I can’t believe how crazy this time of year is, every year.

Intense work deadlines right before the holidays, during which I caught some new strain of Monster Cold that hung in there for over a month. It was so bad that at one point I lost my voice completely—I could not get any sound to emit from my vocal cords for about three days. I ended up running a 3-hour meeting with a client by WHISPERING. (Career tip: Losing your voice can work to your benefit. I think it actually gave me a more commanding presence. Very “Godfather.” Every time I whispered, everyone would fall silent and lean in.)

The day my project ended was my kids’ last day of school/preschool. I was home with them for 2+ weeks which was fun but intense in an entirely different way—play dates, art projects, park trips. You know the drill. My husband, who has been freelancing for 10+ years, recently took a full time JOB-job, so he had to work for much of that time… (Marriage tip: Take turns having “real” jobs or you will be in crisis during every school holiday and fight about who has to take the time off.)

Somehow we got it together for Christmas—presents, nice dinner, happy kids—and then suddenly it was Ruby’s birthday, which comes the week after Christmas, and always seems to catch us by surprise. By then Brian was back at work, so I tried a new Risky Mom Move: I asked Ruby to babysit her baby brother in the store while I bought her birthday presents. (Parenting tip: You CAN pull this off if your oldest child is 9, and the youngest has had his nap. Unfortunately, Jake missed the nap, so by the end of our shopping trip, I ran out of Candy Bribes, and he flung himself face down on the floor of Old Navy, sobbing.)

Now the kids are back in school, and I’m looking at all the things I have to catch up on—paying estimated taxes, bunch of things going on with my son’s preschool, lining up my next freelance project, planning Ruby’s big birthday party, a gazillion broken things around the house to be fixed. And as I look out at the calendar, I can see all these random days-off piling up—professional development days, MLK Day, etc. Also, Jake started coughing last night, which means the next round of winter colds is descending.

So I thought I’d revive the following story, which I originally posted around this time last year. Details are different, but otherwise, I could have written it this year.

How’s your year going so far?

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Originally posted March 14, 2011:

If you’re a working parent and you feel like you’ve been running in place this year, it’s probably not your imagination.

Last week my daughter broke her ankle. It’s kind of a long story, but the central event involved a giant flying leap over a pile of backpacks on the school playground. Girls will be girls…

I’m trying to look on the bright side. For instance:

1. Ruby is not in a lot of pain. Also, she’s thrilled that she gets to wear a cast for a month. All the second graders in her class think she’s exceedingly cool.
2. At age 8, she’s the perfect size for breaking something. Just big enough to use the smallest pair of crutches her pediatrician could dig up. Just small enough to fit in her baby brother’s stroller, which is now Ruby’s makeshift wheelchair whenever her armpits hurt from the crutches.
3. I’m not working full time.

Number 3 is a big deal.

I took this opportunity to add up the number of days either my husband or I have been home during a work day with kids.

In the first ten weeks of this year, we’ve missed 11 days of work due to school holidays or a sick kid. We’re not even through the first quarter yet. If the rest of the year is like this quarter, we’ll miss more than 40 days of work by the end of the year. How can that be?

When Brian and I both worked full time, every cough, every fever, every bout of stomach flu was a major crisis. Who’s going to stay home from work? What if the other kids get it? What if we get it? I had 6 paid sick days a year—generous considering half of American workers don’t have any. But it wasn’t close to covering all the days one of our kids was sick. Of course, I could always use my vacation time, but I needed that to cover the random holidays the kids had off from school.

My kids’ pediatrician explained to me once that children get 8-10 colds and fevers a year. What does that mean in sick days?

Let’s say on average your kid has to be home from school one day per illness (although some illnesses don’t require any missed days of school, while others can knock your kid out for a week, easy). That’s 9 days per year, per kid.

Let’s say you have two kids, and their 9 sick days a year overlap by a half. That means you need to take a good 13 or 14 days off a year to be home with a sick kid. That’s not including all the random “professional development days” and holidays that only school children and postal workers get (Cesar Chavez Day, anyone?). Nor does that number include the days when you, the parent, are sick. And no matter how many green smoothies you drink for breakfast, if you’re up all night with a sick kid, you’re bound to get whatever is keeping him awake.

