Remember the six month itch I had a couple years back? Well, it’s back, but it’s for real this time and it could be called the My Baby’s Going to Be One Soon and I’m Starting to Freak Out About Having a Career Again Itch.
Or, as I’ll refer it to, The Limbo Rock. (Also, that’s a lot shorter).
I’m in limbo here, people.
I’m craving work. Like real, paid work. Yet, I don’t want to give up some of the flexibility I have by being home with my children.
I’m so torn. Many of my friends whose kids are older tell me to cherish my baby. And so I’m doing that. But they are also the ones who’ve managed to carve nice, flexible careers. And, they somehow managed to do it when their children were young.
So I feel like now’s the time. The baby is almost a year. (I know this isn’t “old,” but it’s not like newborn madness.) I have that ITCH. I want to do more.
But I want the cuddles when I want them. I want to be able to pick up my son from school and his activities. I want to be there for bedtime.
Do I give that up for a taste of an office? A meeting? A *gasp* paycheck?
I’m partly sure I do.
But, there’s the part of me that is worried once I get under that limbo stick I’ll fail and fall down.
I’m doing the Limbo Rock.
This is one of my favorite posts by my good friend Wired Momma. What the h is wrong with being a typical wife? According to her, nada. I think she nails it when she talks about how it’s easy to be a wife when we choose to leave our careers on our own terms. For those of us lucky enough to have a choice of whether or not we want to work, when we can exit when we please, it’s rather easy to embrace a typical wifely role. We have the freedom to be a wife/ mom on our own terms.
But then, it’s easy to forget that some of us out there don’t have this choice or struggle with the choice.
And, it’s also easy to forget sometimes that for us to be happy being a wife means that someone else has had to give up something.
The husband. The husband who makes it all possible for the “happy housewife” to exist.
But why would the media ever want to cover that angle?
When Kathryn Bigelow smashed through Hollywood’s glass ceiling at this month’s Oscars, she took with her years of women directors being pigeon-holed and typecast as directing “chick flicks.” As Manhola Dargis points out in her savvy article yesterday on the topic, Bigelow told Hollywood what’s what and silenced the critics. Yes, there will always be the Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephrons and Drew Barrymores who will direct lighter fair, but Ms. Bigelow showed all of us that no matter what Hollywood thinks or reports about female directors, there’s now room in the club for women to direct more “manly” type films, if you will.
Flash to another section of the NY Times yesterday and you’ll find another outlet of the media doing just what Hollywood did to female directors up until this year - typecasting mommy bloggers as doing anything and everything to promote their blogs and make money. The article is snarky and sassy and makes it seem that all we’re out here doing is shilling for baby wipes at the expense of taking care of our kids.
The”mommy blogger“ behemoths have rightly stated their opinions online and I care not to rehash the debate of who said what, if you’ve chosen to work at home or at an office or out of your car or whatever. I just wanted to point out that even if it took 82 freaking years (can you even imagine blogging that long?), Ms. Bigelow rose above the “chick flick” female director fray and did something powerful and magical with her movie.
And we have to remember that we can too. The media can write its sensational headlines and try to pit mom vs. mom, blogger vs. blogger (or both), but as long as we write about what we believe in and do what we like with our sites, no one can mess. Eventually we will break through the clutter and be seen for more than the dirty diapers we journal about on occasion.
I just hope I’m alive to see it.
by selfmademom on February 16, 2010 · 1 comment
Son: “Mommy, why did such and such (name witheld) leave our class earlier this year?”
Me: “Well, she quit.”
Son: “What’s quitting?”
Me: “Hmmm… (realizing I probably shouldn’t use that term loosely around an almost four-year-old.) It’s when you decide not to do something anymore. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. Like, remember I used to work? Remember I showed you my office downtown? But then I quit my job to stay home.”
Son: “Yeah… you quit because you wanted to be a mommy. And be around kids.”
Me: “Yeah, something like that.”
If only it were so cut and dry, right?
Two prominent bloggers have attacked the issue I wrote about last week again this week. I think we’re all saying the same thing although since I don’t consider myself a WAHM because I don’t feel my pithy freelancing really counts as that, I can’t vouch for all the attacks on the WOHM vs. WAHM. I still think it it’s all silly and hope one day we can just put the freaking labels away and stop writing about this and share a laugh about how hard it is to be a mom in general over a cocktail. I’ll take a momtini extra dry.
The end.
I think I forgot to mention in my last post that, uhm, last week I was offered a full-time job. That’s right. A chance to strip off the lululemon, a reason to dry my hair every day (although that is debatable) and most importantly make me some money.
Of course I turned it down instantly.
I’m sure admitting that has got to be every career coach’s worst nightmare. The job was interesting, it actually paid me money, and would have been a good fit. A good fit, had I not been five months pregnant and in no mental condition to take on a full-time job. Seriously, the next time someone asks me for career advice I’m just going to laugh in their face. Apparently the only thing I’m good at these days is avoiding any type of work commitment.
That being said, sometimes I do have a regret about my decision. But only when I think about the potential money I could have been making. One thing I miss about not working is not having my “own” money. The kind where a certain someone doesn’t care if I come home with that new pair of lululemon pants. Of course when I worked all of my “own” money was sort of fake because I enevitably had to have my husband bail me out at tax time due to a lack of me understanding anything about that “withholding” column, or whatever. But it was easier to get away with it.
Or maybe it was because the economy was better.
Whatever the case, the money would never be worth me leaving my envious and rather comfortable position of staying at home, but it did make me pause.
For about half a second. My old lululemon pants are just as cute as the new ones I’ve seen.
