babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
It's all happening.
There’s a particular pressure we Americans feel, I think, to be happy all the time. To prove to others that we’re “just great!” and that nothing, no nothing gets us down. Maybe that’s one reason why so many people are clinically depressed in this country – because they feel like they need a doctor’s excuse in order to be unhappy for a while.
Not only do we feel like we have to feign happiness at all times, but we have to appear productive all the time, too – especially in a place like New York where everyone is either an obsessive overachiever or a chronic underachiever trying to tap into their blocked potential.
So my heart began to sing and my head began to nod in agreement when I read Glennon Melton’s essay Don’t Carpe Diem over on Huffington Post. In it, Melton admits that (of course!) she doesn’t love every second of every minute of her life, and more importantly, she doesn’t feel pressure to.
While describing the mind-numbing chaos of every day parenting, Melton suddenly turns and says: Continue reading »
Sisters are doing it for themselves, but they want help from their employers.
As I noted earlier, Working Mother magazine recently interviewed nearly 4,000 mothers nationwide to determine what their worries and needs are. We know now that both mothers who work outside the home and stay-at-home moms carry the weight of retro expectations on their shoulders when it comes to their domestic life, but what about life outside the home? What do career-oriented mothers want and need in order to both flourish in the workplace and feel as if they’re providing fully for their children?
According to Working Mother, the 5 most important benefits for working moms are: Continue reading »
What's the one thing working mothers and SAHMs worry about? You won't believe it.
Working Mother magazine released a study this morning called What Moms Choose: The Working Mother Report, “a survey of 3,700 mothers nationwide reveal[ing] surprising insights into the differences and similarities between moms who work outside the home and moms who stay at home, as well as the factors that influence their decisions.”
As mothers, we’re all aware of the hot-button issues that make us feel divided and judged by our peers, and working vs. staying at home is certainly near the top of the list. Each lifestyle choice brings with it its own set of guilty feelings, sense of inadequacy and source of pride (sometimes verging on arrogant righteousness). So, besides caring for our children, what do working mothers and stay-at-home mothers have in common? It turns out, there’s one thing both groups of women worry that they’ll be judged on, and it’s honestly so hilariously, ridiculously sad and retro that you’ll laugh when you read it.
The one concern both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers have in common is… Continue reading »
Being a working mom makes me a good role model for my daughters
Being a working mother feels like a constant compromise. When I’m at work I’m distracted by my kids. When I’m with the kids, I always have work at the back of my mind. I’m never fully in one world or the other. Working and parenting are a tightrope walk: give too much to either, and the other will fall apart.
As a writer, I work at home, at a job with flexible hours. I can work at 1 a.m. if I need to, and I often do. I can work for fifteen minutes and then take an abrupt break because the kids are fighting over whose turn it is at the piano. I can work while they eat a snack. I can do some parts of my job while hanging out with them at the playground.
In some ways that makes my job ideal for working motherhood. In others, it makes the juggling act even harder. When I can always be working and always be parenting, the line between the two blurs. It’s hard to show up for either work or parenting with my undivided attention.
I’m sure it’s all worth it though. This conversation with my daughter explains why.
Tina Fey has always been pretty popular with mothers. But her article in the New Yorker, “Confessions of A Juggler”, kicked her a few notches closer to sainthood. In that piece, excerpted from her just-released book, Bossypants, Fey articulated the agonizing struggle between our jobs as women with careers and our priorities as mothers of children. She did it with spot-on clarity. And a lot of really good jokes. For weeks, it seemed like every mother I know was talking about that story, and feeling grateful to Tina Fey for finally getting her agony, and ours, out there on the page.
Last night, news broke that Tina Fey is pregnant. So does that mean the agony is over? Continue reading »
Balancing work and motherhood? Get real!
If there’s one thing working moms, stay-at-home moms and every other sort of moms can agree on, it’s that work-life balance is a joke. Too often, the joke’s on us.
Today, the Strollerderby team was thinking about bringing you a list of tips on how to balance work and motherhood. Problem: none of us know how to do it.
Unless we’re Carolyn, who practices mother-daughter yoga while her assistant types for her.
At the end of the day, we’d love to have a strong sense of professional accomplishment while we’re reading bedtime stories to our clean, fed, smiling children. But let’s get real. That balancing act never quite happens as planned. So we may as well embrace the chaos. Forget trying to balance and celebrate your natural, disheveled self!
Here are our top 11 tips for unbalancing work and motherhood: Continue reading »
Can You Resist the Parent Volunteer Vortex?
This school year, will you be sucked into the (cue scary music) “The School Volunteer Vortex”?
On her blog Late Blooming Mom, 45-year-old working mother Holly Sklar describes her initiation into public school volunteering and the onslaught of all these Uber Volunteer Moms who are clamoring to suck her into her ranks. Two weeks into her kids’ kindergarten year, and she’s already fed up.
In a blog post highlighted on the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, she writes:
I have filled out dozens of forms from the [parent booster] club, not to mention the kids’ teachers, all to do with what activities I can volunteer to be a part of, in the classroom and outside of it, ranging from re-shelving library books to driving kids to and from field trips to helping to organize and run any of the myriad of fund-raising events and activities that occur throughout the year. I’ve been told of mandatory commitments per child at the school, e.g., every family has to work one traffic safety shift, at pickup or drop-off, per child, during the year. I have been invited to no less than four volunteer events, and I’ve already missed two of those. I’ve been asked to contribute the “suggested” amount per child – and nothing that you can pay in ten installments is cheap – because, though a public education is free, a great one is not — especially nowadays. Every day brings more mail in the kids’ backpacks, offering additional ways to get involved.
If I get another piece of paper from the parent association, it’s quite possible my head is going to explode.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
17