From Workaholic to Multitasker: My Working Mom Story
This morning I am taking a break from decorating (and celebrating!) all things Christmas. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the holidays and forget about all the life that happens in-between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The focus of my blog is to always celebrate all things easy within our home. And occasionally it isn’t always easy from the start. So here comes this morning and a bit of reality check from this working mom and how it works, now….
It’s no secret that I love my family and my career. I love the A+O duo and their closeness in age. It’s no secret that Jordan & I are always asking each other if we can have more kids (spoiler… daycare is $$$$).
However, it wasn’t always a life full of “Momma Watch This!” or reading the same books repeatedly every night.
Before kids, I thrived on being a Manager at a Navy Shipbuilder in Mobile, Alabama. It was the best kind of job—for me. I thrived on the hustle, the work, and the adrenaline of always being prepared. I was addicted to working more than my colleagues and being prepared for any outcome and proving we had a plan.
I am a firm believer that moms can parent perfectly by working sometimes, part time, full time, AND staying at home. Before you share this, let’s all agree that Moms do what they think is best for their family. Can’t that be enough?
Looking back, I was a workaholic. And at the time, it didn’t matter. I could give everything I had at work and just relax at home because it was just Jordan & I. Sure we did lots of Home DIYs, but those were much more spontaneous and performed at a leisurely pace. No daycare & formula expenses yet!
Even after having Aubrey, I couldn’t wait to jump back into work. I returned 8 weeks after birth and wanted to make sure I showed my co-workers that motherhood hadn’t changed me. But it did. No, not in the sense where work suddenly became less important, but in the sense that I realized that I couldn’t afford to use all of my energy during the day and expect to coast through my nights.
Because, that isn’t realistic. Working parents have so much to do… so much to cram into a few precious hours each evening, that I realized I needed to figure out what was going to make me successful in both positions.
When we relocated to Michigan, Jordan & I took the opportunity to kind of start fresh and figure out how we wanted to parent our way through the evenings. And as a team, it’s turned into a pretty well-oiled machine. As Aubrey grows older, we are inserting a seasonal activity here and there on the evenings. And we’ve learned to make Tumbling or Swimming fit into Monday nights well.
So this isn’t a blog post explaining away a career, but rather how I’ve shifted learning how to be on-point at a really difficult job to learning how to adapt those skills in creating a great foundation at home. Because having a chaotic night isn’t something that works well for our family.
As each season of our life changes, our routine becomes more evolved as the kids are growing up so quickly. While Jordan & I like to think we have some control, the kids are proving that we will always be learning how to make our lives easier.
And that is perfectly okay. I’ll keep perfecting the three cups of coffee by 7 am look, hoping that I seem presentable for my work meetings, and enjoying the kids in the evenings.
How do you handle it as a working mom? Any helpful hints? Leave ’em in the comments!