At my last job, I almost never took a sick day when I was sick. This garnered sympathy from some of my coworkers, and the stink eye from others.

“Why are you exposing me to your germs?” they wanted to say.

And I wanted to reply, “I can’t afford to take a f***ing sick day for myself. I have three kids!”

My husband was one of those Americans who didn’t have any sick days. He was a freelancer, so any day he took off meant a day he didn’t get paid.

The pay wasn’t really our problem, though. Our main problem was that we had too much work to do, and couldn’t afford to get behind. So usually, when one of the kids was sick, we worked from home.

It was generous of my employer to let me do this, but let’s face it. It sucks to be fielding conference calls on mute while your kid is moaning from fever on the couch. It just does. You feel like you’re neglecting your kid when she needs you most, and you feel like you’re letting your coworkers down, too.

I used to do just about anything to avoid losing a sick day. I canceled play dates if the other kids had even the slightest cold. I cajoled my kids into drinking various herbal remedies at the first sniffle. And I’m not proud to admit it, but on more than one occasion I gave my kids Tylenol for their flushed cheeks and sent them to school anyway. I also had an alarming capacity for denial. That little fleck of something I saw in my kid’s hair wasn’t really a lice nit—probably just dandruff. Here’s your lunchbox, Sweetie!

I’m curious to hear how other people handle sick days. What do you do?

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Just for kicks, I went through the calendar to see how many days the kids have been out of school sick or for random holidays. It averages about 1 day/week for the first 10 weeks of this year:

I’m having one of those weeks.

My work deadlines would be totally manageable by themselves. But all this random stuff comes up.

Like planning my son’s birthday party Sunday. Which we should have been ready for, since it’s the same day every year, but somehow it snuck up on us.

We wanted to keep it simple and small, but still…There are goodie bags to be supplied, food to be bought and prepared, a backyard treasure hunt to be planned. And cake. How to accommodate the various food allergies among his 4-year-old cohorts with an acceptable egg-free, wheat-free, nut-free cake that is “brown on the outside, white on the inside” as per the Birthday Boy’s request?

Then this morning I took my daughter to the doctor to get a wee teensy pebble removed from the inside of her eyelid. That was fun. (Parenting tip: 8-year-olds LOVE eye drops!)

And to put icing on the (allergen-free) cake, we’re not sleeping well.

You know the drill. Ruby’s in a new phase; she can’t fall asleep unless she’s in our bed. (At least, I hope it’s a phase.) When she finally falls asleep, I carry her to her bed, go back to my bed, and swoon into sleep.

An hour later, Jake pads into our room because he needs someone to wipe his nose.

I sleep on the side of the bed near the door, so I usually field these requests. I wipe Jake’s nose, tuck him in bed, armed him with a clean, prophylactic tissue to guard against more nose-wipe requests, forbid him from getting up again, and go back to my bed.

Another hour goes by, during which I fall back into a deep sleep…

And then, suddenly, I wake to what can only be a weapon of mass destruction exploding in my bed. But it’s just my poor husband, having a violent, sneezing allergy attack. (Note to self: Do not let allergy-plagued husband mow the lawn ever again.)

Eventually Brian gets up, takes his allergy meds, and soon he’s snoring beside me. But I’m wide awake.

I lie on my back for the next two hours and stare at the ceiling. I make good use of this quiet time to curse the universe and everyone in it, including me, for not being one of those people who can just easily slip back into sleep.

All of this is to say that when someone sent me a PDF of this “children’s” book (Go the F**k to Sleep), I had to laugh, and then share it. It would make a great gift. You can buy it on Amazon. (I am not getting paid to say that, I just feel obligated. This guy deserves some book sales.)

In case you don’t feel like opening the PDF, here’s the beginning:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the f**k to sleep.

The windows are dark in the town, child.
The whales huddle down in the deep.
I’ll read you one very last book if you swear
You’ll go the f**k to sleep.

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run, and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying.
Lie the f**k down, my darling, and sleep.

And so on…

* * *

Did you take the survey yet?

Would you be so kind as to send the survey post to five friends? Still would like to get another 50 responses or so.

