The Messy Math of Working and Making Time for Kids
I’m writing this with one eye on my screen and the other on my four-year-old, who’s currently rearranging all my loose change into little piles on the rug next to my desk. Half of the goldfish crackers he begged for 10 minutes ago are spilled under my chair, and the dog just snuck three of them when he wasn’t looking. I was supposed to finish three client projects today, and I’m already halfway through the day and only halfway done with the first one. That’s just how it goes these days, I’ve learned.
Before I had my son, I read all the things. All the posts about how to master time blocking, how to get up at 5 a.m. and knock out four hours of work before your kids even wake up, how to have a clean house, a thriving career, and well-adjusted kids all at the same time. I bought a fancy leather planner, I mapped my days into neat 30-minute blocks, I was ready to nail this whole working parent thing. Then the kid came, and all those plans went out the window faster than a sippy cup thrown from a high chair.
I tried the 5 a.m. trick once, back when he was still sleeping through the night consistently. I set my alarm, stumbled out of bed, poured a big coffee, sat down at my desk all proud of myself. The house was quiet, no one needed anything from me, it was everything the articles promised it would be. And I just stared at my screen. For 47 minutes, I stared. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be working on, couldn’t form a coherent sentence, my brain was still stuck in that half-asleep fog where all I wanted to do was crawl back under the covers. Then he woke up at 6:30, an hour earlier than usual, and I was dragging for the whole rest of the day, got less done than if I’d just slept in and dealt with the interruptions. Never tried that again.
That job interview I had three months ago? The one I was so excited about, full-time remote, steady pay, benefits, the whole thing I’d been working toward for two years. I prepped for a week, bought a new nicer shirt for the video call, stocked up on his favorite fruit snacks and queued up the entire Paw Patrol movie, told him “mommy has to talk for an hour, can you be my big boy and play quietly?” He was amazing for the first 22 minutes. I was in the middle of talking through my biggest project, feeling really good about how it was going, when he came barrelling into the room, pants around his ankles, yelling at the top of his lungs “MOMMY I POOPED AND IT STINKY.” I wanted to disappear through the floor. I tried to laugh it off, apologized, but you could just tell the whole energy of the interview shifted. I didn’t get the job. I cried in the bathroom after, not just because I didn’t get the job, but because I felt like every stupid stereotype of the distracted working mom just played out live on camera, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
I still have days where I feel like I’m failing at both. If I’m focused on work, I’m snapping at him when he interrupts, I’m letting him watch too much TV, I’m not paying attention when he wants to show me a cool bug or a weird rock he found. Last month we went to the park, I brought my laptop to answer quick emails while he played. He ran over all excited, holding this lumpy gray rock that looked just like a T-Rex head, and I didn’t even look up from my screen, just said “that’s cool, baby, go play.” He just walked away all quiet, and I felt this punch in the gut. I closed the laptop, went over and sat with him, and we looked at that rock for 15 minutes, talked about where it came from, what the T-Rex would eat, all that silly little stuff. It was the nicest 15 minutes I had all week, but I missed that client deadline I was stressing about, got a really snarky email from the account manager. You pick your poison, right?
I’ve stopped trying to count productivity in full hours now. I count it in 10 or 15 minute chunks. A paragraph here, a quick email there, between band-aids for scraped knees and juice spills and sudden demands to go blow bubbles right this second. My to-do list on the whiteboard by my desk, I move a third of the items to the next week every Sunday. If an item’s still there after three weeks, I just cross it out, because it obviously wasn’t that important to begin with. Most days I pick one big thing to get done, and that’s it. If I get that done, everything else is a bonus. If I don’t, I just try again tomorrow.
It doesn’t feel glamorous. Some days I yell when I shouldn’t, some days we eat frozen pizza three nights in a row, some days I don’t get any work done at all because my kid just needs extra cuddles after a bad nap. I still have nights where I lay awake and worry I’m messing up both, that I’ll never get that steady job I want, that my kid will grow up remembering me always being on the computer instead of playing with him. I don’t have a neat little lesson to wrap this up with, no trick that works for everyone every day. It’s just messy. It’s just choosing what matters today, and letting the rest wait.
Right now, my kid just finished his coin piles, and he’s yelling for me to come look at what he built. That’s what matters today. The to-do list can wait another hour.
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