Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so hard to be a mother

Sometimes my child is so badly behaved and demanding and selfish and I-don’t-care-that-you-have-needs that I want to run from the house screaming at the top of my voice. I want to run as far as I can, to place that is quiet like a Bjork song and empty like fog. Someplace just my own, where I rule the pink fluffy clouds and sunny skies and soft green grass. A place that stays tidy and neat as a pin; where the food cooks itself, the laundry is always washed (and ironed), the dishes are always done, and the bathrooms never need to be cleaned. A place where no-one needs juice or a muffin or to ask me a really important question Right Now.

A place where I get to hold and nurture the selfish child within.

Sometimes my child’s episodes of bad behaviour last for weeks – months, even – and I can’t help the feelings of surging anger and resentment. Feelings that fill me with guilt, but that I am powerless to stop. And eventually, even the guilt starts to foster resentment because no corner of my emotional landscape, or mind or space or life is mine alone.

It is all consumed by this little person who runs roughshod over my emotions and needs because he hasn’t yet learnt that the world doesn’t exist to do his bidding. And then I realise that that’s My fault. Because I am his teacher, his life coach, his purveyor of knowledge. And yet again I feel guilty and angry because despite my very best efforts I have failed. Failed to teach him to care for the feelings of others, failed to help him develop the independence to entertain himself, failed to raise a child that I can actually live with.

And live with him I must. Just like I must teach him. Teach him and guide him and tutor him and lead him and then teach him some more. Because if he doesn’t understand that it is unacceptable to throw a monumental tantrum because I won’t let him play a Wii game all afternoon, or drink a juice that consists of nothing but colorants and artificial flavours; it is my job to fix it.

And this is not a job I can quit. This is not a job I can give up on because it is too hard. This is not a job that I have any choice but to continue. Because the wake up, fetch, carry, work, entertain, wipe snotty nose, cook, clean, always-someone-else’s-agenda merry go round isn’t something I can walk away from. Even if I am bone weary about three leagues beyond the point of exhaustion. Even if today I feel that I just can’t win, that this is the one thing that I simply cannot do, that this is all too much and I Just Can’t Breathe. I must carry on and push through and nurture and remember that he’s just a child and doesn’t understand and smile while I’m at it.

I guess that’s what it means to be responsible. What it means to be a mother.

Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so hard.

I’m not a slacker. I’m a sociological post-materialist.

Not all who wander are lost – JRR Tolkien

I’ve been back at work since the beginning of the year and have enjoyed my job and the people I’ve worked with. But I have to come clean and say that I really don’t like working. And I don’t mean in the ‘work can be such hard, well, work’ kind of way; but in the sense that I find it completely pointless and unfulfilling.

Yes, I realise that survival is a pretty good point and that I need to make money to put food on the table, and blah blah yawn. This is why I still get out of bed in the morning. But meeting these basic needs isn’t really making me happy, leaving me satisfied (just ask Maslow), or providing enough motivation for me to keep doing it in the long term.

I suppose that I could try to pretend that I care about getting rich and accumulating wealth. But I’m just not finding the quest for riches a driver anymore. Sure, I like beautiful things, but I increasingly find myself wanting to create rather than consume beauty. In fact, I’m really into the idea of re- and up-cycling stuff rather than buying more new things. Not to sound like a tree-hugger, but there are only so many resources available and we should probably try to conserve some of them. Not to mention the fact that the quest to acquire just feels to me like it’s in poor taste right now. It’s a pretty different mind-set I find myself in…

For a while I thought that I was fooling myself into believing that I felt this way, and that deep down I was still the rabid consumer that I’ve always been. So I tested my theory and tried to go shopping. About 5 times. I tried my favourite stores. I tried new stores. I tried highly recommended stores and unheard of stores. I tried cheap stores and expensive stores. And each time, I would leave the shops either empty handed, or with one or two purchases that I made because I had a real need.

Not only do I not want to buy new stuff, I desperately want to get rid of the stuff I already have. As we prepare to move (more on that in a separate post), J and I are sorting through our mountains of stuff and identifying the stuff that we want to give to charity or sell. Most of the time I want to pack the essentials (like my books, laptop, a few craft supplies, and enough clothes to not become a nudist) and then call a charity store to come and collect the rest. And when I am in any retail environment I keep finding myself thinking: “Well, I could buy this – but what’s the point? It’s just one more thing that I’ll have to store, clean, and move.”

To me, it makes perfect sense that a severe reduction in my acquisitive drive means a drastic reduction in my desire to work because this has always been all that work is about for me. I have worked to make money so that I could buy shit. I’ve never been a particularly career-driven person. I’ve tried to be. I’ve pretended to be. But the truth is that I really couldn’t give a continental about climbing the corporate ladder, or gaining recognition, or any of the things that seem to be important to my career-focused brethren.

I just want to be free. I want my time to be my own. I want to travel and see places and people I’ve never seen before. I want to watch TV shows and movies. I want to spend time with my husband, son and friends. I want to try new things, like yoga. I want to be able to sit on the couch and do nothing but knit a particularly challenging pattern. I want to experiment with making my own patterns and sewing clothes and home décor. I want to take my son to the beach. I want to lay in bed all morning reading. I want to write. For some reason I want to edit other people’s writing*. (Strangely enough, I probably want to do this more than I want to write).