* * *

Speaking of books, I got Tina’s Fey’s “Bossypants” as a Mother’s Day gift. It’s delightful. I kept stopping last night to read parts out loud to Brian. We need more funny feminists.

Do you hear that sound? Like the wind through the trees? It’s the sound of a million parents, all across America, sighing with relief. Our children are going back to school today!

All in all, we had a great two weeks off. Luckily, neither Brian nor I had to work. We went to the zoo, the aquarium, and the park. The kids’ rode their new scooters to the bakery and everyone got cookies. We read books to each other. We hosted a sleepover party where all the guests’ names were Lila(h), which brought on a lot of good-natured confusion.

“Hey Lila?”

“What?”

“No, the other Lila…”

We did a lot of cooking, and a few times I convinced the girls to help. Inspired by the show “iCarly,” Brian made spaghetti tacos for dinner. I learned how to make cheese puffs from an Alice Waters recipe—tiny golden-brown puffs of buttery goodness. Everyone loved them except Ruby, who was expecting something closer to Cheetohs. You know, something loaded with preservatives that would leave orange sticky residue on her fingers.

Ruby: “Those aren’t real cheese puffs!”

Me: “Honey, they’re the original cheese puffs!”

Martha: “Maybe you need to rename them.”

Me: “How about cheese clouds? Cheese nuggets?”

Ruby: “Too late.”

When it rained, we watched movies: Batman, The Incredibles, and we went to the theater to see Tangled. When we ran out of animated movies, we advanced to Elvis and Charlie Chaplin movies.

Now that the kids are getting older (current ages: 3, 7, and 10) they can play together peacefully for longer intervals. They made forts and lego castles and disappeared in their rooms for an hour at a time. But eventually Jake would try to steal Ruby’s marbles (it makes her so crazy!), or he would refuse to pretend to be her cat, or the rough housing would get too boisterous, and we would have to distract everyone with an art activity or a board game.

We played Trouble until we were bored and moved on to Sorry. We played that game until we truly were sorry; it’s the same mind-numbing game as Trouble but instead of popping the dice you pick a card. We moved on to Scrabble for more challenge. Boys against girls. The boys won but the girls gave them a run for their money with words like “ariels.”

I always have mixed feelings about these long breaks with the kids. We did have a lot of fun, I feel grateful for this time, but by Saturday, I felt like a scullery maid and Brian felt like whatever the male equivalent is of a scullery maid. Some combination of a waiter/butler/chauffeur/bouncer/court jester. We love these kids. We can’t wait to get them off our hands.

Are we just trying too hard?

Studies show that the time parents spend with their children today (both moms and dads) has “risen dramatically” compared with parents in the mid-1990s. Working parents worry that we’re still not spending enough time with our kids. But in one study by Ellen Gallinsky, when children were asked what their one wish would be for their parents, it wasn’t more time together. Instead, they wanted their parents to be “less tired and less stressed.”

How about you? Do you feel like you get the right amount of time with your kids? How was your winter break?

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I recently got an email from a blog reader who said she had been obsessively reading and re-reading my first post, and all the comments that followed it. I wanted to include an excerpt of her email here, but wasn’t able to get in touch with her to get permission. (If you’re out there, my email kept bouncing back!)

Suffices to say, after years of managing what sounds like a challenging career and raising young children, she said she feared she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She wanted to know if I could see my own breakdown coming, and if so, what were the “warning bells”?

There were warning bells. I’ll tell you all about them, and perhaps more importantly, what I tried to do about them. They started almost as soon as I took a full-time job, when my daughter was 8 months old and my stepdaughter was still a toddler. They went right on ringing, on and off, for more than five years, until I quit.

Once, when I thought I was going to have to fire someone, I broke out in itchy red hives all over my body. Another time, I had a panic attack in the middle of a client meeting.

I was still getting used to being a parent, and I found the home-to-work-back-home routine grueling. We had no family in the area to help when one of us had to travel out of town for work or we just needed time to paint the kitchen. Normal people seemed to go about their lives fixing meals and mowing the lawn. We, on the other hand, seemed to be moving through mud, one child attached to each ankle.

