Still Drinking Coffee

It’s almost 8:30, and I’m still drinking coffee. I’m soooo tired. I’m soooo stupid.

This is worse than college: I stay up all night, I regret it the next morning, but then I do it again.

All because I am desperate for a couple hours to myself.

Which are crucial. Not enough - and often, I still am not totally relaxing - I remain “interruptible” - Ariel Gore in her book The Mother Trip provides the insight that mothers are constantly interruptible, but we need time to be uninterruptible - it was really helpful to read her words and know that my constant feeling of being on call, on high alert, just ON - 24 hours a day - is not because there’s something crazy about ME. It’s commonplace, it’s hormonal, it’s motherhood.

It’s hard to explain to others that only when my kids are sleeping - and I know they’re asleep for at least half an hour, solid - can I come close to getting absorbed in something else - yoga, intimacy, writing, things that only have a benefit when you’re fully present and not leaving one ear perked like a satellite dish toward the children’s room.

Of course, by the end of the night, when they are finally both truly asleep - usually 10 p.m. - the last thing I feel like doing is yoga, intimacy, or writing. I want to veg. I want to watch bad television. I want to sleep. I want to read cheesy blogs. I don’t want to engage in anything that requires me to be thoughtful, soulful, or energetic. I have nothing left to give at that point. My body has been a source of nourishment, caring, and entertainment since 7 that morning - it wants a break.

So my relationships are suffering - long distance ones, that require phone calls - close ones, that require quality one-on-one interaction. Not to mention, my relationship with myself. Of course, the last thing I need right now is to grow distant from the ones I love. Again, Gore advocates for mothers to make time for things like sleep and meditation and sex - but god, it’s hard.

Sleep is so boring. And meditation and sex - though both can be reviving - require focus. Can I just chill with the Netflix for a good 48 hours? With some ice cream and vino, while someone gives me a massage, does my nails, trims my hair, takes notes for me when a thought of worth actually does crop up, a little crocus amid the weedy landscape that is my untended brain?

If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Gore’s book and her site, hipmama.com. I don’t think I am at all a “hip” “mama” but it’s nice to know hip mamas exist out there. Mothers are not just saggy, docile, vapid yuppies in ill-fitting jeans driving SUVs badly. They are cool and creative and spiritual and sexual and intellectual and responsible for the human race’s various incarnations. They are not a sub-group for political pundits to try and buttonhole, nor are they a ‘they’ to be tapped and targeted by marketers.

More on that later - probably on my new blog…

When Did Work Start to Suck? (or has it always?)

Toddler and I at Hoos Brews today, the place empty, and she starts asking me for a real-time play-by-play of everything the kind woman behind the counter is doing - “Emptying the soup bowls,” I say, diligently. “Scooping ice cream, I think.”

“What she doing?”

“Making a smoothie, maybe.”

The woman notices, and erupts: “Enjoy your childhood, because this is work, and it sucks!”

“Yeah,” I say, sympathetically. “To kids it seems like so much fun.”

“You just wait,” she says.

And so I start thinking about my daughter’s play activities - imitating cleaning, imitating cooking, making things, pretend shopping… her playtime is all about going through the motions of what I do, what adults do, most of it perceived and experienced as drudgery… rote, boring tasks…

But what makes domestic chores burdens - and what makes a job feel like compulsory torture?

Part of it, I think, or most of it, is the compulsory piece - the fact that you have to shop, you have to clean, you have to Bring Home the Bacon, to survive - you don’t really have much of a choice. Most jobs require that you follow someone else’s rules and procedures, subverting your own ideas and questions, your own style your own imagination your own rhythms to a hierarchy that often doesn’t seem to deserve its power.

Would working in an ice cream/coffee shop be fun if it was play time? If you could do it fearlessly, lovingly?

Would your job be fun if you didn’t have to do it everyday? If you could do it your own way?

Or is it that people tend to be doing jobs they don’t like in the first place, at all, ever?

Because I don’t think the answer is that things are “hard.” Hard work that you love, that you find challenging and rewarding, can be a heck of a lot of fun. I loved studying for the SATs, for instance. I liked mastering the analogy portion of the test. I also enjoyed sweating while swinging a hammer to help build latrines at a women’s music festival. I also loved writing papers in school, having to think out hard issues and find the right words to explain and clarify my points.

On the other hand, I hate doing financial paperwork. I hate data entry. I like the challenge of typing fast. But I don’t like having to be on time to a 9-5 job. I like when I get to question how things are done and develop new, better ways to do them. I don’t like when I have to go through the motions someone else invented that feel slow and redundant.

Meaningful, engaging, fun work that makes one feel like a whole, worthy, respected, happy person - what does that require?

Why does my two year old love sweeping and mopping and I hate it??? And what do I do to reclaim my joy for the mundane and to help my child retain it as she ages?