I know from experience that my skill level at few, if any, of these things is likely to be good enough to display to the public, let alone generate an income. So I know that they would be seen by many as failures. I really don’t care. I want to enjoy the process, not the outcome. I want to simply revel in the creation of something, with no thought given to profitability or income generation for myself or anyone else. I want to do for the sake of doing, make for the sake of making.

The fact that I feel this way doesn’t surprise me. To me, it’s totally normal. But society doesn’t seem to agree. It would seem that if you aren’t driven by money or a desire to achieve society’s narrow preconceptions of success, there is no space for you. Basically, there seem to be three options for women who want to be considered successful:

1. Be the brass-balled career woman clawing her way up the corporate ladder. Extra points if you start your own business and make it successful. Become an expert within your industry. Get head-hunted a few times. Have clients that adore you. Join self-congratulating industry groups and societies. Make lots of money. Buy shit with it. Look amazing all of the time.
2. Be a domestic goddess Stepford wife who cooks and cleans, has amazing sex; is interesting, witty and well read. Host wonderful dinner parties. Be a mother, preferably an earth mother who is a member of the La Leche League and a strict proponent of attachment parenting. Be involved in every school activity and charity drive. Bake cakes and cookies, and cook wholesome and nutritious meals. Shows how practical and thrifty you are and prove that you’re a better wife and home maker than everyone else. Look amazing all of the time.
3. Both of the above.

I call bullshit. Surely there must be more? Something more meaningful? But in the absence of these stereotypical measures of success, I’m left wondering what I believe success to be and how I measure it for myself. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. What I Do know is that I no longer think that success is a big house*, luxury car and designer clothing. I also don’t think that it’s anything as trite or hackneyed as being the perfect wife and mother, and raising the perfect child. While having a home, a car and a happy child and marriage are important to me, these are not the yardsticks by which I measure my success.

(*While I don’t need a big house, I would like to have a sewing and craft room. Purely for practical reasons, you understand.)

Maybe I’m just in the wrong job. Actually, I’m pretty sure I am. The very thought of becoming some money-grubbing company’s PR lackey and contributing to the great need to increase sales within the infinite marketplace drains me of the will to live faster than an open airlock creates a vacuum. But I have no idea what to do with that, because I’m not really qualified to do anything else. I’m lucky enough to have some talent, experience, knowledge and skills under my belt that allow me to make a salary and help put food on the table. Which I need to do right now, because being a single income family just isn’t feasible at the moment. But again, where does this whole situation leave me? I suspect that the answer is “between a rock and a hard place”.

I know that I could find my passion and pursue it on a part time basis. I could study part time and gain a qualification so that I can eventually change careers. I could choose a hobby and wait to see where it goes and how it develops. But really, being a working mother, wife, homemaker, daughter-in-law, and occasional friend is quite a lot to have on my plate as it is.

I just don’t feel as though I can take the limited time that I have available for maintaining meaningful relationships, dedicate it to a hobby; and expect my loved ones to be ok with that. With working and running my home, I have so little free time that I barely see my friends and family. So it just isn’t realistic to put more on my plate. Maybe some women can manage to work, run a home and have a hobby that pursue with single-minded dedication, but apparently I’m not one of them. Besides, I need time to figure out what it is that I actually want to do. I don’t want to be tied to any one thing. I want the tasting menu, please. I want to experiment, see what I’m good at and what I enjoy. I want to wander life’s paths. This doesn’t mean I’m not going anywhere. It just means I don’t know where ‘there’ is right now.

So how do I turn my (largely) as-yet-unidentified passions into a job that can actually get me excited to wake up in the morning, without spreading myself too thin? Should I even try? If you know the answer, please share it. I’m dying to know.

Help! I’m a working mother!

I’ve started writing this post about ten times and have never finished it. (Hopefully tonight’s the night.) Partly because I can never really decide what I think or feel abut the topic and partly because I Just Never Have the Time. You see, 3 months ago I rejoined the workforce. I Am Exhausted! I’ve been through many difficult times in my life, but there have been very few occasions on which I have felt so physically and emotionally drained.

I thought I was prepared for how difficult it would be to go back to work, but as usual I was living in La La Land.

I expected it to be hard for the entire family. I expected E to need an adjustment period to get used to Mommy not being at home all day, dedicated to meeting his every need. I explained to him that I was going back to work and discussed how he felt about it. I spent extra quality time with him and told him that, even though I was going back to work, I would still make sure that I spent time with him. I spoke to his teacher so that she knew to expect a few rough weeks because that’s how long I thought it would take for him to settle. Two months at most. I thought I had all the bases covered. Wrong!

It turns out that what I should have expected was for my usually sweet and gentle child to be replaced by a fire-breathing, tantrum-throwing, non-sleeping, never-eating doppelgänger. (Ok, so the sleep thing isn’t really new. It just got much worse.) Seriously, there have been days where I haven’t recognised my child At All. And that just feels awful, because I miss my baby boy.