And then there was the physical part. No one had warned us what a toll parenting takes on your body. The backaches from lugging children and all their stuff around, the twisting and contorting into strange positions to nurse and talk on the phone at the same time, or to stretch for a pacifier that has rolled under the couch, exactly out of arm’s reach. The illnesses. The sleep deprivation. I developed an eye twitch that went on for months. It felt like a little moth had taken up residence in my eyelid.

I became aware for the first time that my energy was a precious resource, and I had to conserve it. Every movement had to have a purpose. If I went upstairs to get my watch, I took an armload of toys with me. On the way down, I brought the basket of dirty laundry. Every action invoked at least one other action. I ate standing up while I made the kids’ dinner. I coordinated trips to the gym with a friend so I could have some much needed social connection and exercise at the same time.

Sometimes at night, I would lie in bed and feel the earth spinning under me, as if I’d just gotten off a carnival ride. I heard the bells, all right, and I knew for whom they were tolling.

The problem was, it was hard to believe that there was anything wrong with the way I was living. Wasn’t this what everybody did? Busyness was indeed expected, normalized.

Naturally, then, the problem had to be with me. I just needed to try harder.

I noticed that when I didn’t sleep enough, I was much more likely to get sick. If one of the girls was up at night, then there wasn’t much I could do. But if the kids were sleeping, it was inexcusable to lie awake. I took herbal sleep remedies for bad nights, and for really bad nights, I had sleeping pills. Brian and I alternated getting up with the kids on the weekend so we each had one day when we could sleep in until 8 or 9 am. I almost never drank alcohol because it made me wake up in the middle of the night. There was a 6 a.m. yoga class I tried to go to three times a week because, although it felt like a wild indulgence, it gave me more energy to deal with screaming kids and cranky clients and it helped me sleep. I quit coffee. That was not easy to do, quitting coffee. I had terrible headaches for a week, but once I adjusted to drinking tea it wasn’t so bad.

To make the most of our precious non-working time, Brian created an elaborate schedule for the weekends that carefully balanced “family time” and “alone time” for each of us. We had an alternate schedule for weekends when we didn’t have Martha.

Still it wasn’t enough.

Brian threw his back out a few times so badly he could barely walk. We both developed various forms of repetitive stress injury in our hands. When we were beyond exhausted, we would start silly arguments with each other that would last for days, until we no longer remembered why we were supposed to be mad.

In the equation of money versus time, we had money, but no amount of scheduling could resolve our lack of time. So, we used our money to buy time.

We hired Dinora to clean our house. We hired Thania to take care of Ruby during the day, and once a month she hosted a “date night” for all the families in her daycare, which Ruby never missed. We hired Jesús to mow the lawn and weed the garden. Many days, it seemed like the only thing keeping us going was the hard work of Latin American immigrants.

We did most of our own laundry, but we sent out Brian’s work shirts to be laundered, to avoid the ironing. We hired Ed to do our taxes. We hired an arborist to trim our trees. We hired a parade of IT people to climb up into our dusty attic and tinker with our wireless network, and each one of them ridiculed whoever had worked it on last. We had produce delivered to the house once a week, and if we remembered, we added bread and milk to the delivery to save a trip to the store.

Over the months, we learned endless ways to buy a little time with a little money:

• When it’s your day to bring the snack to preschool, buy pre-cut fruit and cheese.
• When you order a take-out dinner, order extra for the kids’ lunches.
• Outsource the birthday parties to the YMCA Kindergym or Pump-It-Up (“The Inflatable Party Zone!”) where there is no set up, no clean up, no cooking, and for an extra fee, they make the goodie bags that parents use to lure their children back into the car when the party’s over.
• Join a gym with good childcare, so if one parent has to work on the weekend, the other can take the kids and still get some exercise.

We bought everything we could buy online—clothes, diapers, books, computer supplies. We kept to a strict 8 pm bedtime schedule for the kids, even if they didn’t seem tired, because there was so much that had to get done after they were in bed. After vowing I would never do this, we used the TV many mornings and evenings and sometimes on weekend afternoons when we needed to clean or pack up the car or just have a moment of peace.

We couldn’t afford for one of us to stop working, but we felt very lucky that we could afford the extra help.

How do families do it when both parents have to work fulltime and they’re still living paycheck to paycheck?

How do single parents do it?

