I’ll just get right to the point:

My husband and I just returned from a 9-day trip to Berlin and Prague… during which our daughter was being spoiled silly by my mom and my grandparents and becoming an amphibian by spending hours swimming at the beach. Yes, this is the “make you jealous” part: We a vacation by ourselves, no kids involved.

I won’t lie, it was pure heaven. It’s been a really tough year on many fronts and both of us really needed a break and some time to just hang out with each other, without our work or laptops nearby. (This is a good time to mention my heroic achievement during the vacation — no Internet, no work, no checking emails, zero. I doubted very much that I could actually pull this off before we left but I realized just how much I needed to disconnect as soon as we stepped into our beautiful hotel room in the center of Berlin.)
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Motherhood has changed me in many ways, but one thing it’s certainly done is increase the dark circles under my eyes. I know, I know, it’s a small price to pay for the joy my daughter brings me, but I can’t say that I love the tired-exhausted look they give me in the morning. So after lots of trial-and-error I’ve found a great concealer that I love and I never leave the house without it.

In addition to the concealer, I usually put on some mascara and blush. If I’m really getting serious, I’ll put on the Laura Mercier tinted moisturizer, which makes my face look like I’ve been tanning in my back yard instead of staying up late catching up on work the night before. I might throw on some lipstick later in the day, but most of the time, that’s my entire makeup routine, which I think is pretty quick and light.

For me, putting on a little makeup in the morning is a good way to pick myself up and get ready for the day. If I look better, I feel better, period. So I find it surprising when I hear from other moms that since they’ve had kids they’ve stopped wearing makeup. Some say they don’t have the time, which I find hard to believe, but others simply say that they’ve stopped caring as much.
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My first job out of college was for McKinsey & Company, a super-competitive consulting firm in New York. I worked with really really sharp people and it was a huge learning curve. Many times, I felt like I was hardly keeping my head above water and not doing such a stellar job. Reviews were a big part of the process there and I was genuinely stressed out when my first one rolled around, thinking that my manager would deliver some bad news.

Then I had the review. It was glowing. There were absolutely some areas I needed to work on and improve, but overall, my performance was rated very highly by my manager and my colleagues and I got a nice $5,000 raise, a BIG deal for a 22 year-old just out of college, living in New York City.

This wasn’t the only instance in my career when my perception of how my work would be rated by my boss was worse than what my boss actually thought. Once I talked about this persistent (and annoying) feeling with another woman colleague and she confessed about feeling the same way. It was part of a larger conversation we had about the female impostor complex – feeling like someone would soon figure out that we’re not as great at our jobs as it might seem.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this is fairly common.
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When I was pregnant my mom told me that I was going to have to let go of my perfectionist tendencies once I became a mom. She and I are very similar in the way we want to make everything just right, from the meals we cook for our families to how clean our houses are, and she knew from her own experience that something would have to give. (Although, thinking back, I am not sure what she let go when I was growing up and she was a busy working mom… I’ll have to ask her about that.)

I heard this advice from many other moms as well but to be honest, I ignored it. Well, maybe not ignored, but tucked somewhere deep inside my brain and didn’t think much about. I knew that having a baby would change EVERYTHING, but surely it didn’t have to mean that my house would be a mess, we’d eat endless leftovers for dinner, skip out on concerts and catching indie movies we loved so much, or forget to send birthday cards to my family and friends (one of my long-time must-dos.)
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We met with a financial advisor the other day to get our finances organized. Nothing fancy, but we wanted to make sure we had enough (and the right kind) of life insurance, were maximizing our savings and had a solid plan to save for our daughter’s college.

According to our financial advisor, a year at a private college is projected to cost almost $100,000 by the time our daughter turns 18, which is in 13 years. (I’ll just pause a bit here as we all stare at this INSANE number. My husband and I both went to the same liberal arts college, which seemed insanely expensive at $30,000 per year. Wow.)

This means that a four year private college education will cost nearly $400,000 for one child. (And this is on top of the $200,000+ that it costs to raise a child during his or her first 18 years of life.) The only question that comes to mind when I see this number is how in the world will most non-ultra-rich families be able to cover this? Of course there are scholarships and loans and work study jobs, all of which can reduce this number, but what remains will likely still be scary.
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We’ve had three nannies for our daughter since she was born and now have a regular babysitter who spends about 10 hours a week with her. I remember the agony with which I left her with her first nanny when I want back to work. She was just three months old and I literally had trouble walking away from the door. Part of me was just so sad to leave her but an even bigger part of me was completely freaking out about leaving her with essentially, a stranger.

Sure, the nanny did work with us for a few weeks before I went back to work and I got to see her with our daughter. And of course we called references, one of whom was a good friend who had recommended the nanny in the first place. But you know that no amount of positive references can make you feel 100% better about leaving your kiddo in another person’s care.
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I have an issue: I work too much.

I know, I know, it’s all relative but relative to how much I think I should be working in order to not go nuts I am working too much. For example, I worked about half of this weekend, if you count the hours. I was away on a business trip most of last week and if you travel for business you know that it’s like doing double work — when you come back, you have to catch up on all the work you didn’t do while you did business trip related work. I also managed to catch a terrible sinus infection on this trip, which reduced my productivity to zero when I returned. Oh, and did I mention that I’ve been on this huge, fire drill project at work, which means night and weekend work even without business travel or sinus infections.

Bottom line, I had a ton of work to catch up on and no choice but to do it over the weekend. I made a difficult, but conscious choice that I would be an absent wife rather than an absent mother: I worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights after my daughter was asleep and during her naps (thank someone for her being tired enough to take them!) Result? We got a bunch of fun family time together but whatever time I’d usually spend with my husband I used for work. (This is yet another sad example of the trade-off I find myself making in favor of being a mom vs. a wife and it absolutely makes me feel like I am terrible at being a wife.)
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