Balancing Motherhood and a Full-Time Job
Words by Amy Clark
Sitting down to write about achieving balance as a mother who works a full-time job outside the home, I can’t help but look around my home and laugh at the irony. In my bathroom and every bedroom of my home, laundry is spilling out of hampers and collecting in piles on the floor. Unwashed dishes are sitting on my kitchen counter. Crumbs from who-knows-when litter the floor under the dining room table. Next to the desk where I am sitting right now is a stack of unread mail that is several days old. Actually, the mail at the bottom of the pile is probably a couple weeks old, let’s just be honest.
When my first child was born, I took 6 weeks off work as a substitute teacher. When the call came asking me to return to the schools, I was happy to go back. Motherhood was a difficult adjustment for me, and I felt relieved to go back to a world that was familiar. I still remember how lovely it felt to be wearing professional-looking clothes, instead of sweatpants, to engage in conversations with adults, and to do simple things like check my email without worrying about a crying baby. While there have been moments in my life when I wished my life looked different, I am well aware of the benefits of working away from home.
This does not mean that a life that involves being at an office until 4:30 every day, and then coming home to break up sibling squabbles, nag those same children to do their chores, do their homework, play outside instead of staring at a screen, cook dinner, clean up after dinner, run baths, nag them again to pick up their stuff, and for-goodness-sake-I-told-you-to-put-those-shoes-away-a-million-times-already, tuck them into bed, and then collapse on the couch in exhaustion is anything resembling easy or smooth. And somehow in the middle of all that, I am supposed to achieve something called “balance”? What is that, anyway?
I think this means we are supposed to be able to give each area of our life the amount of time needed for it to actually function effectively. But that’s a fairly subjective definition, because what my life needs to be functional is different from what your life needs. And “functional” is a very different measurement from “fantasy”, which is what I suspect a lot of us, myself included, use to determine how we are living life. A woman in an online group of which I’m a member recently wrote down what she would like to do each day, ideally, and the average amount of time each activity would take. She discovered that it was literally impossible to do everything she wanted to do in her ideal day. Her math added up to more than 24 hours. It could not be done, full stop. She was setting herself up for failure every single day that she held herself to this fantasy standard.
I was both relieved and horrified at this conclusion. I have plenty of my own fantasies surrounding how my life as a working mom should look. I would love to come home to a clean home every day, healthy meals served at the table each night (at the same time, of course, and enjoyed by everyone), followed by easy laughter with my children at bath time while I look on fondly as they happily splash and play, quick bedtimes and then sufficient time to relax with my husband while I spend time on hobbies that both fulfill and challenge me, as the laundry fairy neatly folds and puts away today’s load and the kitchen fairy cleans up the evidence of that healthy dinner. The idea that this would never materialize as my reality brought a strange sense of grief, along with the realization that I was not at fault for this dissonance between my fantasy and my actual life. My life will never look like that. And while I feel some loss at that, because it really was a beautiful vision, there is also a freedom and grace that comes with finally, truly, letting it go.
The truth is, finding balance as a working mom is not so much about living into a fantasy version of anything. Rather, in my experience it has been much more about learning to embrace my reality, as messy and dysfunctional as it can be sometimes. My home can be loud, messy, and chaotic, and while I am not going to tell you I dug through a pile of dirty laundry to find my son a pair of pants to wear to school this morning, I can’t in good conscience tell you that I didn’t, either. I am often exhausted. I feel guilty that we can’t spend our weekends the way I would like to, because we are busy cleaning and catching up on things that were neglected during the work week. My kids sometimes have sandwiches or cereal for dinner. And we’re not even going to mention the state of their bedrooms.
Alongside those truths, I can also tell you that I have had to learn to ask for help, to speak up for my needs, and to define what my priorities actually are. If I can’t do everything, then I have no choice but to decide what is truly important to me. For me, this means spending as much of my time as possible in quality time with my kids and my husband, and a little quiet alone time for my introverted self. In order for me to do that, I need to lean on the people around me. My kids do chores, my husband does at least as much around our house as I do, and our parents help with picking the kids up from school. Everybody has to pitch in to keep our life afloat. This has been hard for me, as a very independent person. I used to subscribe very much to the notion that in order to be successful, I had to do everything myself. Life has taught me that society’s expectation of what success looks like does not feel very good to me. What works instead is to lean into my own values, and not worry too much about everything else. When I am able to do that, I experience a sense of inner alignment and peace that feels very much like… balance.
About the Author:
Amy is a wife, mother of three, writer, and photographer. She is also a grad student on the path to becoming a marriage and family therapist. She drinks way too much coffee, eats a lot of chocolate, and compensates for these habits with yoga and hiking. She loves deep conversations with close friends, marveling at nature, and reading, and feels most herself at the beach.