We took elaborate measures to cope, money ran through our hands at an alarming rate, and still it wasn’t enough. When our coping strategies stopped working and we found ourselves teetering on the edge, we brought in the experts. We found a wonderful couple’s therapist and learned to stop taking our stress out on each other. I saw an acupuncturist when I developed a nerve problem in my hands, and I saw him again when I had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I found a naturopath who tested my saliva and prescribed Vitamin B shots and a complicated mix of amino acids and yet more herbs. Brian subjected himself to weekly allergy shots for months, and then a miracle happened. His allergies improved. He, too, started working out more, and his back pain finally subsided.

All these strategies, supplements, and support systems, all of our combined ingenuity, made it possible, just barely, for both of us to keep working full time. And then our son was born. And that is a story for another day.

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I love hearing from blog readers, and blog readers tell me they love reading your comments. What’s your story? Are you hearing warning bells? What are you doing about them?

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My first semester in grad school for journalism, more than a decade ago, was a shock.

Boom! Right from the beginning we had daily story deadlines. Each of us desperately wanted to prove ourselves to be the next Edward R. Murrow. None of us knew what we were doing.

We were awestruck by our professors, who had held important positions at The New York Times and the major news networks, reported in war torn countries, and braved beatings in Tiananmen Square. We craved their approval. We would labor over our stories intensely, only to have our heroes rip them to pieces.

No one escaped that first few months unscathed.

Finally, one of my classmates did the thing we had all been trying very, very hard not to do.

She broke down in her advisor’s office and cried.

Marcia, her advisor, did not shrink in horror, or send her away, or belittle her, or get flustered, or do any of the things we all secretly feared she might do. Instead, she reached behind her desk and pulled out a box of tissues.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You wouldn’t believe how many students have cried in my office.”

* * *

I wish we all had Marcia’s attitude about crying. I wish we could take it in our stride, see it as a normal, healthy response to everyday disappointment, pain, and stress, instead saving it up for the big stuff—death, divorce, this.

We see crying as a sign of weakness. This is a terrible burden for men, of course, who are supposed to be “emotionally available” but without any of those sissy emotions. But it’s also a terrible burden for women, precisely because we tend to be more easily moved to tears. It’s expected of us. Then when we do it, we are dismissed as delicate, hysterical creatures who just can’t take the heat. Or manipulators.

So when we feel tears coming, we do everything we can to shut them off.

I’m one of those people. I never cried in Marcia’s office. I rarely cry at sad movies. When some difficulty arises, at work or at home, I tend to get angry or focus on solving the problem, but not cry.

It’s gotten so hard to cry, in fact, that I’ve developed what you might call crying constipation. The tears are there; they just don’t come out.

It’s like my tear ducts haven’t been properly maintained. When I get really upset, a tiny janitor inside my (brain? sinuses?) pulls out his wrench and cranks the rusty old faucet open. But just when the water starts rumbling in the pipes, he shuts it off again. I end up dry-eyed and anxious. Or worse.

Two years ago, as I was spiraling into the depression, that turned into a nervous breakdown, I couldn’t sleep. I could barely make myself eat. I was having panic attacks at random times of the day and night. But I couldn’t cry.

Looking back, I think that I imagined that if I started crying, it would mean I had been beaten. Crying was a kind of surrender, and when you think you’re holding the entire world together, you can’t surrender. Too many people depend on you. You have to keep going.

At a certain point, I couldn’t keep going. That’s when the tears came.

I would seem fine at work, then meet my friend David for lunch and cry into my Tandoori chicken. After lunch, I’d blow my nose and go back to work until it was time to pick up my kids. I’d start crying again, quietly, on the BART train, and by the time I picked up my car and arrived at Ruby’s school, I’d be sobbing in the parking lot.

Blow nose. Pick up kids. Drive home. Make dinner. Hold it together until Brian could get home and take over the evening routine. Stumble upstairs to bed, and cry myself to sleep.

This terrified me. Who was this woman with the endless supply of tears? When was it going to stop?

Sometimes your body knows a thing before your mind does. Maybe it’s your soul that knows. I realize now that crying was my body/soul’s way of saying, Honey, enough is enough. This is way too hard. You are made for more than just taking care of other people.

