In case some of my readers aren’t up on the lingo WAHM stands for Work at Home Mom (not to be confuse with WOHM «Work out of Home Mom») and SAHM means Stay At Home Mom. I prefer to be known as awesome.
Yesterday Cameron was home from daycare with a double ear infection. Yup, DH and I thought it might be pink eye but lo and behold it was really the ear infection. My sister was incredulous that we had no idea. «You mean she didn’t wake up during the night multiple times?» Nope. That’s not how Cameron rolls. But we did know something was wrong so off to the doctor’s DH went with Cameron. Diagnosis in hand we decided to keep her home for the day so she would nap better and recover more quickly.
Unfortunately neither of us could take the day off of work. DH’s calendar was a bit more flexible than mine but I had about 5 hours of conference calls where I was an integral component. So not only did I have to have my headset on for most of the day, multitasking was absolutely out. It worked out OK but I was pretty stressed for most of the day even with DH shouldering the heavier load with childcare. And Cameron napped for about 5.5 hours total. All in all it should have been a piece of cake but it was still stressful. I could never really concentrate on Cameron when it was my time to care for her or work when I was supposed to be herding cats on my conference calls.
As I lay on the couch in exhaustion catching up on the 8 (!) episodes of Fringe we have saved I wondered, how do the women who work full time jobs also juggle being the primary care giver during the day for their kids? I don’t mean freelance work which can technically be managed in «off» hours (although talk about tiring!) but a 9-5 job. I met one woman at BigFinance who told me proudly that she was going to be working at home while watching her 6 month and 5 year old sons. Really? I’m sure that worked out fabulously.
I have an exceptionally happy, long napping baby and there is no way in hell I could do it for more than a day. And that was with DH. I worry that technology has allowed us to juggle too many things. I appreciate the flexibility from BigFinance and the technological tools that allow me to work from home at least once a week. But when I work from home, I work from home. Sure, I might throw in some laundry or run an errand or blog but my time and attention is focused on work.
What do the rest of you think? Totally possible to juggle a full time day job and caring for kids? I assume that it would get easier as the kids get older but I would think that 0-6 is the hardest.
PS – Cameron is doing totally great today and didn’t even glance at me as I waved goodbye after dropping her off at daycare. And I am happily ensconced at my desk slogging through email.
