How long can I keep all these balls in the air?

I always knew I’d stay home with my kids.  I knew it when I played Barbies as little girl and when I played “house” with my pretend husband (Rob Lowe) and my pretend kids (Tracy and Lisa).  Even throughout college and graduate school, as I diligently earned high grades and prepared for a life in the workforce, the entire time I knew that when I started having babies, I’d leave my job as a Speech-Language Pathologist and become a stay at home mom.

I’m lucky, in the sense that my youthful assumptions and dreams came true.  Life circumstances were such that I did have the option of staying home if I so chose, my husband supported my decision to stay home and we could afford to live on one income.  For the past (almost) six years it has worked for our family.

I have held some small online jobs these last few years, working no more than a few hours a week. It’s been the type of work that could be done around my schedule.  I’ve never had to give a second thought to scheduling doctor/dentist/hair appointments, the house was cleaned on a semi-regular basis, and laundry was washed, folded, and put away in the same day.  I even lunched with my girlfriends on days the kids were in school. This past summer, though, everything changed when I started two new jobs.

One of my jobs is this one right here, where I write about my life online.  Not a bad gig AT ALL, but I can’t blow it off and decide that I just don’t feel like writing anything and instead I’m going to take my kids to the park and out for Icees just because it’s a sunny Monday afternoon.  My other job is a business I’m starting that currently makes me exactly zero dollars, but requires at least ten hours a day devoted to building it so that someday it will make more than zero dollars.  That previously flexible schedule has suddenly become awfully rigid.

I’m a work at home mom now and instead of being on top of things, I feel like all I can do is put out the fires as these rise around me.

It’s not like I ever had any romantic notions about what it would be like to work from home.  My father owned a business that he ran out of our home when I was growing up and I knew from watching him that working from home doesn’t mean a life of leisure and spontaneous outings.  He worked HARD ten hours a day or more at least five days a week and three or four hours every weekend.  I knew this, yet I’m constantly surprised when I have to schedule life in between my work responsibilities.

My house is in shambles as I type this.  I can see half of a Buzz Lightyear costume on the kitchen floor surrounded by crumbs.  The dryer buzzer has been beeping off and on for the past ten minutes. Clutter nearly covers my kitchen counters, bills, magazines, junk mail, library books, and dirty dishes. My daughter is watching another episode of SpongeBob even though I told her an hour ago that I’d stop working so we could play.  But instead of closing the computer, I’ve had to answer three important work-related phone calls, reply to even more urgent emails, plan some marketing strategies, research upcoming work related activities I need to write about, all while I’m trying to write this.

I look at my to do list and instead of shrinking, it grows.

This work-life balance is not some newfangled discovery that I’ve made.  How on earth would shows like Dr. Phil and the Today Show have survived without the strife of working mothers to discuss? But this switch from stay-at-home to work-at-home mom is new to me and the change has been HUGE for our family.

“You’re probably going to have to give something up,” I’ve been told by several people.  Maybe they’re right, how long can I really work this many hours a day?  Can I be honest, though?  It hurts my feelings when I’m told that I need to give something up. Would my husband be told that he needed to give something up to balance his job and family?  This assumption that something’s gotta give makes me feel like the work that I’m doing isn’t “real” enough or that they they think I’m somehow failing at my responsibilities as my kids’ mom–even though I know for a fact that the people who’ve made this suggestion have done so because they are trying to help.  Logically I know that it has nothing to do with my abilities or lack thereof.  I know that I read into this suggestion because of my own insecurities about my new role as a working mother.

I want so badly to be able to do it all.  Meals cooked from scratch, never missing an appointment, having a clean (enough) house, I want those things.  But I also want to build my business and write and have responsibilities that don’t have anything to do with homemaking.

I don’t know how to adjust and gain my footing, but I do know that I need the support of my husband, my kids, my family, and my friends.  I need for people to understand that I am working so hard for something I want and I’m trying to do that the best way I know how.

(photo source)