A nervous breakdown can be caused by many things. In my case, one of the causes was a failure to listen. All those tears that I’d been holding back, they were trying to tell me something—that I was trying to do something impossible, that I was living the wrong life, that I was giving up too much for a job that gave back too little. But I’d been too afraid to listen.

* * *

The crying went on for months, and then slowly started to dry up. At some point, I realized I was better. I don’t know when it happened. Now I find it hard to cry again, but I know better. When I feel that little janitor coming with his wrench, I try to let him do his thing.

Every once in a while, after the kids are in bed and I’m alone in the kitchen making their lunches, I’ll listen to a particularly sad Moth story and have a nice, satisfying little cry.

You know what else helps when I want to cry but can’t? Chopping onions. Sometimes a fake cry makes it easier to segue into a real one. Sad movies or sad music can also help. Anything that quiets the mind can help. For me that’s writing or meditation.

Why am I telling you all this? If you browse through this blog, you’ll find hundreds of comments from women and men—most of whom I’ve never met—talking about their struggles to do something that is incredibly hard and maybe impossible.

My message to them, and to you, is that it is OK to cry about it. It’s not a sign of weakness or an act of surrender. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your job like I did, or that you’re going to spiral into some terrible depression. It’s actually the other way around. It’s simply a way of taking in a message your body already knows, but your mind hasn’t been able or willing to absorb:

This isn’t your fault. It’s just really, really hard.

Crying is a way of having compassion for yourself. It’s just listening. Once you can take that in, you get to decide what to do about it.

* * *

Need a good cry RIGHT NOW? Listen one of these two heartbreaking stories from The Moth: Andrew Solomon: The Refugees; Mike Destefano: Franny’s Last Ride.

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I would get it every Sunday. It would start in the late afternoon, a sadness laced with dread, a weight pressing lightly on my chest. As the evening wore on, the feeling would get stronger, the weight on my chest heavier, until I tucked the kids in bed.

Only then could I fully contemplate the week ahead. I’d open my Google calendar, with its absurd overlapping red and purple boxes representing all the places I was expected at the same time.

If I’d been a Roman Catholic saint, I could have used the miracle of bilocation to appear in both 11 am meetings Tuesday, and Ruby’s 11 am dentist appointment. If I could have stopped time, it would have been possible to lead the workshop that was supposed to end at 5:30 and still manage to get back across the Bay Bridge to pick up two kids in two different places before childcare closed at 6 o’clock.

Alas, I was a mere mortal, which meant my week would be a series of mad sprints, one after another, without pause. I would eat standing up, answer email in the bathroom, and cut out everything that wasn’t necessary. And still I would be late. Still I would have to beg out of meetings, miss appointments, and disappoint people who counted on me.

Technically, I had chosen to live this way. But looking at my calendar, it didn’t feel like there was any choice involved in how I spent my days. There were so many to-dos that they were squeezing me out of my own life. The truth of this washed over me every Sunday evening.

The problem was more than busyness. There was no flow, that effortless state of being where the ego falls away and we truly enjoy the task we are engaged in, simply for the sake of doing it. Instead, I was racing through every task so I could move on to the next one. In my mind, I had already moved on to the next one.

My Sunday Night Blues ended abruptly that warm spring day when I had a nervous breakdown, quit my job, and completely changed my life.

Now Sunday nights are usually a mix of joy and relief. I’m tired from an active weekend with the kids, but I can also look forward to the coming week because I know I will have time alone to write, to talk to a friend, to look up a new recipe for dinner. No matter what else I have going on—freelance projects, housework, helping out at my kids’ schools—there is room for me. So far.

But this story is still unfolding. I’ve started working again. I’m determined not to fall into the trap of an unlived life, a life without flow, but the work I do is demanding and I’m ambitious. How do I keep from getting sucked in too far?

I’m not the only one who has sung the Sunday Night Blues. What is this phenomenon, do you think? Does it happen to you?

For more on “flow,” watch this talk by the author who wrote the book about it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

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This is the first of a series of posts about working moms and breastfeeding.