I miss him more than words can express. I miss being there for every high-and low in his day, the big and the small events that are important to him. I feel disconnected from his life and this is soul destroying. I miss knowing, without a shadow of doubt, how he is doing and what he is feeling. I know that he is in good hands, as I’ve hired someone to be with him during the day and because we are lucky enough that – because he works from home – J can spend a fair amount of time with him.

But this is just another thing for me to feel guilty about. J has had to seriously adjust his work patterns and habits to accommodate the fact that I can no longer be the one to drive E to and from school, take him to play dates or to his weekly visit with his gran. This has been hard for J, and he has soldiered through with a calm that I didn’t always manage as a stay at home mom. I am so proud of both of them. Of J. But that doesn’t make it any easier to walk out the door every morning and leave my child behind.

 When I am with him, I try to make the most of it, but I am so tired and going through my own stuff. Trying to settle into a new job after 3 years off the market is hard hard hard. I doubt myself and my abilities professionally and now I doubt my parenting abilities because my child seems to be deeply traumatised. Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had gone back to work when he was just a baby and this would all be normal for him.

I predicted that I would need time to adjust to working and to feeling a fair amount of guilt about leaving my precious child in the care of another. But nothing, Nothing could have prepared me for the waves of maternal guilt that have sometimes brought me to my knees. My child has been beyond difficult and I have just been too exhausted to cope with it. I had completely forgotten how draining it can be to work.

I went into this thinking of all the wonderful things that I had missed about work for so long – the adult interaction, the intellectual stimulation, the validation, the self-esteem that comes from doing a job and doing it well. Of course, what I forgot to factor in was the fact that I had never been a working mother. A working girlfriend, a working wife, but not a working Mom. And let me tell you, its a whole different ball game.

There have been times when my child has begged and pleaded with me to stay home with him. And nothing on Earth can compare to how incredibly crap that makes me feel. There have been times when I have walked in the door after a long, hard day of work and all I wanted to do is crawl into a hot bath followed by bed. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t an option because there’s a little man that has been waiting all day to tell me what he did at school, at great length. And even though I really do want to hear about it, sometimes I just can’t summon up the energy to get excited about his news. Oh the guilt!

I wish I had been more realistic with myself. I wish that I had foreseen how difficult it would be for Me to adjust and get used to being back in the working world. But I didn’t and man alive has it been hard.

There have also been things that just came at me out of left field. Like the fact that when you’re a working mum you have pretty much zero time for yourself. Because there is always someone making demands on your time. At work, its your boss and clients; at home its your child, husband and friends. So you never, ever get time to be alone and do the things that are important to you (like update your blog).

And the dear old hubby presents a whole host of issues that I never would have expected. From the minute I said that I wanted to go back to work, J has been amazingly supportive. And he has followed through on that support in the most incredible way. He has taken over the bulk of the child care,and I know that it is really hard for him because E wants to be with him all the time since I’m not home; which is making His work so much harder. He makes sure he’s cared for and manages the nanny. All while doing a full day’s work and starting a business. This cannot be easy and I am enormously grateful for all of his efforts.

Unfortunately, me going back to work has taken a serious toll on our marriage. Because as supportive as J is, he also has needs. Needs that it had been really easy and simple for me to meet for the last three years, because I was a stay-at-home mum. Taking care of my family was my main and only priority. These days, I can’t just drop what I’m doing and meet him for lunch. I have to work. Most days I can’t even take the time to have a real conversation with him, because I am attending to a child that has missed me and that I have missed just as much. And by the time I’m done with being mommy for the evening I am just too exhausted to do anything but fall into bed. And even if I do manage to stay awake, I’m stressed out and grumpy and all I want to do is watch an episode of Glee before passing out.

Plus, in many ways I am having to play referee to two stubborn males who want All of my attention. There are days when I walk in the front door and both of them start speaking at me at the same time. And both of them deserve to be heard. I Want to hear both of them. But I really can’t split myself in two, as much as I would like to. I never expected this to be so hard on my relationship. Which is crazy, when I think about it, because I should have expected J to need as much time as E and I to adjust. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

When I was a stay-at-home mom, I was the first to lament how difficult it is and how hard it is to handle the judgement from many working moms who think that stay-at-home mothers have it easy. I’d get really angry when I heard that opinion voiced and I still do to a large extent because it Isn’t easy. But I’m really starting to think that being a working mom is just that little bit harder. Because you have to deal with all the same stuff as a stay-at-home mother, with the added stress of work. And yes, the pay is better, but you really do work for that money. At home and at the office.

I wish I knew whether I’ve made the right decision in going back to work but I really don’t. Sometimes things go really well and I feel so fulfilled – I am doing what I love and regaining much of the confidence and self-respect that I had lost during my journey through post-natal depression and as an at-home mom. At other times, I feel like the worst mother and wife in the world – I have abandoned my husband and child and am the most selfish person around.

I wish I knew how to find a balance so that I felt content with my choices but I’m really starting to think that it may not be possible. And that scares the crap out of me.