I recently had lunch with a friend whose daughter is a few months younger than ours. We got to talking about our last few weekends and she told me that the number of her daughter’s activities, birthday parties, and playdates that fill their weekends is overwhelming. “Before she was born we thought that she’d fit into our life but it turned out quite the opposite,” she told me.

I thought this was an interesting way to put it. My husband and I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the parenting spectrum. We definitely spend a fair amount of time taking our daughter to activities (I write this right after we got home from her ballet class), but we made a decision a while ago to have at least one afternoon every weekend where we have nothing planned, including playdates. We buy our share of educational games and I have a sign-up form for kids’ drama club sitting on my desk, but we’ve also thought it was really important to let our daughter just play and hang out. And because I really can’t stand playgrounds or children’s museums, we’re almost never there and I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it a long time ago.
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On an average weekday I spend between 2 to 3 hours with my daughter, before and after work. Of course, a lot of that time is occupied with doing a bunch of other stuff, like getting breakfast ready, packing lunch, organizing stuff for school, and so on. On some days, after she is in bed and I’m either back at work at my computer or getting some chores done around the house, I feel like we didn’t spend much time together at all.

To be honest, it’s one of the worst feelings for me, one that hurts even more than all the working mom guilt, which, I’m either getting used to or is getting less acute.
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Until a few years ago we lived in New York City, where it was much more common (it seems to me, at least, this is by no means a well-researched statement) for moms who worked to have full-time nannies. We had a nanny for our daughter until she was three years old, when we moved to a suburb of Boston and she started going to daycare. Our daughter’s nanny took care of her Monday through Friday, 8:30am - 6pm, when one of us would get home from work (usually just in the nick of time, out of breath, and excited to see our kiddo!) Weekends were — and still very much are — all about the three of us hanging out together.

I remember going to a birthday party for one of our daughter’s friends, whom she’d met at the playground, and seeing a few kids who were brought there by their nannies. The party was on a Saturday afternoon and while I knew that their moms worked, I was pretty sure they didn’t work on the weekend. A similar thing happened at another birthday party a few months later and I then realized that weekend nannies were more common than I thought.
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So I might have mentioned that I started a new gig recently. A regular, full-time, office-based gig.

I’m pretty excited about it. Actually, I’m really excited about it for a bunch of reasons — smart people, great energy, interesting, challenging work, a somewhat family-friendly environment, and an incredible office space. (I know, the last one sounds kind of strange, but if you saw our wide open, bright, sun-filled office that’s right on the river, you’d know what I mean.) Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty damn excited to have a good job  like this during the current recession.

But in all my excitement about it I completely forgot just how stressful it is to start a new job. Wow. Everyone and everything is new and my brain is working in double overdrive to learn what I need to as quickly as possible while also beginning to get to know my co-workers, develop some relationships, and start to figure out the various aspects of office politics. To be honest, it’s pretty overwhelming, and some of my energy is spent trying not to show my new colleagues to degree to which I am overwhelmed.
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I should be either sleeping or running while I am writing this post because after the weekend we just spent with our very good friends visiting from New York I need to catch up on missed zzz’s and burn off the extra thousands of calories I consumed during our food feasts. I love those guys and our kiddos are best friends, but boy, do we always overdo it on the “talking til early morning while eating too much awesome food” front.”

I mentioned in an earlier post (hinted is more likely) that my husband and I are very lightly and casually talking about whether we’ll have a second child. Not sure you can talk about something that important lightly, but for now, we’re at that level, if that makes sense. These friends who were visiting are one of the very few other families we know with an only child and they recently told us they are “working” on number two. (I always chuckle at this concept of working on another kid.) And I realized this weekend that their decision is most definitely influencing how I think about ours, at least in some ways.
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I’ve seen a few articles recently which mention the fact that the layoffs in the current recession are hitting men much harder than women (having something to do with more men being employed in finance and manufacturing, two industries suffering the most). And more than a few news stories and commentators have mentioned that men being laid off is actually good for women. The logic goes like this: Men get laid off. They go home and start taking over more domestic duties, like childcare and cleaning and cooking. This frees up more time for women who then head back into the labor force.

OK, I am sure some very smart people have studied these trends and determined that this is what’s going to happen. And yes, it’s true that more moms are heading back to work or cutting their maternity leaves short during this recession. But I doubt very much that they are doing this because their husbands are doing more around the house. Rather, they are doing this because they need to support their families financially. In other words, they are doing it because they have to, not because they want to.
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(I have to say I feel a bit odd to be writing this post on the heels of the day when we celebrate moms — and one that I really enjoy! — but in many ways, I think it’s really fitting.)

A friend who is older than me but doesn’t have kids told me recently that she’s really sick of being judged for not having children. I asked her how she is being judged and she gave me an answer I didn’t quite expect. She told me that worse than snarky comments or raised eyebrows (the latter from her mother-in-law) is the general sense in our society that motherhood is this noble, amazing thing that all women should aspire to.

“I’m super-successful in my career, I am married to a great guy, I’m a decent daughter (most of the time), I’m honest, hard-working and I even volunteer at a soup kitchen several times a year… and yet I feel like the world thinks I am inadequate because I’m not a mother,” she said (I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist.)

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I spent the better part of last Sunday running around trying to find great Mother’s Day gifts for my mom, my grandma, my mom-in-law, and our much-loved babysitter, who is like our daughter’s third grandma. My mom is really tough to shop for, my grandma is picky, my mom-in-law is a total mystery every time, and for our babysitter I’m always trying to balance beauty with utility — which all means that shopping for Mother’s Day is a loooong process.

And let’s not forget the foam flowers (with her photo on them) my daughter and I are making, which required a trip to the craft store since we’re not really well stocked house when it comes to art supplies. Oh, and the Mother’s Day dinner I’m cooking for all the moms above this coming Sunday at our place.

Mother’s Day is tiring but I don’t mind putting in the effort. Ever since I became a mom I like making a big deal out of it for the moms in my life — I know it’s a very very very small way to show them all how much we appreciate them. But I have one mom I’m trying not to forget this Mother’s Day: me.
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This week we have an appointment to visit our daughter’s new kindergarten for the fall (I am still in denial that she is going to kindergarten in a few months but that’s another story), a workshop about kindergarten transition, a parent-teacher conference at her pre-school, a dentist appointment for my husband, a doctor’s appointment for me and oh, almost forgot, my appointment to get a haircut which I’ve now canceled four times.

Sure, it’s an unusual week mostly because of the kindergarten stuff, but very few weeks go by without us having to find a way to take time off from work for something. We’ve developed a few strategies over time to try and minimize the time we need to take off:
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