There are so many things that make working from home better for me than working in a remote office, but during this pregnancy I’ve found myself missing some things I enjoyed while I was an in-house employee during my first pregnancy:

• singing to the baby during my solo car commute
• wearing my cutest maternity clothes instead of my loungiest, schlubbiest ones
• fielding questions from curious coworkers
• getting at least a little exercise every day, even if it’s just going up and down the stairs between my desk and the copier
• not having constant access to an entire pantry of bad-for-me food
• office drama!

Stuff I don’t miss? The list is strikingly similar:

• the excruciating drive home during the third trimester, when my ribs felt ready to crack open
• the hassle of finding a cute maternity outfit every. single. day.
• fielding awkward/invasive questions from curious coworkers
• not having constant access to an entire pantry full of yummy food
• missing out on the cocktail part of after-hours cocktail receptions
• the privacy of my own bathroom, and never having to wait in line
• office drama! (OMG)

Did you work in an office while you were pregnant? What did you love about it? What did you hate?

Move up the ranks. Earn more money. Get a better job title. Bask in your success.

That’s what I’m supposed to be doing, I suppose, but as an editor and writer, I’m happy to keep doing just that: editing and writing. I don’t want to become an editorial director and spend my days delegating tasks and parsing budgets instead of wrangling semicolons and enlightening a new generation of authors on the function of the en dash. As an online writer, I don’t want to oversee a team of underling writers, scheduling their posts and sprucing up their headlines, I want to WRITE. (Besides, I’m terrible at budgets AND headlines.)

This doesn’t mean I don’t want “better” jobs (I use quotation marks because “better” can mean a variety of things here), and I certainly wouldn’t balk at getting paid more, or even being recognized for what I do well with a plaque at a fancy-dress dinner. And yet…I’m also mostly okay with how things are going (and have been going for years). The status quo is a.o.k. by me.

So then why do I feel like my lack of ambition is a bad thing? Why do I think there must be something wrong with my wiring that I don’t want to move up the career ladder and take on more responsibilities and seek greater rewards and recognition? Am I selling myself short? Am I just scared?

The answers here are Yes and Yes, but there are other factors at work too. I DO have ambition–it’s just more for homelife instead of worklife. And in order to reach those personal goals, I’m perfectly happy to let my professional goals slide. Being a success at work is lovely, but what makes me happy is being a success at home, as a wife and mother and friend. But I have goals, I do! They’re just more often things like Sew Pillows for the Couch instead of Win a Pulitzer for excellence in journalism.

Are you ambitious? Where does it show up more–at work or at home?

Kids or no, I like work, but I also HAVE to work (financial, mental, for the good of misused apostrophes everywhere, etc.), and that’s just the way it is. Because I’ve never had much choice in the matter, I tried not to waste time dwelling on the topic when my first son was born. That I would go back to work after maternity leave was a given, and beyond that I just did my best to stay confident that the details would work themselves out.

Ah, details. It’s true that the devil’s in them…
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I use the phrase “dream job” a lot, mostly in reference to what I do (editing and writing) but also (and more often since having kids) to describe how I’m able to do it, which is part-time and freelance from home, with MAJOR flexibility. It’s the right job for me, and the details are a nearly perfect match for my life right now; the only thing I say about my career more often than “dream job” is “lucky.” So, so lucky.

But is it what I’d always imagined? No, not exactly.
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Once upon a time, there was some drama at the office that consisted of three of my coworkers and me having what I’ll call here for the sake of propriety “communication issues.” Basically, one of the people was feeling picked on for screwing up something important, and although from my perspective it didn’t seem like anyone was being out of line in her opinion (we just wanted to acknowledge the mistake in hopes that it wouldn’t be made again in the future), the whole thing nevertheless turned into a bit of a low-grade bitchfight (to throw propriety aside), a devolution that I found completely ridiculous because (a) the initial problem had been addressed and solved and (b) I had bigger things to worry about so (c) LET’S MOVE ON.
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There’s always a lot of controversy when people start debating stay-at-home moms v.s. work-outside-the-home moms. There’s huffing and hubbub about who are the better parents and whose kids are happier/healthier/smarter/fitter, and round and round she goes until everyone’s panties are quite certainly cutting off the circulation to their brains. My sympathies are on both sides, I think because I don’t feel like I have to defend myself; I’m not a SAHM or a WOHM but a rarer hybrid: the work-at-home mom.

In my three-plus years as a parent, the subject of my WAHMness hasn’t created even a ripple in the wavepool of moms judging other moms…unless you count the three times it came up last month.
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Walking into a job interview is nerve-wracking enough, even if you feel totally pulled-together and prepared and 100 percent qualified for the position. First impressions are everything, we’re told, so you do what you can to look and act the part. You practice your eye contact and handshake, and you wear your sharpest interview outfit, the one that says “Take me seriously.”
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I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my English degree until the year before I graduated from college. I was walking around in the basement of the best used bookstore in downtown Salt Lake when, I kid you not, a book literally fell off the shelf in front of me and landed at my feet. And I am using the literal meaning of the word “literal” here.
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I’m about to tell my company I’m pregnant. I told my extended family over Christmas, I told the Internet back in November, at five weeks, and I of course told my husband before the test was even dry. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell Facebook because, well, I kind of hate Facebook (okay, not “kind of,” I really hate Facebook) and so the next big step is definitely telling my boss and supervisor and coworkers, in part because I’m excited, duh; in part because I don’t want them wondering where I’ve disappeared to when I drop off their radar from July to October; and in part because I don’t want anyone there to think I must hate them (as I hate Facebook and all Montagues) because I waited so long to share the news. I’m already 15 weeks along, and at this point even postponing the announcement until week 16 feels like an insult.

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We spent the holidays with my family in Utah and had ourselves a jolly-good time, but then three days after Christmas my grandfather died in a car crash on his way to the volunteer job he’d been doing several times a week for thirty years (THIRTY YEARS) and, well, it wasn’t a very happy New Year after all. (My mom took that tack of greeting family members with a cheer of “Crappy New Year, huh?” and everyone nodded in solemn agreement.)

My little family of three (and one-third) were originally supposed to fly back to California on the day after the accident, but we ended up extending our stay by five days (for a total of thirteen) so we could be there for the funeral. It wasn’t the greatest of trips–in addition to the grief and the harried logistics of funeral planning, we weren’t prepared for that much time away, and I spent most of those extra five days working–but it wasn’t all bad, and if I may take a break from talking about work here, I’d like to share a few things I learned about parenthood, parents, and grandparents.
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