You CAN Have it All (Sort Of)

It’s been a frustrating winter to say the least.

This winter is providing our eighth school snow delay, on top of ten snow cancellation days. Which is impressive, when you realize my kids are only in school together 3 mornings a week. For someone who relies on those meager hours to squeeze in a full week’s worth of work, it’s anxiety inducing to say the least. Let’s do the math: 11 snow days plus 7 school delays equals A WHOLE LOTTA VODKA in my coffee cup at 10am.

I kid, I kid. (not really)

I’ll admit it. I thought I’d found the perfect balance between working and staying home with my kids. The bags under my eyes may have warranted their own area codes but I’d truly thought I’d finally achieved the elusive ‘balance’ for which every mom seems to be searching. Not only do I get to stay home with my kids, but while they’re at school or sleeping I can pursue my other passion– authoring this blog, a dream come true– and make it my job! The best of both worlds, right? Until Mother Nature (who *should* know better, she’s a mother, for goodness sakes) throws a polar-vortex wrapped wrench into the whole works.

Screeeeeech. Hold up here. Not only have I been tipped off balance, it’s as if I’ve been shoved with both hands off a balance beam face first into a pile of slush. And not the yummy alcohol slushies of my youth. I’m talking the dirty, freezing, month-old slush that covers every. thing. in. sight.

My children haven’t had a full week of school since the beginning of December. Working while they’re home is impossible, because I either need to ignore them (um, no), put them in front of non-stop videos (which would break their brains forever and it would be ALL MY FAULT), or try to type a complete sentence while my 3-year-old engages me in the following conversation twenty times a day:

Bee: Mommy! Mama! Mom! MOMMMM! Mommy!

Me: Yeah, buddy?

Bee: Guess what?

Me: What it is, bud?

Bee: BUM BUM!

As my frustration rises up from my stomach to the throbbing vein in my forehead, I can’t help but look at his hazel eyes and realize he’s still so little. Any minute now I’m going to blink and he’ll be in kindergarten, and then soon after giving me heart attacks as he takes his driving test. Hearing the word BUM eleventy billion times a day may not have been how I imagined motherhood, but I didn’t count on those deep hazel eyes melting my soul either.

What an incredibly humbling few months it’s been. To finally finding my career taking off again but being pulled back by an invisible string. To feeling halfway human and then having two sets of eyes and ears and endless giggles and teeny toes remind me why I committed to stay home when I gave up teaching in the first place. Forget the glass ceiling. It’s more like a glass cage full of mirrors, reflecting my wants, needs, and dreams back to me. I’m living the dream! Sometimes.

My mantra these past few years has been the best advice I’ve ever gotten, and it rings in my ears on the DAILY lately:

I was given that advice my junior year of college by a woman for whom I nannied. Good advice is so often lost on the young. When she told me ‘you can have it all, just not at the same time,’ I actually laughed. I was twenty years old, had a fantastic social life, was halfway through college with a major I loved and living the good life with the best friends a gal could ask for– I DID have it all, at the same time. Or so I thought. Or perhaps I didn’t realize that time would be so fleeting. That’s why when I got the best advice of my life at age 20, I almost let it go. It slipped out of my brain, through my hands, and held on for dear life to a pinkie finger until I was finally in a place to deeply understand what it meant.

You CAN have it all. Just not at the same time. You can have kids, a clean home, an amazing career, trips around the world, a rockin’ body, money in your pocket, sanity… but not at the same time. Anyone who claims they have all that is either not telling the truth, isn’t being honest with themselves, or isn’t present with either one of those entities. You may have an immaculate home, but do you ignore the kids to clean? Your career may be skyrocketing and you’re working non-stop, but what are you sacrificing in those hours you’d spent getting there?

As I type this, my kids have interrupted me no less than 4,392 times. Thomas the Train needs to be rescued from the table. The Frozen soundtrack has been playing non-stop. Tiny hands are digging through my purse and someone just fell off a chair with a massive ‘thump’. I’m not making a word of it up, though I’m going to omit the part where I begged my kids for FIVE FREAKING MINUTES TO TYPE SOMETHING WITHOUT BEING INTERRUPTED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THREE MONTHS. That plan failed. What was I saying?

I deeply understand what working moms sacrifice. I was foolish to think I could do both. In two years when both kids are in school full time I might read this and scoff and think, what was I thinking?! But today, as the snow falls and my kids run circles around the kitchen table (“watch your heads! I don’t have time to take anyone to the ER!”) I’m taking it all in and realizing that even though I can’t have IT ALL, I can focus on what’s most important during this oh-so-short season of life and adjust my sails a bit.