I love Twitter.
I love that it can connect me to smart, interesting people like Queen of Spain who send me off to read something like this piece about moms who work, which was written by Jaelithe at The State of Discontent and has me sitting at my desk crying when I should be drafting blog posts for a client.
Without Twitter — and Queen of Spain and Jaelithe — I would just be a woman sitting alone in a tiny home office, wondering what my small children are doing right now at school and whether I will someday regret my eagerness to get back to work.
I do not work full time. I do not work outside the home (unless the corner table at Starbucks counts.) But I am working enough that I cannot manage to do it with the girls here. Miss D. now goes to school five mornings a week. Her sister joins her on four of those days. It’s a big change for us. Overnight, seemingly, our time together went from vast, unending hours to packed days and rushed transitions.
Wake, eat, dress, drive, drop-off, work, work, work, pick up, nap, play, cook, eat, bathe, bed.
Repeat.
The weather is finally turning here. It’s time to go outside again after a long, strange Southern winter. A friend invited me and Belly to the zoo and out to lunch last week, and I declined. Belly had school, I had work, and neither of us has the lifestyle right now for mid-morning, weekday zoo dates. It made me sad. Later, when the same friend e-mailed me to talk about alternate times we could get together, she noted that perhaps while I might one day regret how quickly my stay-at-home-mom status evolved, she might regret how slowly hers did.
There are plenty of choices for us. Sometimes, they all feel wrong.
I love the work I’m doing now. I am so, so grateful for successful friends who thought of me when they needed a writer.
Still, Jaelithe’s shout out to the working moms has me struggling to gain my composure this morning.
Which I will do.
Quickly.
Because there’s a long to-do list, and it’s almost time for me to go pick up my babies.
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Sounds like things are crazy. Crazy good in some ways and not in others…Hang in there!
You’ll fit that zoo trip in some other time. And remember, as Jaelithe said, your babies are out there playing Mommy the Writer and are so proud.
Don’t forget that the kids get out of school pretty early and you have the afternoon with them……..not quite like being gone morning till night. That probably doesn’t help , does it?
Thanks for coming by to read what I wrote, and thanks for writing about it here. I’m happily surprised that a post I spent an hour writing just to try to cheer up a couple of good friends who were having a hard time seems to have resonated so much with other mothers. It makes me think childcare-providers-turned-mothers like me ought to talk more often about what we’ve learned on both sides of that relationship. Practically everyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows I’m a professional writer and SEO consultant who juggles parenting with my work from home. But I rarely think to mention that before all that, I was a nanny working for a mother who juggled family and career in much the same way I now do.
Twitter kills my productivity like nothing else. And yet it connects me to so many wonderful people and ideas, I don’t know anymore how I’d get through my day without it.