Bringing Home (More of) the Bacon

As I am pulling a long night shift (catching up from playing hooky today), I am trying to feel inspired by this story about how women who work part-time in the U.K. earn more than men who work part time. (Of course, full-time working women lag behind the men in pay.) Ironically, I got my tax returns back today and found out I owe a boatload because of my increased income last year and my resulting increased self-employment tax. Would love to know if there is a similar trend in the U.S….

Childcare on the Night Shift

There are times when my “flexible” schedule makes me twist myself into a pretzel to make certain writing assignments, and those times are usually during the night. I need to cover a school board or community meeting, or attend an art exhibit or play, but obviously can’t drag the kids with me. Dad doesn’t get home until 7, factoring in his commute and hot yoga class, which is usually too late for me to make any nighttime engagements.

Now, I’m lucky that my in-laws live in the next town over so I have free, family help I can tap first, but sometimes grandma and grandpa will have the temerity to book a cruise, go to the Indian casino for some wholesome gambling, and basically have, you know, a life. So when I read about this, I was intrigued, and even halfway tempted to ditch my writing career and start one of these nighttime childcare centers in the States. (After all, so many writing jobs are outsourced to India it’d be nice to work it the other way around.)

I wonder how many part-time JAMS could use nighttime care. There’s no reason, with my job, that I shouldn’t be home regularly to tuck my kids in bed, but for those times when I’m in a pinch for a special event, I could see how it would be appealing to drop the kids off for an hour or so until dad could pick them up. So, “night care”–next big thing or nutty?

Taking Care of Business (and Baby)

The Nation’s Bryce Covert wrote a blog post about the changing face of childcare, which included a mention of a study of MBA graduates of the University of Chicago. That study shows its respondents were more likely to leave their jobs not at the first blush of pregnancy or after delivering their baby, but rather in the few years afterward, when their children are toddler or preschool age. For us JAMS (juggling-it-all moms who work part time), I was particularly interested in this section of Covert’s post:

The study also found that most weren’t actually leaving their careers. Instead, they started to slow them down, decreasing hours, shifting to part-time work, or becoming self-employed. The study observes that “almost no decline in labor-force participation is noted, and only a modest decline in hours worked are apparent in the two years before the first birth.” Those hours keep falling off in the four years after a woman has her child. In conjunction, there is a “large shift” into part-time or self-employment. That represents a huge change in the way we normally think of mothers: these days, rather than leaving work to go full-time mommy, many seem to be trying to do both.

For me, working part-time as my kids get older is ideal in part because school serves as an affordable form of child care–they are there for about 6.5 hours a day, which gives me plenty of time (ideally) to work uninterrupted. My self-employed, part-time gigs also allow me to be more involved with my kids. I can volunteer in their classrooms, or set aside after-school time to connect and talk about their day. I “dropped out” of my full-time job before my kids were born, so I didn’t make the exact same shift as the study respondents, but I certainly understand the attempt to integrate work and parenting.

Snack Break

My kids love to eat. My son will come home from school and head straight to the fridge, while my petite 5-year-old daughter invariably finds the room in her stomach to eat two “breaksets,” (or breakfasts, in Meg-speak). But as with most moms, working part time or not, the challenge is making sure what they eat is good for them. I’ve had strangers willingly share their secrets to getting healthy foods into their children, so I know I’m not alone. As I’ve mentioned before, I am always on the lookout for “helpful hints” on the home front, the better to help me juggle my work and mom tasks. Some of what I’ve accrued so far:

* Everything tastes better with a dip/sauce. Strawberries in mascarpone cream, carrots and celery in ranch dressing, etc.

* When the bible talks about manna from heaven, I believe it’s talking about tortillas. My son could care less about a turkey and avocado sandwich, but roll that baby up in a tortilla–well, he’s even learned how to make them himself.

* Make the good stuff the only stuff available. In the dark moment when I get the cries of “I’m starving” and dinner is still on the stove, put out a plate of veggies. Just don’t forget the dip.

* Make snacks different and fun. A friend of mine will make a little trail mix snack out of cashews and the candy-coated sunflower seeds from Trader Joe’s that I have totally stolen (and that I will even eat myself). And speaking of Trader Joe’s, there always seem to be some yummy options on the shelves there. While the seaweed snacks were a noble failure with my brood, I had more recent success with the new Crispy Jeju Mandarin Orange Slices, basically dried oranges that are so good it’s easy to plow through a bag quickly.

* The one thing I need to do more of: get the kids more involved in meal planning and cooking (see tortilla wraps above). My daughter keeps talking about how she wants to be a famous chef (and a famous artist, and singer, and a dancer, among other professions) so I’ve enlisted her help in making smoothies and her peanut butter sandwiches. My goal is to give each kid one day a week to choose the dinner for the family, and then have them help make it.

What snack secrets do you have?

Volunteer Opportunities

While we were going through my grandmother’s home to gather up important paperwork after her death, I came across a box on the top shelf of her broom closet. Inside was a thick stack of newspaper clippings, most of which detailed her volunteer work. It seemed as if there wasn’t an organization in town she didn’t devote time to: the local library, the Red Cross, Meals on Wheels, the American Association of University Women, and numerous cultural centers and arts groups.

