In the land of the blogosphere where you can pretty much convince yourself that every other mother is sewing her house’s curtains, cooking straight from the bountiful, beautiful garden and managing to do BIG IMPORTANT THINGS away from home, all whilst rocking a kind of trendy-hipster-with-bangs-and-vintage-boots style, it’s exceedingly refreshing to learn about people’s overwhelm. Bonus points go to overwhelm that seems credible—and even likable.
You can do the same thing imagining the lives of fellow mamas, both the ones who have BIG IMPORTANT or at least steady paying jobs or the ones who are intentionally designated the at-home parent.
I think this is why I resonated so with Amy Reiter’s essay in the e-anthology Welcome to My World (in which my essay, “Snow Day” also appears) “Momming in the Middle.” The harried, earnest life she’s living—balance and juggle are euphemistic words, try breathless-race-against-time-and-space—feels completely familiar to me.
Reiter’s description of the tiny bedroom where she works puts me right at home: a “no-man’s land heaped with unfolded (Clean? Dirty?) laundry, unsorted mail, school “invention center” art projects made from egg cartons and the contents of somebody else’s junk drawer that are ignored by their pint-sized creators until someone tries to throw them out, and a rock collection (gravel from a friend’s driveway), a baseball-card collection, a business-card collection and a collection of small scraps of ripped-up paper with a mysterious code written on them in colorful crayon.”
That’s my house! Actually, I work in the kitchen at the counter. I ceded my study to my eldest son, who now sleeps there.
It’s really not the physical chaos, though that Amy Reiter describes so well: she describes how in the service of being present, the freelance-work-from-home dream renders a parent less present, even if physically on the premises. She offers the right examples of how the lack of separation between the worker and the parent sometimes ends up feeling like those experimentations in blending paint colors on a preschooler’s brush—mucky brown.
**
Like Amy Reiter—and like other mothers who’ve shared their color experimentation via parenting and work—there isn’t a totally perfect shade, even if you use a hipstematic app. It’s very reassuring, though, to know you’re not alone making your valiant attempt.
Side note: written on Saturday morning while one sick kid plus preschooler sister are watching the DIY channel in the same room, my devil’s deal for a few minutes without their climbing on me.
