How to Be the Best Working Mom in the World
When I was growing up, my dad always picked us up from school. He worked as a mechanic for the railroad and had a Union-backed, family-friendly 7am-3pm schedule. Plus, our school was right down the street from the truck shop, just past the parking lot where my mom’s car waited for her to return at the end of the day after a half-mile walk across the Loop and a 45-minute Metra ride.
For 36 years, my mom worked in downtown Chicago at a Fortune 100 company that you may know as a household name supplying oatmeal, pancakes, and the yellow sports drink they dump on the winning coach at the end of a big game. As a kid, I would often wake up before dawn and stumble bleary-eyed to the kitchen where she’d be dressed for work paying bills over coffee. She’d already changed over a load of laundry and set up three tiny cups of orange juice and three chewable vitamins on the counter behind her. Next, get three bickering kids dressed, fed, and safely delivered to school by 8am.
In the afternoon, she would call and let us know what train she’d be on. Most of the time it was the 5:05 or the 6:15. Sometimes we’d get lucky and she’d get a seat on the 4:24. Other times — the times when Dad told us to leave her alone when she came in the door — Mom caught the 7:38.
I had no idea what my mom did during the hours between train rides. She did something with numbers and money and at some point, I had to ask her what the word “payroll” meant. A few times a year, she’d pack us onto the train and take us downtown. We met her work friends and played with office supplies and stood wide-eyed with awe inside the lobby of this great skyscraper where the oatmeal in the cafeteria was free and the cereal mascots’ faces adorned every surface.
As I grew older, the complexity of a working mom’s life started to reveal itself. Why she got up so early. Why she got so mad if our dawdling made her late for the morning train. Why the days she took us downtown just happened to be days we didn’t have school. The way that every day has to be planned and sequenced and executed in just the right order or it all falls apart.
When I became a working mom, I asked her how she did it. How did she get everything done? How can I stop feeling guilty? She said, “You just do it. You can’t think about how. Everything gets done, but it’s never balanced. You just have to accept that sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s family and somebody’s always going to be disappointed.” I thought about that advice a lot in the early days, wondering when and how I’m disappointing my son. Because I don’t have a corporate job, home and work is a blurry space in our lives. I write essays at the playground. I pack his lunch and set out the TV remote and a bowl of cereal on days when I have early morning client calls. I make sure we have a special day before I hop on a plane for a speaking gig. And I felt guilty about all of it until I found an essay I wrote about my mom.
My son is the same age as I was when I submitted an essay to the grocery store’s Mother’s Day contest in 1991 about my caring, generous, problem-solving mom. I didn’t mention her job at all. When I look back on this essay with the eyes of someone who has been teaching autobiography for a long time, all that guilt dissolved.
The unconscious choices people make when they write the story of their lives reflect their values and strongest themes of memory. When asked to write about what I love about my mom, it wasn’t her career.
There’s a lot of advice out there for working moms about how to ditch the guilt and embrace the imbalance. I can’t say I disagree, but I wonder if we would tell our stories differently if we changed the question from “How can I get over working mom guilt?” to “What makes me the best mom in the world?” I bet your kids have an answer.
My mom and dad are retired now and enjoy doing what they want with their time and I think about this a lot: everything gets done. The ups and downs of parenting with a career is an adventure that I hope to live long enough to look back on fondly. And that future is not guaranteed, so I strive to work each day in a way that tells the best story. The one where everything gets done and when the heartbreak of imbalance fades, all that’s left will be pride and joy.