She could do all of this because she didn’t work; my grandfather made it a point of pride that he provided enough that she didn’t have to take a paying job, and she had yet to go back to school to earn her master’s and doctorate degrees (the latter at age 72). So throughout the 1960s and ’70s she was busy in the community, and it was all preserved on the yellowing newspapers in her closet. (Side note: there’s a whole dissertation that could be made in the coverage of women in newspapers during that era–she was called “Mrs. Clyde Lyles” and relegated to the “ladies” section of the local papers during much of the ’60s, before making her way into the “regular” section of the paper and being called by her own name in the ’70s.)

My mom and I joked about how reading through her many accomplishments made us feel lazy, but that’s not really the right word. Any mom who is working part time in some capacity knows laziness is not an option if you don’t want a home overflowing with unwashed laundry and hungry kids. But it has made me wonder what I am missing out on by not being able to volunteer my time–and what our communities are missing out on with more moms finding that they want to give more of themselves but can’t because family and work obligations take up too much of their time.

Right now, my volunteering centers around PTA and my son’s classroom. Now, Lord knows, California public schools need all the help they can get, but I feel like I need to do something that isn’t as centered around my kids–volunteering at school feels like it’s part and parcel of being a mom. So my job now is figuring out how to broaden my horizons within an ever-narrowing space of free time.

 

A Few Housekeeping Items

When I was 13, I won the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Homemaker Award for my junior high school. If I didn’t have this newspaper clipping to prove it, I’m afraid no one who knows me would actually believe it:

Look, even the two co-winners from the other local junior highs seem to be giving me the side eye. “She obviously did not get the memo,” they are telepathically telling each other, “that future homemakers only wear Gunne Sax-label ‘Little House on the Prairie’/fourth wife in a polygamous cult-style dresses. Does she have a job interview at IBM after this?”

The point is, as a part-time working mom, there are certain things in life that are a priority to get done, and there are things that sometimes have to slide. For me, housekeeping definitely falls into that latter category. My family doesn’t live in Third World-esque squalor, of course, but we don’t have Martha Stewart-levels of sparkling domesticity, either. I am simply more adept at bringing home the bacon than the Borax.

Which is why I am always on the lookout for any housekeeping tips to make my life easier and my home look nicer. My white whale is the mastery of folding a fitted sheet, as I have haplessly tried many methods and can never achieve their nice and neat results (which probably says more about my folding skills than the methods themselves). As I press on in search of that elusive goal, I am always looking for other tips, and ideally I’ll write the occasional blog post when I come across something easy and foolproof (believe me, if I can do it, it’s foolproof).

The tip for today’s post comes from my friend Jennifer, who is a powerhouse. She’s a doctor, mom of two, and indefatigable PTA volunteer. When I was over at her house a while back, she had recently spruced up her kitchen. One of the new items was a chalkboard, and on it she had written down the dinner menu for each day of the week. Since I had painted the inside of our pantry door in chalkboard paint when we had moved in, I thought I’d try out her idea myself:

My chicken-scratch writing aside, it’s been a brilliant idea in its simplicity. With the week’s menu laid out in a central area, everyone knows what’s coming meal-wise. Knowing that I’ll be writing down weekly menus has helped me put more thought and time into planning and shopping, and less scrambling during the dinner hour as I try to throw something together. Knowing what I am cooking and how long it will take to make it helps me plan my day better. And seeing the planned meals has cut down on the dreaded “short-order cook” syndrome that I ran into when the kids would request their own dinner ideas that would invariably include some variation on cheese: “I want pizza!” “No, I want a quesadilla!” “I only want mac and cheese.” The first time I put the week’s menu up, my son looked it over and said, “I won’t eat until Wednesday.” But eat he did, and when the next week’s menu went on the board, he said excitedly to his sister, “Look, we get to have cornbread and chili on Monday!” Having a plan for dinner makes everyone happy.

So what’s in your housekeeping arsenal? Let me know and I’ll give it my Daughters of the American Revolution Homemaker Award-Winning seal of approval.

 

Is Your Job Killing You?Brought to you by Matrix Direct Term Life Insurance

Is Your Job Killing You?

Brought to you by Matrix Direct Term Life Insurance

Keeping It All Together…Or Not

For those of you who have popped in on this blog and supported its start at the beginning of the year, sincere apologies for the long delay between posts. 2012 has been a heck of a month–I have the feelings that the Mayans may have just gotten the whole end-of-the-world thing right, at the rate the year has gone so far.

In addition to the normal kids/work/PTA/home/life schedule of things, January brought the death of one of our beloved dogs, whom we had to put to sleep. I also had to plan and host birthday parties for both of my kids (at home, which necessitated thorough housecleaning not once but twice). Someone got ahold of my credit card number and made a fradulent charge and I had to close my account. And then my dear 90-year-old grandmother, who had taken ill during the holidays with pneumonia, rapidly declined, suffering through two different hospital stays before coming home to die last week.

And it’s only February. Good God, do we really have to wait for December for the world to end, Mayans?

