The Work-Kids Time Math That Never Adds Up
Last Tuesday I had a make-or-break client check-in, the one I’d been prepping for three weeks. I locked myself in the spare bedroom I call my office, taped the hand-drawn “DO NOT DISTURB MOMMY IS WORKING” sign my 7-year-old made me to the door, and even put a laundry basket against the handle to slow down any tiny intruders. Thirty minutes in, I heard scrabbling, then a wet little voice through the crack: “Mommy, I need you to wipe my butt. I can’t reach.” That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re pregnant and daydreaming about how you’ll “have it all” working from home: half your big important work moments will be interrupted by something gross and unskippable.
I tried all the systems, okay? I bought the fancy leather planner, I color-coded my Google calendar, I batch my tasks, I tried the 5 a.m. wake-up hack that’s supposed to give you three hours of quiet me-time before the kids get up. I did that 5 a.m. thing exactly twice. First time, I drank my coffee and got 45 minutes of emails done, then fell asleep on the couch until 8 a.m., and the kids woke up first and drew all over my arms with washable marker. Second time, I just fell asleep as soon as I sat down, and woke up to the 4-year-old pouring cheerios into my lap. So that hack went right out the window.
I used to beat myself up about this. I’d close my laptop at the end of the day and count all the things I didn’t get done, all the kid moments I was too distracted to be present for. I missed my oldest’s class dinosaur presentation last month because an emergency call with my biggest client popped up out of nowhere. I sat in my driveway after the call crying for 10 minutes, because he’d practiced that presentation every night for two weeks, he’d even made me a special paper dinosaur to bring to show me, and I wasn’t there. That night he climbed into my lap after dinner and said his teacher let him do it again just for me in the living room, and it was better because he didn’t get scared in front of the whole class. But I still think about it once a week. Guilt doesn’t just go away because it turned out okay for him.
Last week I did a virtual panel for a group of women starting small businesses, all fancy from the waist up, sweatpants with a ketchup stain from lunch on the bottom, like usual. Halfway through my opening talk, the 4-year-old pushed open the door, holding his dead goldfish Bubbles that he’d fished out of the tank with his bare hands, held him right up to the camera, and yelled “MOMMY BUBBLES IS SLEEPING CAN WE BURY HIM IN THE BACKYARD?” I wanted to die. I wanted to crawl under the desk and never come out. But after the panel, a dozen different women messaged me saying that was the only part that felt real, that they’d all had similar moments, that they were tired of seeing people pretend their work and kid lives fit together perfectly.
The thing I’ve figured out lately, that I never see anyone talk about, is that it doesn’t have to fit perfectly. I used to think I needed 4 full hours of uninterrupted work time to get anything done, and then 2 full hours of uninterrupted quality kid time after, and then an hour of me time, and it all adds up to a perfect day. But that never happens. If I waited for uninterrupted time to work, I’d never get anything done. Now I work while they eat their after-school popsicles, I answer emails while they watch their 20 minutes of cartoon after dinner, I bring my laptop to soccer practice and type up notes on the bench while my kid runs around. Yeah, half the time I get interrupted to tie a shoe or look at a roly-poly someone found, but I get more done that way than I do waiting for the perfect quiet block that almost never comes.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all okay all the time. Some days I snap at the kids for interrupting me when I’m on a roll, then I feel guilty for the rest of the day. Some days I put work off to go to the park, and then I have to stay up until 1 a.m. finishing a project, and I’m a zombie the next day. Last week I spent three hours building a rainforest diorama with my oldest that he forgot to tell me about until the night before it was due, and I missed a deadline on a small project, and I lost that client. I still don’t know if that was the right call, losing the client to build the diorama. Part of me says yes, obviously, it’s my kid’s school project, but the other part of me says that client money was going to pay for our summer vacation, so now we can’t go to the beach like we planned. There’s no perfect answer there, just a choice you make and live with.
Right now, as I type this, there’s a melted chocolate ice cream stain on the couch cushion next to me, the kids are in the bath making a huge puddle on the bathroom floor, and I still have that invoice I was supposed to send yesterday sitting half-done in a tab. I took them out for ice cream an hour early today because I finished a big project, and the 4-year-old dropped his first cone on the sidewalk, and then we got caught in the rain on the walk home, and everything was soaked. It wasn’t perfect. I still don’t have this figured out. Some days I feel like I’m bad at my job and bad at being a mom, like I’m splitting myself into too many tiny pieces and none of them are enough. But most days, I look at the messy bits, the interruptions, the things that don’t get done, the ice cream stains and the dead goldfish and the last-minute dioramas, and that’s just it, isn’t it? This is what it is. The math never adds up. You just count the good bits where you can find them, and wipe up the mess later.
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