Saturday, April 17, 2010

Working mom of 2 under 2

The trials and tribulations...

Let me start by saying that I love being a mom, a wife, and a professional. What I don't love, is having to be all three at the same time. I've been working since I was 15 years old. When I was on maternity leave, I felt lost that I wasn't working. After I had Brock, I was excited to get back to work. It was easy for me to do it all.  Now that I had Lillian its a totally different story.

I have been having a very hard time balancing my roles of mom, wife, and professional. I can't keep my house clean and some nights I don't have energy to make dinner.  All the while, I have to change a million diapers a day, feed my two kids and my husband, oh yeah... and the damn dogs.  I can't handle the pressures of making my hours at work and meeting my expectations at home. Not that my husband has expectations. Its my own expectations. I *should* be able to maintain a clean house and all of that. But I just can't. I'm stressed out all day long from dealing with the kids... mostly Lillian, who seems to be colicky. Brock was never colicky so I didn't have to deal with this before. Then when Spike gets home, I think "ok, I'm finally going to get a break." Pfffft! Yeah right. He comes home from (albeit) a very long and hard day at work and he wants to take a bath. Ok, fine. Go ahead... but while he's in the bath, I'm still trying to wrap things up for work and I'm starting to stress out about dinner, because Brock goes to bed between 6 & 7 pm! Ugh! I don't know what the deal is. I know I am very lucky to have a job that allows me to work from home. But I'm not busy enough to  justify sending the kids to a babysitter because I'm not brining in enough money. So I keep them home with me, which totally limits the time I can make phone calls for work to when they are both napping. I would much rather be a full-time stay-at-home mom and not have to worry about brining home a paycheck.

We've talked about it and have decided that I will work for at least another 2 years so we can make sure to be free of credit card debt and have a nest egg. Then I can take a break and focus on being a mom. So for now, I will deal with things the way they are.

I have so much respect for working moms. Even more for single moms.  I don't know how you do it :-) Any tips would be appreciated!

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