I went back to work when my son was four months old and still living exclusively on a diet of breast milk. So approximately every three hours I dropped what I was doing and ducked into Conference Room B. All four of the small conference rooms in our office had clear glass walls, but the HR director and I had carefully covered the glass in Room B from floor to ceiling in dark red paisley tablecloths, secured with lots of thick packing tape. Our office manager had thoughtfully sent an email around the office reminding people not to book that room: “Remember ‘B’ is for Baby!”

Once inside, I always locked the door.

What I did next is something I have never heard another working mom say she enjoyed.

First I took off my shirt because I didn’t want it to get wet. Then I unsnapped my nursing bra, removed the pads, and set them face up on the conference table. I unpacked my ‘Medela Pump In Style,’ a breast pump cleverly disguised to look like a stylish backpack, one that might contain important legal briefs or confidential sales projections. I plugged it in. I assembled bottles and tiny plastic hoses quickly, then carefully positioned the suction cups.

When I turned the power dial, the pump began to wheeze and groan rhythmically. I often wondered if people could hear it in the adjacent conference rooms. The walls between them were paper-thin, but I didn’t care. I was just thankful that the lock on the door was secure.

Within a few seconds, milk began to drip, then trickle into the bottles. It would have been nice to relax into an oxytocin-induced meditative state, to enjoy pumping the way other people enjoy cigarette breaks.

But most of the time I had work to do. I learned early on to pin the suction cups in place with my right arm, leaving my left hand free (I’m left-handed) to page through whatever document I was reading and write comments in the margins.

After about ten minutes the bottles were two-thirds full. I snapped the pump off. It was suddenly very quiet while I patted my breasts dry with a paper towel and got dressed.

Then to the employee kitchen to wash everything and put away the milk.

We had one shared refrigerator in my office. I deliberately stored the bottles on the bottom shelf, against the side. Discreet, but not clandestine. I didn’t want to hide them behind people’s lunches. That would imply I was doing something shameful or perverse.

Occasionally a male employee would be fixing his coffee at the kitchen counter when I arrived to wash my pump parts. He usually left quickly—either out of embarrassment or a desire to give me some privacy. There was another sink available in the women’s bathroom which had two stalls, but it was small and cramped, there was no sponge or dish soap, and something about it seemed unsanitary to me, so I usually used the kitchen. Three hours later, I did it all again.

Even under the best of circumstances, pumping is time-consuming and inconvenient. I spent most of my job in back-to-back meetings—it was hard just to find time to use the bathroom or grab lunch. When I was breastfeeding, it seemed like I was constantly making apologies when I had to end a meeting early or start late. Luckily, most of my coworkers were very understanding.

But sometimes I would get tired of making apologies, or I would have attend a meeting at a client’s office, so instead of organizing my meetings around my every-three-hours pumping schedule, I’d pump around my meeting schedule. This strategy had big drawbacks—several months after I went back to work I developed mastitis, a painful infection that resulted from waiting too long to pump. I spent one miserable night alternately shivering with chills and sweating from fever before I went to the doctor and got antibiotics.

* * *

Most of the women I know have made sacrifices to continue breastfeeding after they return to work. We do this despite the inconvenience and indignity of hooking ourselves up to a milking machine three times a day, because the health benefits for our babies and ourselves abound.

Many of our coworkers and employers, however, are still woefully ignorant about breastfeeding; without realizing it, they put us in situations that can be thoroughly humiliating.

In Part II. I’m going to tell you about what happened to my friend, Jackie. Go to Part II.

* * *

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I had a truly crappy Mother’s Day this year.

I think Anna Jarvis would understand. Inspired by her own mother’s life, she started a campaign in 1907 to recognize mothers for their contribution to society. She was successful in making Mother’s Day a national holiday, but then spent the rest of her life fighting its commercial exploitation. She died in an asylum when she was 84. (That’s her in the photo above, on the right. Her mother, Ann is on the left.)

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.

—Anna Jarvis.

My bad Mother’s Day was no one’s fault in particular. The problem was that my husband, Brian, had been working way too much. He’s on a project that is challenging and even sometimes fun, but also complex and intense. After weeks of working late, often until 2 or 3 am, the intensity combined with lack of sleep started taking its toll.