Answer me, people!!

How Much in Touch Would You Want to Be?

I had the baby! And now I’m back.  So here’s  the question that got me blogging today: Would you, if you could, wear a device - like a bracelet or necklace - for each child or loved one that showed his or her heartbeat (they would be wearing sensors, of course)? So that you would know at all times that the individual in question was alive? (So you didn’t forget them in the car, or worry about the schoolbus going over the creaky bridge…)

The idea popped into my head today as my daughter went off to daycare, leaving me at home with my four-week-old infant -  I was thinking of working mothers -  the separation anxiety we often feel when leaving our kids to go to  work. But really, if such a thing existed, anyone could make use of it. And maybe some people would find it comforting. But others might find it crazy-making, evidence of total anxiety… What do you think?

A President Who Mandates Balance: Never Gonna Happen

So, this article, “Presidential Candidates Ignore Working Mothers,” says some things I agree with, like “the person who gets my vote will not relegate topics such as family leave, flexible work schedules and affordable childcare to the political back burner called ‘women’s issues.’”

Yes. If there were a candidate who didn’t do that, I would be quite happy.

In fact, I think anyone who stops calling anything having to do with families and children “women’s issues” is going to get a big kiss from me, right off the bat.

But I’m cynical. I don’t think we’re going to get a presidential candidate, female or not, who has the energy - let alone the desire - to help us all get flex time and cheap daycare when there’s issues like Iraq and global warming to be managed.

Yet, the personal is political - and the political is made up of the personal. Everything ties into everything else. Our culture as a whole is schizophrenic with regards to how we think of people in general.

Like, I was waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave at work today, and I was stretching around in the ‘kitchen area’ while waiting… and I knew, as I did this, that it was possible that I could get in trouble for not behaving ‘professionally’ in the workplace. Of course, anyone with a little humanity would forgive me a little stretching - and not just because I’m almost six months’ pregnant.

But we don’t think of ourselves as human beings with bodies and emotions that need attention. Our idea of proper adult behavior, both in and sometimes out of the office, are all about slicing off everything but our very censored mental skills. It’s capitalism, and we’re the cogs in the machine.

Yes, some companies are more generous than others. And the two women who caught me stretching by the microwave were kind and not punitive. But at the base of it, our culture sees us first as expendable workers, second as valuable human lives.

And so, issues like work/life balance and childcare aren’t going to matter until it starts to hurt companies in the only part of them that can hurt - the part where the money comes in. And how that’s going to happen… well, it’s not going to be by presidential decree, unfortunately.

Work-Life Balance: The Peaceful Revolution

Moms Rising and The Huffington Post have teamed up to create a new blog focused on work-life balance. Looks interesting. Of course, a “peaceful” revolution sounds good, nice and tame, but I have my doubts. Or my frustrations, actually. It seems to me that the problems mothers face at work link to deeper cultural issues we have as a society about family networks, work, productivity, women, etc. For a true revolution, we need a real overhaul - and that kind of thing usually doesn’t happen peacefully.

A working mother friend of mine sent me a link to that ‘what wives need is wives of their own’ article that came out in August, and our consequent discussion about how even the nicest husbands still don’t do the fundamental toilet-scrubbing, clothes-monitoring, tedious domestic crap that wives tend to do (mostly because they know it needs doing) was a bit tense. Life must continue. We can’t abdicate our responsibilities in protest. We can only have so many battles with spouses (and bosses, etc.) to try and gain equality in the large and small tasks of our lives.

I’m re-reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a story about two “Free Women” who never remarried after their divorces - in the 70s - and it’s interesting to think about how different their struggles are to define themselves in a different era, “free” from the traditional structures…

I guess I feel like my generation is trying to do everything - we want to be “free” but we want family, too - we have all this feminist background - even if we don’t call ourselves feminists - it’s not that we want to be superwomen - we just want a healthy normality -

I look directly at my mother in law - who does everything for her husband, and bitches at him for not knowing how to do anything, but then never requires him to fend for himself - a vicious cycle that has turned her bitter and vicious. She’s the same way with my husband - she does everything for him when we visit, but then lambasts him for being helpless - I’m not trying to blame her, but her seething anger about the role she plays - and refuses to vacate - is suffocating. And it means that there’s a lot of work for us to do emotionally around our domestic life. I don’t want to become her - I don’t want to grow old with resentment because of the choices I make - or feel I was forced to make. This is what I want to be free from.

Anyway - just my rambling, disorganized thoughts. Domestic life and work life and social life - sometimes figuring out the balance within each and between each, how we define ourselves and each other, within them - it’s not as easy as just meeting deadlines and picking up the kids on time (not that that is easy!)…

Friends at Work: Possible?

