight, meaning you can finally sit back with a book and enjoy what it feels like to be “off the clock” from your 24/7 parenthood gig? When you watch your parents with your kids, do you become the student—asking a million questions and relying on their advice—or do you become the police officer, regulating intake of cookies and television so as not to exceed the AAP’s recommended allowance?

If you’re planning to spend time with your parents (or maybe your spouse’s parents) this holiday season, are you looking forward to it or dreading it? (It’s okay, your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m staying home with my five-month-old (and working here and there, partly for money and partly to stay sane), and I might as well just come right out and say it: I definitely have days when I’d rather be just working. Taking care of a baby is hard (and older children are even harder, in many ways) (how come no one told me this?), and that’s why the mere idea of being able to sit at a computer for an uninterrupted block of time during daylight hours–no rushing through projects before my son wakes from his always-too-short-naps–is enough to get me begging on my knees.

This didn’t happen to me when my first son was born. Why? Probably because I went back to work part-time when he was 16 weeks old. I did the requisite amount of lamenting our separation every Tuesday and Thursday, of course, but looking back, it truly was a gift, having that job to go away to.

We always hear about the working mom who wishes she could stay home but not much about the other side of that coin. What about the mothers who wish they could work but can’t?

Right now it makes more sense for me to stay home with my infant, so that’s what I’m doing, and even though some days I would kill for Mary Poppins to umbrella down from the sky and take the kid into a chalk painting for a few hours, overall I really am happy with the situation. To be honest, though, I suspect this happiness is tied tightly to the knowledge that I will only be in this position for a short time (we have a daycare spot saved for June 2013) because, like I said in the simplest terms above, taking care of a baby is HARD.

Have you ever been in the position of wanting to work but needing to stay home? Did you even dare say that out loud or is this one of those things “good mothers” aren’t supposed to talk about?

The plot! It thickens! Or thins, rather. I lost my job last week.
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Yesterday was big for America. The top story is of course the re-election of President Obama, but beyond that there were many other important issues at stake across the country. On my ballot, I got to vote on funding for education, financial support for the zoo and other public venues, the restructuring of the state’s three-strikes law, and the repeal of the death penalty. Some of you may have voted on the legalization of gay marriage, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time.

I’m not the most politics-savvy person out there, but I do make an effort to get informed on the current topics, and I always vote. If I don’t have a lot of time or energy for in-depth research on the propositions and measures and officials, I can at least make election season a time to reflect on and perhaps re-examine my beliefs about the way government can and should impact our lives. It’s probably not awesome that it happens as infrequently as it does, but hey, it’s better than nothing.

That said, four years is a long time. At the last national election, I was still pregnant with my older son, and then BOOM, yesterday I went to the polls with both him and my younger son, who’s creeping up on four months. I was proud to take them with and show them how the process works, but I was more proud that I was casting my votes with them specifically in mind. Although I like to think I have always voted for the good of the whole, with special emphasis on those who need government help the most–children, the poor, the sick–I’ve definitely started looking at my voting privilege differently since I had kids. Instead of just thinking about my vote, I now feel about it too.

When you have children, you’re no longer voting just for yourself, you’re voting for them–for what they do, for who they are, and for who they might become. What if we can’t afford private school and have to rely on public education? What if PBS lost funding and there was no more Sesame Street? What if one or both of them is gay? I’ll even admit that having children has complicated my feelings about abortion.

It’s one thing to vote for the vague “future of America”; it’s another when you realize that future is your own children.

Has becoming a parent changed your politics?

This week marks eleven years at my job, and how did I celebrate? By not going back to work after maternity leave. Yikes.
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Just because I like being a working mom doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize about how the other half lives. When I picture myself as a full-time stay-at-home mom, I’m…
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My maternity leave ends in six weeks, and I’ll probably spend at least four of those weeks stressing out about what to do with the baby when I go back to work. (I’ll spend the other two ignoring the issue completely.)

When I went back to work after my first son was born, I made the switch from full-time to part-time (in the office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), and my husband was also working part-time then (Tuesdays and Thursdays), which meant whoever wasn’t on the job that day was the stay-at-home parent. Bottle-feeding problems aside, this was a wonderful solution, since I didn’t have to go through the agony of handing my baby over to a caring but paid stranger until said baby was a year and a half old.

This time around, my husband is working full-time and, between steady contracts and freelance gigs, so am I. I could probably give some of that up (and likely will have to), but for now I’m researching solutions that will allow me to keep the jobs I love without sacrificing quality time with the baby I also love (and happen to love more than I love work, for the record).

The good news is I work entirely from home, so I have a lot of options. We don’t have any family in the area who could help, but the next best thing might be hiring a babysitter to come in for a few hours every day, so at least the baby could stay at home. There are also nanny-shares in the neighborhood, as well as in-home daycares and more formal ones not too far away. (My older son’s awesome daycare doesn’t have room for more infants right now, so we have to wait on that.) I’ve also thought about just trying to do it all, all by myself, but having been in this position before, and I know that I’ll only be making a hard situation harder, and that all bets are off once the baby figures out how to move himself across a room.

I know there’s no option that will make me feel happy to pass my newborn over to a stranger at this point, but I also know that it’s probably necessary and definitely worth a shot (especially considering that sending my older son to daycare was one of the best things we ever did, for him and our family).

Here’s my call for advice and words of encouragement and/or warning. What did you do when you went back to work while your baby was still a baby? Did you find a solution you loved? Did you suffer through one you hated? Did you figure out something that felt sort of in between–maybe not ideal but a good enough fix for the time being?