Not Truly Ready for Fall

This week feels like fall. The temperatures are a bit cooler and the crickets are chirping louder lately. Some of our maple tree leaves are turning orange but they always turn early.

It was a tough day with the kids. So I was constantly looking for something to keep them occupied. I get tired of playing "you be a person and I'm a kitty/doggie."

I had a bag of apples that needed to be used up so the perfect project was to make an apple crisp. I intended to have the kids help me peel and cut the apples using our apple peeler-corer-slicer. It looks like this:

The kids have had a lot of fun with in the past. However it wasn't working right so I had to abandon it much to Big Bro's chagrin. I started peeling apples with a knife while explaining that he's too little to use knives. He told him he should go play until I'm ready to start mixing things.

(Photo by Big Bro with lots of filtering because the original was so dark)

As he often does in his four-year-old way, he persisted that he really, really, really wanted to help. After a couple minutes my smart mom hat came on and I realized the apples are soft enough that they could be cut with a butter knife. So I peeled pieces of apple and gave them to him to cut into chunks.

He loved it. He was really good at cutting the right size chunks and was very exacting in his approach.

Lil Sis got in on the action by pouring in the sugar, then she and Big Bro stirred the apples, cinnamon, and sugar together.

I made the crumble and let them help put the last bits of it on top of the apples in the pan. They enjoyed taste testing it too.

I'm not convinced that I'm really ready for fall and cold weather, but it was a great project to pass the afternoon, and the apple crisp tasted delicious.

Quitting at being a SAHM?

I was browsing my email this past weekend and saw a job announcement. I read it out of habit and was surprised that it sounded pretty darn perfect for me. I told my husband and he said you should apply, it just seems like such a great cross-section of all your experience.

But it's full-time, I replied. What about the kids? It could be a great job but the timing is still all wrong. We would have to do the daycare thing and that would be a huge transition for us. 

Yes, but we could potentially send them to our neighbor's daycare. It just seems like it could be a good job for you.

Source: 

http://www.secureteen.com/working-mom/working-mom-vs-stay-at-home-mom-what’s-best-for-kids/

I've been torn ever since seeing that job ad. It really does seem like a great position. My husband's excitement about it added to my feeling that I should apply. It could still be a longshot since I have been out of work for so long. But what's the harm in trying?

Then I started feeling anxious. What if I got the job? It would be a holy sh** kind of moment....Can I really get on board with the day care option after 4 years as a SAHM? Only seeing my kids for maybe 2 hours a day on weekdays before bed. Would they revolt? The family lifestyle changes it would force didn't sound appealing. Then again it was the most appealing job posting I've seen in a long time. But, I've already been out of the workforce for 4 years. If I wait 3 more years until Lil Sis is in kindergarden that will be 7 years out of the workforce! My chances will just get worse and worse in the future the longer I stay away.

...It's a fitting job. It could be a bridge back to working.  I should apply. Chances are I won't get it anyway, afterall I've been out of work for 5 years. Then again I should just see what happens. It will only be harder to get a job the longer I've been out. But what if I did get it? What then? What about the kids? No, don't bother applying the time isn't right--but....

Circular thoughts, over and over.

Monday morning I was driving in the car and flipped to a new radio station and heard a song with lyrics including:

We wish our weekdays away 
Spend our weekends in bed
We Drink ourselves stupid and work ourselves dead....

But we’re all slowly dying in front of computers....

(Scare away the Dark by Passenger http://youtu.be/0hVQ2jjDpss)

The song was a little sappy, and not entirely applicable to my situation, but it cleared my angst (temporarily). Did I truly want the job? Not now while my kids are so little. Especially since it's full time and does require some evenings and weekends as do many planning jobs. Why this job? Is it really so perfect? Why am I so worried about not having a job? Because you need a career to be successful. You need an occupation, money, titles and promotions to be considered worth something. I don't want to be left behind. How will I rejoin the workforce when the time is right?

However... Right now I have something that many people wish they could do. To have the freedom and the choice to not be tied to a desk and computer 40+ hours a week. To be home with my kids, snuggling on the couch reading books at 2:00 on a weekday afternoon.

The realization hasn't totally stopped the circular thoughts, but it has helped. I don't want to quit being a SAHM. Sometimes I just want it all, and you can't. At least not all at the same time.

Work/Family Balance

I am a stay at home mom. That is established. I stay home with the kids while my husband goes to the office for work. Between the hours of 8am and 6pm I am a playmate, a teacher, an entertainer, a disciplinarian, a cook, a server, a nurse, a maid, a chauffeur.

Once the kids are in bed I am a blogger for this personal blog, and the BVT Moms Blog. I get to have a voice on motherhood and environmental issues. I get to have a voice in the world outside my home.

As of this January I am also a co-founder of a Vermont chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby (VT CCL). Now I am an organizer and a leader. Someone with a clear stake in starting an organization and making sure it succeeds. It's thrilling and energizing to be part of a "start up" on an issue I'm passionate about. It's outside the mommy box entirely, which is refreshing.

The blogging and the organization start up have to occur after the kids are in bed. Their bedtime has crept back later and later, therefore my prime blogging and organizing hours are often between 9pm and midnight.

It's late, and sometimes when I'm done, I'm buzzing with excitement and it's hard to go straight to bed. After working extra on a particular post or after an exciting conference call about the VT CCL I can be awake until 1am or later trying to settle enough to sleep. The kids always get up at 7 and sometimes earlier than that, which makes for awfully short nights.

What's my work/family balance? I often burn the candle at both ends and sacrifice sleep, as lots of mother/parents do I'm sure. Of course there are nights I crash early or fall asleep as as I wait for my kids to nod off. 

