its the simple things

Oh the guilt of being a working mom...



You can only understand if you are one.



You want to be a good mom. You want to spend more time with your kids. You want to be there for them all the time. You want to be there after school when it is a blizzard out side, snowing horizontally, wind fiercely blowing, and at that moment you remember your 7 yr old wore crocks to school even though you told him it was going to snow today. You want to go and pick them up and have the cocoamotion waiting for them frothing with melted marshmallows. But you are at work looking out the window at the snowstorm feeling your heart yet again form another guilt crack. You want to be at their awards assembly's, and support them, even though they are silly and the kids say you really don't need to come....you still want to be there. You want to drop everything and go to pick them up from school when they call with a stomach ache, but you have either have them wait miserably at school until you can drive the 45 minutes after you've divided your patients to other nurses, or until you've received permission from your manager after she's gotten out of a mtg with the hospital administrator, or until you've finished entering your important data that was due 2 days prior. Or you need to find a good neighbor to go and pick up your sick kid and hope and pray your kid doesn't get your neighbor's whole family sick until you can get their yourself. Or just leaving your kids home alone so many hours after school. I really hope these things will make my kids stronger, more responsible, and resilient.



It has always been a challenge for me to be a working mom. I know we need the insurance and the money and I really like being a nurse. But their is something so wonderful about being a mom that is so indescribable. When I realized I had to put my brand new wonderful baby in day care for someone else to hold him, love him, watch him coo and grow and smile, OH the heartache! I used to add up all the hours I had to spend away from him. after months and months time I realized this was not helping one bit, so I tried to concentrate on the time we spent together. I did my housecleaning and laundry when they were napping, I did dishes after thye went to bed for the night. My days off were meant to be fun days, where we went to the park, played games, took walks, rolled and played on the floor, built forts with blankets and pillows. Saturdays were sacred. Family days. Dad was home too. We all had fun playing together. My kids never wanted to go to other kids' houses, they wanted to just stay home and play with their own toys and their own mom and dad, because they never got to.



When I cut back to working only part time--3 days a week instead of 4, I don't know how things changed but they did. My focus was still trying to spend as much time as possible with them, but now that I was home a little more, I wanted to do the things that other moms did. Volunteer in the classroom, have play dates, go on field trips, join the pta. I got buiser, took on more responsibilities, had busier church callings. I got older and less energetic. Life got in the way of me devoting all of my spare time to my kids.



So even though I am home a little more, I still feel like I'm missing out on the everyday little things in life with my kids. I feel stabs of guilt when I hear words like "a mother's place is in the home", "stay at home mom", or "homemaker" even though they are not meant to hurt, they are. Yes I believe that a mother should be in the home, that is the best place for her and the children, but sometimes it just can't happen.



So I will again try to make every chance I have with my kids count. To play video games with the boys instead of yell at them to get their jobs done, to play barbies, to color and paint, to play house, fly kites

to play doggie in the morning before school even if it will make you a little late for work

to make hot chocolate when we can

with lots of marshmallows

and to not get upset when your 4 yr old is so excited to plant the pansies from Costco, she does it herself--right before you are supposed to leave for the temple open house and she looks at you with a huge smile on her face, dirt up to her elbows and says, "awn't they bootiful mommy?" and then you get to spend the next 20 minutes that you really don't have to replant them so all the root systems are completly covered up.

It is the simple things in life that really matter. I am going to try and do more of those!