Well, my first week as a working mom of two is over, and really, it wasn't that bad. I was out the door before the boys woke up and I was home in time for lunch. There are some little things that still need to be ironed out, like how John and I are going to get enough sleep to manage our family and our jobs, but it seems like the first week went as well as can be expected.
That said though, I'm having very mixed feelings about it. Which, yea, they don't really matter because I HAVE to work right now, so any "feelings" I'm having about it are irrelevant, yet feelings there are.
On one hand, I like working. I do. I've always liked working and I can't deny that it felt good to get up, put actual clothes on (instead of staying in my jammies well past lunch) and go do something all adult like. Plus, all the down time I had at work. I get BREAKS! 15 whole minutes during which I can do ANYTHING I WANT! I can go to the bathroom ALONE! I can buy a bag of chips from the vending machine and eat the whole bag myself and none of the chips had been sucked on by anyone! Even better, I can buy a candy bar WITH PEANUTS! I can read a few chapters of a book. And I get TWO breaks! Plus a 30 min lunch! WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL THIS ME TIME??? And at work, when I'm not on a break, all I have to do is the job I was hired to do. In this case, take payments for prepaid phones. That's all I do. I don't have to do that and take the dog out to poop. I don't have to take payments and make four separate lunches (all four of us eat different meals, I don't know why, just to be difficult I guess). I don't have to take payments and break up a fight remembering to kiss boo boos and discipline the appropriate child. I don't have to take payments while changing a diaper, stopping a child from coloring on the wall and cleaning up hairballs from the cat. It's 6 hours of easy livin'.
Of course, I get home and the house is a mess, the kids are hungry, the dog needs to pee and John can hardly keep his eyes open because he only had 4 hours of sleep and I need to hurry and make lunch AND dinner so John can have something to eat when he's at work.
One of the biggest challenges I foresee is the fact that with me working mornings and John working nights, there's no marriage time. I only know my schedule week to week and my days off can vary due to business need, so it's not likely we'll ever have whole days off together like we used to. He gets home at 1AM and I've already gone to sleep hours before because I have to get up at 3AM. No more middle of the night nookie when John gets home from work I guess.
Of course, the most important thing is that our work schedules are such that we don't need to put the kids in daycare. I don't think daycare is bad, not at all! In fact Alex would LOVE daycare. But there are a few reasons I don't want to have to resort to that. The first of which is money. Paying for daycare for two children would basically cost the same as what I'm making! So what's the point? I could try to find a cheaper daycare, but ultimately, I would want to send them somewhere I felt comfortable about, these are my CHILDREN of course. Which leads me to my second reason, which is that I'm nervous about Max's peanut allergy. No one but me will be as careful about the foods that are around him making sure he doesn't so much as LOOK at a peanut. The third is if the kids get sick, they can't go to daycare, and neither John or I have paid time off, yet we'd probably have to pay for daycare even if thekids are sick and can't go. And finally, we both work in call centers where we can't have our phones on and wouldn't know there was a problem with the kids (an emergency, or illness, etc.) until we can check our phones on a break/lunch which could be HOURS after the problem came up. All of these things make daycare a non viable option for me. The advantage of no daycare is that our kids get to spend lots of time with both their parents and that, I think, is awesome!
When I'm at work, so far I'm enjoying it, and I get all excited about the potential for learning different skills and working in other departments, getting promoted, rebuilding my career....Then I get home and I think about how I don't WANT a career, I want to focus 100% of my energy on my family. So there's a little bit of conflict going on in my own head. This will sort itself out though. Once I've been working for a while, I'm pretty sure I'll know exactly what I want to do whether it be build my career or just work the job for a paycheck.
Last night we had Chinese food and one of our fortune cookies (of course I can't find it now) said something to the effect of "In the next week you will need to work as a team" and it couldn't have been more appropriate. Our family dynamic is changing drastically. We're going from a 1950's type household of the working bread-winner Dad and the homemaker Mom to a more up to date family model of two working parents sharing the duties of child rearing and earning money equally (well, sort of, John does make more money than me). We've tried this before (during Alex's first year) and it didn't work for us, and luckily we were in a position that we could do something different. I'm hoping that an extra four years of marriage and parenting under our belts will help us adjust to our new life and be successful this time. We need to work as a team to make sure all four of us get what we need and are happy.
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