The other day, I was talking with a friend of mine at a birthday party for our daughters’ friend. She was marveling over what had happened in my life over the past month and asked me, “How are you keeping it all together?” The short answer is, I’m not.

When my weekly 160-mile round trips to visit my grandmother turned into daily treks during her last week of life, I knew I had to pretty much throw my schedule out the window. I told my editors what was going on and got deadline extensions for certain projects. Grocery shopping got done so the family would be fed, but the laundry piled up (and up, and up). My workouts dwindled away, while my stack of magazines and books on my nightstand grew to an alarming height.

Now that life is returning to normal, I know I have a lot of catching up to do. And while I normally would be FREAKING OUT that I was falling behind, I can’t find it in me to stress. Of course, part of that is due to the emotional overload I’ve been through–I’m simply too tired to worry–but I feel like my life lesson for the year is letting go of my plans, my schedule, and branching out. I would prefer to do this without any more deaths in the family, thank you very much, but the point is, I don’t feel bad about not keeping it all together. The house is still standing even though I forgot to start the dishwasher last night, and my work will still get done, albeit a little later than normal.

I couldn’t not keep it all together without some help, though. My husband stepped into the breach, giving up his beloved hot yoga class and taking time off work to help me out. Friends offered prayers and assistance, with offers to take care of the kids so I could get more time with my grandmother. It’s a reminder to keep an eye on the big picture and invest in the things–like relationships–that really matter. And while this blog was, unfortunately, one of the things that fell by the wayside, I’m ready to jump back into it–and if there’s ever another large gap, just know that I’m busy not keeping it all together–and that I’m totally fine with that. 

 

When It Comes to Motherhood, It’s a Small World

Toight, skip the DVR or the magazine and after the kids go to bed get online and see the new exhibit, “Mama: Motherhood Around the Globe,” presented by the International Museum of Women. It’s thought-provoking, moving, and is sure to broaden your perspective on what it means to be a mother in today’s world.

The exhibit has several components–there are art galleries of paintings, drawings, photos, and other works; essays on motherhood; and profiles of women working toward improving women’s rights around the world. The exhibit is also divided into themes. The first topic covers reproductive rights and the decision to have a child (or not); future themes include “Healthy Mama, Healthy Baby,” “Mama’s Work,” and “Mama in Many Ways.”

The part of the exhibit I enjoyed the most were the “Meet the Mamas” videos, which consisted of interviews of mothers around the world. The short videos were fascinating to me–not just in their stories, but also in the universality of certain shared concerns by mothers the world over. I could relate to the mother of twins in China who was exhausted from working while she was pregnant, and the Nigerian woman who was struggling with infertility. Others were eye-opening, such as the Afghani mom of four who was forbidden by the Taliban from going to the hospital for the birth of her first child, and spoke movingly of how she worried about her children as they walked off to school because they could inadvertently set off a land mine. I’ve bookmarked the site so I can visit again, to be educated and to be inspired.

 

Happiness is a…Part-Time Job?

My timing isn’t always perfect. For instance, my kids’ birthdays are only a couple of weeks apart from each other, which means that I get to plan two kids’ parties at the same time: ordering cakes from different bakeries because one wants an ice cream cake and the other wants chocolate cake with fairies, making sure the preschool girls don’t mistakenly get the invite for the grade-school boys’ Lego party (and vice versa), etc. And not only are these birthdays close together, they are also close together soon after Christmas (present overload!) and in the heart of winter (I am making daily visits to weather.com to see if the coming rainstorm is going to wash out my son’s mini-golf party this year. Of course, after eight years of planning kids’ birthday parties you’d think we’d know better than to plan an outdoor event in January. But wouldn’t you rather have nine 8-year-old boys running around outdoors than cooped up in your house with only two Wii remotes among them? But I digress.)

Anyway, this is all to say that if I had started this blog about moms who work part-time just a few weeks earlier, I would have been all over this study when it was released, instead of catching up after the fact. But I can’t resist a post on it, as it hits so close to home.

In brief: The American Psychological Association released a study last month that found that moms with part-time jobs were happier than stay-at-home moms (full-time working moms were also found to be happier than the moms at home). Not only did the part-timers have better health and fewer symptoms of depression, but they also were just as involved in school activities as stay-at-home moms and provided more learning opportunities for their toddlers than both full-time working moms or stay-at-home moms.

Personally, I feel like happiness is in the eye of the beholder. I know women who have found great fulfillment in being home with their kids, and others who feel their job is integral to their well-being. To paraphrase Philippians, it’s about being content, whatever the circumstances. And sure, I’ve had days when I would feel more content if I got to just stay in bed and read a book, or the only “learning opportunity” I provided my toddler was a morning of watching “Robin Hood” for the umpteenth time so I could wrap up a deadline. But even though my stack of books on the nightstand goes untouched, and I occasionally get this stuck in my head, I’d say overall working part-time has been great for me. I also know that as I’ve gotten to know more moms in my situation, it’s helped me feel less alone and more understood, which can boost happiness immensely. So ask yourself, are you happy, and if so, why? And does it even have anything to do with whether you work or not?