A Mommy Story

Many of us want to be women who can have it all. Its 2006, feminism is here and is in full swing! We can be pretty much anything we want to be! (OK, maybe not president…yet.) Women are not limited to being only stay at home mothers or having “care careers” of nursing, teaching, or secretarial work. Our horizons are broad now, and more women than ever are entering fields once thought to be dominated by men: engineering, business, science, etc. We can be married, have kids, do volunteer activities, and have a full time job at the same time.

So if I can have it all now, why do I sometimes feel like I have nothing?

This week is killing me. I just started a new half-quarter class for my nursing school requirements, and it is one of the few I can’t take online. So I’m in class four days a week, from 8:00am-12:30pm. Three of those days, I have just enough time to drive to work, where I stay until 8:00pm. Then I hurry home to deal with domestic duties, work on my school homework, deal with the insurance crap from the break-in, and maybe get some time to blog. By the time 11:00pm comes, I know I need to get to sleep, but my mind is still racing with all of the things I need to do for the next day. Eventually I drift off to sleep after midnight, only to wake at 5:00am (when Aaron wakes, even though he tries to be quiet, it often wakes me up for the day). Lather, rinse, repeat, collapse.

I hate to whine about this. After all, I’m only working a part-time job, which I know is a luxury some don’t have. There are many women out there putting in full time work, while still going to school part-time and taking care of their families. How do they do it?

The class I’m taking is only six weeks long, and after that I’ll have a little more time again. But for the moment there are three days a week when I only get to see Cordy for 30 minutes in the morning, as I take her to wherever she is spending the day. By the time I get home, she’s already in bed for the night.

It was because of scenarios like this that I quit my full time job a year ago. We had Cordy in daycare at the time, and five days a week we would have about an hour in the morning to spend time with her (while also getting ready for the day), and then an hour in the evening with her before her bedtime. Realizing that forced me even deeper into a depression that had gripped me since I was pregnant.

I’m thankful I get to spend more time with her now. But I’m still juggling all of the responsibilities I have, trying not to drop any of them, but knowing that I can’t give equal attention to everything. Eventually I’m going to lose a grip on one of them, and I’ll either drop one, or they’ll all come crashing down on me.

During times like this, I sometimes wish I didn’t have it all. Maybe life would have been easier if I was expected to be a housewife raising my children after I got married. Sure, I’d be entirely responsible for the housework, but right now I’m responsible for half of it, and my half is not doing so well at the moment.

Don’t worry, I’m not advocating a return to 1950’s Norman Rockwell America, so you can get your panties out of a bunch, Linda Hirshman. For one, I don’t think that kind of reality is viable anymore. The American economy practically demands a 2-income household today, or at the very least a large one-income household, which most people don’t have, and which many in power right now would prefer to keep that way. (Hey Congress, what about that minimum wage increase, eh?)

And I’m thankful women have all of the opportunities available to us today. We can go to school, we can be educated, and we can make the choice to work and raise a family at the same time. We can even choose to not marry and not have children! I’m thankful to be educated, and to have the freedom I do to write whatever I want and be given (hopefully) the same respect as a man. These are all Good Things, and we should be grateful to the women who came before us for carving out these freedoms for us.

But when is it all too much? What do we do when we realize we have it all, but we’re so far in over our heads that we’re drowning and there appears to be no way out? Where do we draw the line and say enough is enough – we can’t handle anymore? How do we decide what we must give up for our happiness and sanity?

The guilt I feel while writing this is tremendous. I am the modern Super Woman with family and career, and I should be ashamed for not wanting it all. I want more time to spend at the park. I want to go to Mommy & Me classes. I want time to work out and take care of myself. I want my daughter, and any other children we have, to grow up knowing that mommy can be counted on.

My mother was a Super Woman by necessity – divorced, struggling to work as much as possible to support me, torn between working extra hours and spending time with me, and often gone when I needed her the most. I don’t blame her for that, because she was making the best choices she could for us, but the thought of following in her footsteps and having to constantly choose between work and Cordy sometimes haunts me.

Just last night I told Aaron that I thought he was so much stronger of a person than me, because he can handle working full time, doing theatre in the evenings, and still make time for Cordy and me and his share of the housework. He must have more fortitude than I do. Poor man – I know he’s going to read this, and I’m sure my constant harping on this topic probably makes him feel bad, although that isn’t my intention. (The plight of men trying to have it all is an entirely different post.)

Aaron is a good provider for the family, an excellent husband and father, and probably puts up with far more from me than he should. I’m sure when we married he never imagined that once we had children I would go on an “I want to be a SAHM!” whine-fest. After all, we both planned to work, and I planned to continue my telecommuting job so I could work full time and stay home full time. But things don’t always turn out how we plan them. I can only hope that once our children are in school (or at least preschool), I will be happy to work full-time again, bring home the big bucks, and give him the freedom to quit his job to pursue his talent in theatre full-time.

In the meantime, something has to give. I just don’t know what.