Eating and Guilt

One of the greatest challenges that I face as a working mother is making sure my kids eat healthy. I probably have more guilt over this area than almost anything that I do as a mother. I take a lot of shortcuts that I don't really feel guilty about: throwing gifts into gift bags because I have no time to wrap presents for birthdays, even if I do feel outdone by the creative mommy down the street who color coordinates everything like a junior Martha Stewart. Or sending money for school events, rather than volunteering my free (!) time to help edit the yearbook. Or spraying febreeze on a pair of jeans that aren't really dirty, and could skip a washing that I didn't have to do the night before. But food, well that gets me every time. I was raised by a woman who cooked three meals a day, every day.
I at least try to assuage my guilt at serving my child frozen ziti by having her eat carrot sticks and applesauce along with it. I think, however, that this is the one area that I may never really get over in terms of working mom guilt. I'll just remember to slip some mashed peas into the next batch of brownies I bake.

Moms don't get sick days

One of the toughest areas of work family balance is figuring out how to handle things when one of your children is sick. I can blah blah all day about work family balance, and just get to the point where I think, "hey, this is pretty easy," and within a few days, it happens. You know the dreaded words, "mom, I don't feel so good." So now, which parent (assuming that you have another parent available) is going to stay home and cancel their work day? My kids seem to have a knack for getting sick when my husband goes out of town on business trips, so I really have no choice about staying home sometimes. What is even harder, though, is having a sick child to take care of, and then also being sick yourself! You really do understand the real meaning of "moms don't get sick days!" (And of course, on some days, dads don't either, but statistically, working mothers are more likely to take time off to be with a sick child than are men).

But, we've all had those days of being so miserably sick that you could barely lift yourself out of the bed, but still having to attend to a child who is suffering with a raging fever, or throwing up profusely, or unable to sleep all night due to a hacking cough. Or my personal favorite, having to drag my feverish and miserable child into the doctor's office for a one or two hour wait, when I'm feverish and miserable myself. Even with my husband helping out, there are going to be a certain number of hours per day that its just you and me kid. On those days, it takes every ounce of well, whatever that force is that got me up at 2am to feed a three week old baby, to get me off the couch. Yes, my priorties have changed with motherhood. I used to dream of island vacations, of spa days, and some as yet as invented, magical, calorie free Godiva chocolate. Now, I dream of the greatest bliss: having a sick day all to yourself to wallow in your own misery and sleep it all away.

Sally Quinn, Sarah Palin, the Mommy Wars, and the Hypocrisy of Some Feminists

The mommy wars took an interesting spin during this year's Presidential election. As most everyone knows, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a working mother of five children. On the surface, she seemed to have it all: motherhood and a successful political career. She earned more than her husband, who worked a flexible work schedule, and who took long-term paternity leave after the birth of their fifth child, Trig, who was born with Downs Syndrome. Sarah Palin had the seemingly perfect set up for any woman trying to combine work and family. I am not here to argue Democratic or Republican, but I will admit I really disagree with a lot of her positions. Regardless of your opinion about her politics, or how qualified she is or isn't to be Vice-President. I think about the hypocrisy in much of this debate. Palin made her choices, and it would seem that most feminists would support her achieving a prominent career while raising children. But, no the Mommy Wars must strike again. However, the attacks against the choice to have a family and a career escalated when it came out that her 17 year old daughter was pregnant. Never mind that plenty of teenage girls with stay at home moms get pregnant, people quickly attributed her daughter's pregnancy to neglect by her mother working full-time. There has been a lot of buzz questioning if Sarah Palin can be a mother and a politician. Much of this has been posted on blogs by folks that are usually feminist in their views about motherhood. However, it has also spilled over into the mainstream media. Sally Quinn appeared on air stating that Sarah Palin had too much to handle to be a Vice President and to take care of young children. Across the ocean, Liz Hunt, a writer for London's Daily Telegraph, also questioned how good a mother Palin could be if she was also Vice President. No one would have questioned the ability of Joe Biden, Barack Obama or John McCain to lead the country if one of their daughters was pregnant at 17, or if one of their children had Down's Syndrome. The double standard of gender role ideology is alive and well. Love her or hate her, if you support women's right to make their own decisions about work and family, you cannot attack her for doing what everyone has been telling us women what we can and should do. I'm just disappointed that those who claim to want to knock down barriers for women for all these years jumped on the bandwagon to help perpetuate it all over again in criticizing Sarah Palin for trying to balance motherhood and work.

Work Family Balance

A Delicate Balance is a blog about my struggles with the work family balance act. It is a delicate balance. I do not buy into the whole idea of being a perfect mother, with perfect children. I think women should give themselves a break and stop trying to live up to everyone else's expectations of what motherhood is supposed to be. I think motherhood has become a competition to see who has the child who talks first, whose child gets into the best preschool, and whose child is the best dressed. We are making each other feel like failures if our child does something average every now and then. Sadly, we also fail to see how much pressure to be the best all the time puts on children. Then, add the desire to be a competent employee to the mix, and you can definitely see that the work family balance is never easy, but it is rewarding.

The whole pressure to be the best mother ever is out there. Sometimes the competition is subtle, masked in the slightly surprised looks and the comments of, "oh, you allow your child to eat non-organic food and watch TV?" The pressure is applied by marketing departments who convince parents that they are uncaring if they do not buy outrageously expensive strollers, because an average stroller could result in some kind of a fluke stroller accident. You are not a failure at motherhood if you buy cookies instead of baking them when your child's room mother asks for contributions to the holiday party. It is also okay to have low-key birthday parties in the backyard instead of celebrations that require the planning and execution worthy of a $30,000 wedding reception.

However, these days, in addition to feeling the pressure to be a perfect mother, you also have the pressure exerted by the neo-traditionalists. Some of these neo-traditionalists are women who believe that "having it all" cannot happen in today's world, and they have joined the "opt-out revolution" and have made a choice to stay home. Others of them, such as writer Caitlin Flanagan, warn women to not get too obsessed with careers, and to make sure that they still have hot meals waiting for their husbands-or else! Yes, the neotraditionalists of this variety say we can have it all, but we better still make sure we are doing it right. Gee, I thought most men these days could make their own dinner as needed. This attitude plays right into the "second shift" mentality that was written about decades ago by Arlie Hochschild, wherein the women she interviewed held full time jobs, but also did the bulk of housework and childcare after they got home. So, sadly, despite the general awareness of this issue of women being overburdened, women are still "suppossed" to pick up the slack at home according to Ms. Flanagan, or we are not being "good" wives.

So, I find myself battered about by those who expect us to be perfect moms, and those who say we should join the opt out revolution or become a neotraditionalist of some variety. However, I feel that there is a path to be blazed in work family balance in that I do believe it is entirely possible to combine work and family successfully. So I also see myself as rebelling against the whole opt out revolution that says that women cannot really have it all, and have to sacrifice their whole career in order to have a happy family. However, I do not want to give the wrong impression that I consider this whole work family balance to be easy. And I'm not tossing away 8 years of higher education and long, long hours of work to stay home full-time. No, I am not blissfully at peace all the time about pulling off the balance. I get frazzled at times. I sometimes get too little sleep. I have pangs of guilt on occasion for not being able to bake those darn cookies, or make 14 different crafts to decorate the house at Christmas. But, I do it well enough to be satisfied with both. Most of the time.