While walking the dog tonight, I suddenly got the Blog-Gag - the delayed reaction of horror in realizing that it’s quite possible the coworker who’d hurt my feelings today will read the post and damn me to hell. God, I’m so stupid. Not a savvy blogger. I should know better - my mother found my blog and wrote scathing e-mails I didn’t have the energy to read about our religious differences - and I didn’t even know she knew what “Goggle” (sic) was. I am dumb.

The thing is, if we were just friends, not work friends, I’d be able to ask her directly about her behavior, instead of just writing about it. I’d ask if she were mad at me and she’d probably say no but if she said yes then we’d hash it out and then either stay fast friends or go our merry ways.

But we work together. Closely. And we have a really good working relationship - we agree often and disagree constructively, we chat playfully, we side with each other helpfully. We get along so well, I’ve long harbored a desire for the two of us to go off into the sunset together, starting our own business, writing books together, making money and becoming famous together - having fun along the way.

But attempts to extend our work friendship haven’t gone entirely well - mostly because we’re very much alike - sensitive and opinionated and sometimes too easily hurt. We’re like sisters in that way - except we don’t have the blood relationship linking us beyond our petty differences - we have work, which doesn’t so much link us beyond differences so much as make them big and insurmountable, possibly pitting us against each other - if we let them.

I know there are women out there who make friends at work and keep them through the years, both in and out of the office. Same with the old office romance - I’ve had one (it’s still going on, sans office!). So I know it’s possible. But it’s hard. At least it’s hard for me. Friendships are hard, work makes them harder, and it’s difficult sometimes to know how to keep your distance - if you should keep it - when your cubicles are right next to each other.

I do love my coworker, by the way.

And not just because she could be reading this.

Getting Along With NonMoms at Work

So, it’s not easy when, in the middle of Labor Day weekend, your little daughter starts vomiting and all the plans of fun in the fading August sun dissipate down the toilet along with anything you try to feed the poor little thing. And then Tuesday shows up, the girl is still too ill to go to daycare, the dad has pressing job matters he can’t avoid, and there’s another eight hours of time off from your job burned - and there’s the cookies you were supposed to bake for department x as part of a group effort with your coworkers still existing on the Platonic plane of ideals - not made.

You tell your boss, and then you let your coworker know, too, just to make sure she knows you’re not going to be there.

“My daughter is ill, ” you say.

“What am I going to do about these cookies I made?” she asks, bitterly, resentfully, - pissed.

No “gee, sorry, hope she gets better” from this coworker. No sympathy. And maybe that’s right - she doesn’t have kids, doesn’t really want to have kids, and has expressed before that she’s not going to let me get any kind of special treatment in terms of needing to hand off overtime work to her because I have a child I have responsibility for - oh no. She isn’t going to let anyone get away with that.

So I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess - but it made me want to scream - and it made me want to cry. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I chose to have children - I’m happy to have my daughter, believe me. The fact that all of my days off go to being with her when she’s sick - no more ’sick days’ when I just need time to myself to decompress - that doesn’t bother me. The fact that I have to constantly weigh my priorities and try to prove that I’m still a good little worker even though I’m exhausted and worried and strained about my kid or my pregancy - well, I don’t expect special treatment.

But I guess I do expect some courtesy - and I don’t expect to feel guilty or resented because I have an ill child. I don’t expect a non-mom to understand exactly, but - but I do wish it were easier to explain that it’s not that I have it easy - not at all - and some niceness would be - well, much appreciated.

It’s hard to be in a team at work where I’m the only mother of the lot - sure, my boss has kids, and he’s very understanding about the challenges - but he’s also the boss. He doesn’t have anyone to answer to the way I do when he’s got to make a decision between work and family. And he doesn’t have coworkers giving him the evil eye - or the evil phone conversation - when he’s got a family crisis taking over his ability to be a perfect coworker.

I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself - all I care about, when it comes down to it - is easing the misery of my baby.  Still, I’m stressed - nothing is more scary to me than feeling judged by bosses and coworkers for logistical things I can’t control instead of for my job performance. Sigh.  If only I could work from/at home - all the magazines with their articles on working mothers make it sound so easy!

Pregnant in the Office

Yesterday I found out one of the women in my office is also pregnant and due five days before me. This is great, except that:a) She is super skinny, and this is her first, so while I already look like a balloon, her “bump” is barely visible

b) She has super great clothes, and will now have super great maternity clothes, and I will not be able to get away with looking crappy without being in stark contrast to her.

These are perhaps superficial contrasts, but come on, everyone’s going to see the two of us and make judgments, and I’m going to feel ridiculously fat, old, and ugly next to her. Boo hoo. Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself.

3) Working and being pregnant and a mother is - surprise! - A LOT of work. All I want to do is sleep, eat, puke, and cry.

I am looking forward to Mom’s Night Out, March 2008! Yay!