After you read what I am about to write, you’re going to think I am either very silly, very stupid, or … something worse, so I won’t give you ideas:

I was away for most of this week on a business trip. Since I am horrible at sleeping on planes and in hotel rooms and since this trip involved a three-hour time difference, I got very little sleep, even less than my usual miserable amount. On top of this, the trip involved some extra celebrating sessions with my team, which — as you might guess — brought with them some alcoholic beverages. When I landed on Thursday after a sleepless five-hour red-eye flight, I felt like I’d been punched all over. I went home, slept for three hours, and got right back up to take my daughter to our work Halloween party.

That night I slept like a baby but I woke up on Friday feeling not much better than before. I went to bed later than I should have — c’mon, I had to have at least one real conversation with my husband after a week of short text messages and “gotta run!” calls. On Saturday morning, I was still exhausted. But… (and now we get to the point of this longish story)
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I’ve never watched Dr. Phil and to be honest, the small bits of the show that I’ve caught here and there, while flipping through channels at the gym, didn’t exactly draw me in. I find him blunt, but in a bad way, intrusive, but in less-than-helpful way, and just overall not a kind of guy whose opinion will sway me. So when I read about the show he did recently about stay-at-home moms vs. working moms, I didn’t rush to YouTube to check it out.

It turns out it was a very good thing. According to the many, many blog posts about it — most filled with the kind of sharp emotion only the mommy wars can bring on — the show would have made my blood boil. One of the guests was Jessica Gottlieb, who is a stay-at-home mom and who often blogs about the wonderfullness of moms who stay at home and the terribleness of moms who choose to work. Apparently she said things like working moms who choose to work (vs those who have to work) are selfish and “I wouldn’t outsource loving my husband, why would I outsource loving my kids?”
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For the first time in a VERY long time I work at a company where many of my colleagues are also friends. Not the best, close, share everything, talk all the time friends, but friends whose company I enjoy and whose lives I’m happy to be a part of.

I’ve definitely had friends from work before. (One of my great life friends is a woman I worked with for five years at a small firm — even though we now live in different cities and don’t see each other often, we’re still good friends.) But what I’ve missed during the latter parts of my career is working in an environment where I have a lot in common with many people — vs. just a few — and where people do spend time together outside of work. I’m now realizing just how important it is for me to be in a social work environment and how much I missed this energy during the last few years when I worked from home.
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When I sat down to breakfast with my kiddo this morning, she looked a little surprised. I realized why: For the past week, we hardly saw each other, not to mention share a meal. My absentee mothering — as I’ve called it during the few moments this week when working mom guilt kicked in stronger than usual — was due to the insanity going on at work.

Early in the week most of us realized that something BIG was on the horizon. Mid-week, some of the management changes were evident and we’d gotten an invite to an all-hands meeting for our group, to be attended by a super-senior manager. By Thursday morning, we were part of a significant corporate re-org and trying to figure out what it all meant for the group and for each of us individually. The usual office politics picked up steam and I think I literally spent 48 hours in a row talking to dozens of my colleagues.
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This is going to be a really short post. (OK, maybe not really short because I am not capable of really short, but short.) And the reason it’s going to be short is because I only have 18 minutes to write it, edit it, publish it, brush my teeth, wash my face, and get into bed.

Starting tonight, I am implementing a 3-day a week 10pm bed time for myself. Which means that three times a week I will get my butt in bed by 10pm. I can read once I am there, but I can’t work, or make to-do lists or look through recipe books (tried all of those and none lead to a good night sleep.)

This is going to be a HUGE challenge for me. On an average night my husband and I go to bed around 11:30 or midnight. We usually wake up around 6:15am, and two days a week I get up at the horrible hour of 5:30am to drag myself (usually cursing) to a 6am spin class. (Those are the days I definitely prioritize working out over sleep.)

Few parents get enough sleep and absolutely no working mom I know thinks she gets enough sleep or even close to it. But I consistently sleep an average of only 5 hours a night and it’s taking a serious toll on me. I’ve tried to deny it for a long, long time and make up excuses like, “Oh, I’m still young, I definitely can deal with this for a while” or “I have no other choice because of the amount of work and home stuff that needs to get done.”

But I need to cut down on the excuses because I am really really really tired and cranky and not my peppy self way too often. The lack of sleep is definitely affecting my mood, my energy levels, and how I am doing at work. I need to stop the denial and just admit it:

My name is Nataly and I need more sleep.
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When I read about a new study showing that working mothers and fathers often resort to unhealthy eating because juggling work and family leaves them little time and energy to prepare healthy meals I wasn’t going to write about it. At first glance it read to me like another indictment of working families — i.e. here is one more thing we’re not perfect at.

But then I changed my mind because I think this is a really really really really — did I write enough reallys? — to address. Just like you always hear the advice that a happy mom (and dad, but we usually tend to talk about moms here) leads to a happier family I firmly believe (and I am sure there are tons of studies that show this, although it’s kind of common sense) that a healthy mom leads to a healthier family. So if we skip meals, resort to unhealthy snacks instead of nutritional meals, and constantly eat on the go — all things that this study found that working parents do — our kids are more likely to pick up these habits. Not a good thing.
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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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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’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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