Catching Up, Working Mom

This ends my third full day home from vacation. I guess I'm all caught up finally. 

1. laundry and unpacking
2. clean out fridge and refill from store
3. quickly cook leftover CSA food and get the new shipment
4. read over 300 personal and work emails
5. respond to the important ones
6. catch up on everyone else's blogs
7. write my vacation blog
8. put vacation photos up on flickr account
9. put photos on shutterfly to share with fellow travelers
10. go to work and catch up on calls, deadlines, and updates

I haven't had time to do much else these past three days. Well, technically I also went to pilates, took the kids to the beach at the park, ate snowballs while feeding the ducks at our neighborhood pier, did some gardening, and went out to eat Mexican food with some friends.  All things that I love. But it feels like I've been

 doing work forever and I'm only now able to start doing fun stuff again.  It's a weird transition.

Best moment lately: the kids have been "sleeping in" until around 8am since we've been home. 

Worst moment lately: seeing all the uneaten CSA vegetables getting limp and/or slimy in my fridge.  I should have donated that last share since Jenny had to hold it from Thursday to Tuesday.  And what I didn't finish eating before we left went bad by the time we got home. And now today I got a new shipment to be responsible for. My weekend mission: eat veggies!

Jessie wrote an interesting blog post about feeling guilty for discarding old food. I totally agree. In just a few short weeks we'll get our baby chickens and when they're hens, they'll eat our leftovers with gusto. Until then, it all goes into our compost.

thoughts of the day: Does anyone come back from vacation and find that they miss work? Because I have a super sweet job that I usually love. But I didn't miss it at all. 

I see from recent conversations and blog posts that I'm not the only one thinking about work during summer vacation.

At dinner tonight my friends were talking about when we would each go back to work. One was saying she could be an at-home mom for the rest of her life. One just returned after maternity leave and cherishes her 15 hours at work each week. I feel like my answe

r changes all the time. We're all highly educated and intelligent women, as well as loving mothers who realize that our babies won't be babies for long- we cherish the time we have with them.  

"I sometimes feel like a working mom without child care." -Jenny, in her blog. As opposed to what we might describe her as: a stay-at-home mom who also has a part-time job that she does from home (like me?).  I totally feel that way a lot.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of me at work

 because you can see I'm teaching with Cassie in my arms as if she's not even there. Is this enriching to her? Is this the best thing for me? I feel so lucky that I can have her at work with me, as though it's the same thing as being with her. It allows me to not miss a moment and sometimes the kids learn and experience new things by coming to work with me. But sometimes it feels a bit like the constant companionship of pregnancy but with the baby in my arms instead. And I worry that maybe I'm being selfish.

 

My friend Amy recently wrote a really thoughtful, great blog post about being an at-home mom versus being a working mom. And how that dichotomy is irrelevant because there's so many ways to do either well or poorly that the classifications are meaningless. Paid can mean different things, depending on how you look at it. (as Jeremiah would say, "Hello Visa? I'd like to pay this month's bills with love and quality time. Oh, you don't accept those as payment? But my wife says...")

Being at home can mean different things, depending on if you mean 'not at work but instead doing enriching activities with your kids' or if you mean 'watching my stories. kids are watching too.'

We all have different interpretations of 'quality time', 'job', and 'valuable'. Amy said it's really bullshit that people even use those classifications and then use them to tell people that they're doing it the right way.  Totally. I'm always using classifications that don't really apply just to make things easier. If anyone ever asks if I stay home with the kids or if I work, I always go into it for like 5 min because I don't think either describes my life fully.

And she said lots of other interesting things too, including how the right to (or pressure to) breastfeed fits into this idea of what a "working" mom should be expected to do or excused from doing.  (By the way, Amy is the most champion breastfeeder I've ever known and also donated a freezer full of breastmilk to a milk bank. Killer!)

My favorite part was her quote from an article saying when did "women's rights" turn into "the right to work"? Just something to think about. Since it seems like lots of you are thinking about this lately. (If you weren't before, maybe you are now?)