I Thought I’d Crack Working From Home With Kids. Turns Out I Still Hide In The Pantry For Coffee.
I’m typing this with one hand because the other is holding a half-cold coffee that I’ve already reheated twice in the microwave. Ten minutes ago, my four-year-old banged on the home office door so hard the doorknob jiggled, yelling that she’d peed a little and needed new underwear. Before that, my seven-year-old had a 15-minute meltdown because he couldn’t find the specific 2×2 blue Lego brick he needs for his spaceship. I told him we’d look after I finished this paragraph, and he called me a mean mommy. That’s where we are right now.
I quit my in-office corporate job two years ago to go freelance, remember? The whole point was to stop missing school plays and field trips, to stop rushing through bedtime because I was too drained from commuting, to “have it all” or whatever the phrase was that all the mom people were using back then. I bought into all the time management hacks: get up at 5am before the kids wake up, time block your day into 25-minute chunks, batch all your emails so you don’t get distracted, outsource the cleaning if you can. I tried every single one. The 5am thing lasted 12 days. I’d drag myself out of bed, make coffee, sit down at my desk, and fall asleep face first on my keyboard 10 minutes later, because I’d stayed up until 11:30 patching jeans and folding the mountain of laundry that never actually goes away. Time blocking just left me feeling guilty every time a kid needed something and threw off my entire schedule.
Last month I had a big client call scheduled for 1pm, right after the kids left for swimming lessons. I’d prepped for weeks, had all my slides ready, even put on a clean blouse that didn’t have any juice stains on it. Ten minutes before the call, the swimming pool emailed me: class canceled, somebody had an accident in the shallow end. I stared at my screen for a full minute, then herded the kids into the living room, gave them each a cookie and told them to watch a movie, please, just for one hour. It was going fine, right up until the moment the client asked me to walk through our projected budget. That’s when my four-year-old pushed open the office door, dragged the entire basket of folded clean laundry I’d finished that morning right into the middle of the room, dumped it all over the floor, and yelled “MOMMY I NEED A POPSICLE RIGHT NOW I’m STARVING.”
I muted the call, my face so hot I thought I’d pass out, and told her to wait one minute. The client, who’s also a mom of two, just laughed when I unmuted and said “don’t even worry about it, I’ve had a kid throw up on my desk mid-call before.” It was fine, we got through the call, but that awkward hot flush is still something I feel sometimes, you know? When someone asks me how I manage to work and have kids, and I just smile and say “it’s all good” instead of telling them that I ate a cold granola bar standing up over the sink for lunch three days last week, that the baseboards haven’t been wiped down since Christmas, that I still forget to pack my older son’s snack for after-school care half the time.
I do actually hide in the pantry sometimes, for the record. Not for big dramatic breakdowns, just to drink a coffee that’s still hot for five minutes. Last week I was sitting on the floor between the bag of flour and the jar of pickles, and I heard my seven-year-old yell “WHERE IS MOMMY?” from the living room. I just sat there for two more sips, breathing, before I answered. I used to feel guilty about that, like I’m doing something wrong by wanting two minutes alone. Now I figure it’s better than me snapping at them because I’m overstimulated and tired, over a spilled juice box that doesn’t even matter.
Here’s the weird thing I’ve noticed that no hack ever talks about: I used to plan my days with 10 different tasks I had to get done, and I’d leave the day feeling like a failure because I only checked off three. Now I just write down two things that absolutely have to get done that day. That’s it. If those two things get done, it’s a win. If the other eight don’t, they can wait until tomorrow. Most of the time, those eight things aren’t that important anyway. Vacuuming the crumbs out of the couch can wait. The world won’t end if I answer those emails tomorrow instead of today.
And another weird contradiction: some weeks I get way more work done when the kids are home than when they go stay with my mom for a long weekend. When they’re gone, I have all this free time, I keep telling myself I’ll knock out three big projects, and instead I take a long shower, watch an entire episode of a show by myself, scroll through my phone for an hour, and before I know it it’s 3pm and I’ve written two paragraphs. When they’re home, I work in 15-minute chunks between fort-building and Lego searches and snack requests, and somehow I get my two main things done every time. It doesn’t make sense, it just is.
The kids are quiet now, they’re both sitting on the rug watching Bluey, the Lego meltdown is over (we found the blue brick under the fridge, of course). I ordered pizza for dinner because I didn’t have time to defrost the chicken I had planned, and that’s fine. The sink is full of dishes, the laundry that got dumped is still piled in the corner of the office, I have three unanswered emails sitting in my inbox that I’ve been ignoring for two days.
I don’t have any tips for you. I don’t have it all figured out. Some days I feel like I’m half-assing both my job and being a mom, like I’m not giving enough to either. Some days I resent working when I want to be playing, and resent the kids when I want to be working. It’s messy. It’s not the perfectly balanced thing people post about online. I still hide in the pantry for hot coffee. I still miss deadlines sometimes. I still step on Legos in the middle of the night when I go get a glass of water. That’s just how it goes, I think. No big secret, no perfect fix. Just one coffee reheat, one completed task, one dandelion my son picked for me that’s sitting wilted on my desk, at a time. (Word count: 1187)
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I Thought I’d Crack Working From Home With Kids