For now, it works. In a year and a half Big Bro will be off to kindergarten and Lil Sis will be entering preschool. That will mean 3.5 hours, 3 days a week to myself when they are both at school. I anticipate that it will feel like a luxury to write and organize during the day.

      

 

Surprise Contact From My Grad School Professor

On Friday evening I got an email from one of the Town Selectmen. He was forwarding an email that was received via the Town's website contact form. The email was from one of my graduate school professors. He had Googled me and found that I serve on my Town Planning Commission. The professor was looking for me because he had "some questions about our past work." He included his email and phone number and requested I contact him.

I was surprised, and a bit flattered. But then I started to panic a bit. What did he want to ask me about? Would I remember anything about it? Could I sound intelligent on the phone even though it's been 6 years since I graduated, and 5 since I worked in transportation planning? I would have to fess up that I, a former "transportation scholar" who received funding from my university to study transportation, was now a stay at home mom in a tiny town and not doing anything transportation related.

"Did he find you on LinkedIn?" my husband asked. LinkedIn is another thing that makes me panic a little. Yes, I joined years ago when I had a professional job, but LinkedIn doesn't serve much purpose for people who don't work for an income. It's a point of embarrassment to think that old colleagues might find me on there and see that I have become irrelevant in my field. Or so my panicked brain told me.

So I emailed him, the phone would be too nerve-wracking, plus it was dinner time here on the East Coast and not far from the kids bedtime either. It was a very congenial email exchange. Turns out my old professor just was looking for a file from that project I had helped him with. Thanks to the never ending storage provided by my gmail account, I still had our original correspondence on the project which included the original database he was desperately seeking. He was grateful to find the database file, and told me about how much his kids had grown and made the usual "it goes by so fast!" kind of remarks. He was glad to see I was still involved in planning. He also mentioned that thanks to a generous donation my school had been renovated from a dumpy little building into something quite nice, and they had a full time staff person to help students and alumni find internships and jobs.

Thanks for the tip, Professor! I just may do that sometime in the next few years. But for now I'm good where I am, despite any insecurities I may have about not having a position in our economic system at this point in time.

 

Me in grad school, wrapping up a conference I organized.

Me in my current job

Poem for an Old Dishwasher

Today we got a replacement dishwasher, brand new!

Sorry, but I have to say:  it wasn't me, it was you.

I will not feel sorry, I will not feel sad.

Yes, your washing technique was really that bad.

Running empty washes with bleach to keep you moderately clean 

just didn't feel right, know what I mean?

I've waited and wished for this day to come.

Does that mean I've gotten boring? That I'm no longer young?

But with two kids to feed and lots of dishes to wash--

You just couldn't cut it, so you got the kibosh.

Your sleek replacement is here. It's quieter too.

It does its job wonderfully, making dishes look new.

Old

New

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On Becoming a Stay at Home Mom

If you had asked me as a teenager what would I be doing with my life by my late 20s/early 30s, stay-at-home motherhood would not have come up. Discussions in my household growing up included things like becoming a flight attendant as a way to travel and see the world. My parents lived an international life between Germany and the US for their first several years together. We traveled to Germany and other places as a family when I was a kid. As a teen I grabbed every chance to travel more independently: a high school exchange to Germany, an environmental education trip to Kenya, and a semester traveling and camping throughout the Southeastern US with the Audubon Expedition Institute. I imagined this pattern would likely continue into adulthood.

Then a funny thing happened. I fell in love with a local boy. I really got to know and fell in love with the region that as a teen I only imagined leaving and trading it for bigger and better, more worldly places. Even so, my local boy and I started traveling together (St. Croix, Ireland, Paris). We moved cross country together, to Los Angeles, to pursue a masters degree and a law degree. These adventures, though great fun, only made us appreciate our little corner of Vermont more and we knew we wanted to come back.

Upon moving back, with a fresh masters degree (in urban planning) in hand, I married my local boy. We got jobs with steady incomes. Jobs that allowed us a new adventure of buying a ramshackle house and totally renovating it. We worked all day at our jobs, ate a quick takeout dinner in the conference room of my office, then went to work on our house in the dark, and freezing cold winter temperatures for a few hours each night and every weekend. It was quite romantic actually.

When the house was done we decided we wanted a baby. But by then it was fall of 2008 and the Great Recession started. I lost my job. I  looked for new work but was conflicted. Conflicted about interviewing for jobs I didn't know if I would keep because I didn't know what kind of mother I wanted to be. My mother was a stay at home mom, and so were many of my friends' mothers growing up, so it was a familiar path. Yet, I had just recently gotten my degree and felt like I had better use it. The economic crisis wasn't making finding work easy so I found a part time, temporary job while I was pregnant. When my son was born it just felt right to be home with him. I didn't want anyone else raising him. I didn't want to miss all his firsts. The decision was made.

I have been a stay at home mom for 3 years now and it has been so rewarding to watch my son and daughter grow. Difficult and grueling at times too, but worth it. I have tried to always keep one foot in the professional world. I did some consulting for a former employer, and I also serve on my town's planning commission and zoning board. There are times that I worry about re-entering the workforce, will my skills still be relevant, who will hire me after so many years of "not working." There have been times when I'm the only stay at home parent in the room and I do feel less valued because I don't have my own paycheck and any office stories I have to add to the conversation are 4 years old. Still, I wouldn't trade this time with my kids. The memories we are making are absolutely priceless. A free-spirited friend of mine from college told me "We are more than what we do to earn our daily bread." I think this is true. I have a very fulfilling life raising my children, and a very important job guiding them to be conscientious, intelligent, and caring individuals. There will still time for another professional career someday, and time for family travel adventures.

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