I took the kids out Saturday morning so he could rest. When we met up at a school function in the afternoon, Brian told me he’d been fighting off anxiety attacks all day. He’d tried to go out and get me something for Mother’s Day, he said tearfully, but couldn’t think of leaving the house without making things worse. We hustled home and put him in bed. He slept for 15 hours straight.

Sunday morning he told me he didn’t think he could get out of bed.

“No problem!” I said, trying not to act alarmed. “I’ll take the kids out. We’ll do something fun.”

After all, Anna Jarvis was right. I don’t need flowers or cards or candy. But I need my husband to be okay.

I recently read a report that said fathers now feel more torn over balancing work and family than mothers. In our family, that makes sense. I left my job last year and now freelance part time. But my husband, who does the same web consulting work I do, has continued full speed ahead. Someone has to, right?

I wanted to make the best out of Mother’s Day–if nothing else, so Brian wouldn’t feel so bad. Maybe I could take the kids to the Little Farm in Tilden Park. I’d just soak in my delicious children by myself, somewhere peaceful and kid-friendly and outdoors. Then we could go to a toy store to get birthday presents for Jake, who was turning three on Monday. This idea sounded much better when it was scripted as a two-parent act, but now it was improv.

It started raining before we even left the house. Goodbye, peaceful outdoor setting. I decided to take the kids to Kindergym, a giant room at the YMCA with a bouncy castle, a jungle gym, a climbing wall, and lots of rowdy children. Heaven for my two- and seven-year-old. Clamorous, overstimulating hell for me.

When I couldn’t take any more, I pried Jake and Ruby out of their homemade fort, (Aw! C’mon, Mama! You said 5 more minutes! That wasn’t 5!), and signed them into Child Watch so I could go to a dance class that I love. I knew the day would go better if I could do one nice thing for myself. But I tweaked an old knee injury and had to stop after 20 minutes.

Shower. Limp back to Child Watch. Pack up kids. (Aw! Just one more picture, Mama! I’m not done with my picture!) Drive to Fourth Street.

I knew the toy shopping had a better chance of going well if we ate first. I picked the yummy Mexican place at the end of the parking lot because it’s fast and they have a simple rice-and-beans plate that both kids usually eat with minimal complaints.

The restaurant was the most crowded I’d ever seen it. We snagged three chairs at the end of a long table with a very unhappy looking family at the other end. They did not look like they wanted to share their table. So I didn’t ask. I just plunked the kids down and ignored the unfriendly glares. Maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe they were having a crappy Mother’s Day, too.

Even if it was personal, I couldn’t blame them, really. Jake hadn’t napped and was entering his “mean drunk” stage of the day. When the food arrived, he refused to eat his beans or anything with protein. (No! Jus’ rice, mama! I only want rice!) Which made Ruby laugh for some reason. Which made Jake mad. (You no laugh at me, Ruby!) I didn’t really feel like sharing a table with him, either.

I called Brian to check on him. He hadn’t moved from the couch since we’d left three hours ago. He started to say something else, but I couldn’t hear him over the kids.

“I want more rice! Ruby, you dop pushing me!” Jake screeched.

“Jake, leave your sister alone! Ruby, sit up in your seat!..Brian–I couldn’t hear you. What did you say?”

“I need to get off the phone,” he said.

When we hung up, Jake started crying.

“I want to talk to DADDY!”

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. We can’t talk to Daddy right now. Daddy needs to rest.”

My son lay his blond head on the table and wailed at the top of his lungs.

“I WANT TO TALK TO DADDY!”

Over and over and over again.

I knew exactly how he felt. I wanted Daddy, too.

More dirty looks from restaurant patrons. It was too crowded to walk around to Jake’s side of the table, so I just sat there, staring at him while the whole restaurant considered my incompetence.

This is Mother’s Day! I wanted to yell at them. Can you guys cut me a little slack?

After a long minute, I asked Jake calmly if he would like to play under the table. He sniffled and allowed that he would.

We finished lunch. Once outside, both kids magically became peaceful. It’s weird how that happens sometimes. I considered my options. Take them home and stress out their father, or muscle through the toy store, and mark one very important item off the to-do list.

It was the fastest shopping spree in birthday history. I bribed Ruby with a dollar to “babysit” her brother, then left them near the stuffed animals and frantically hobbled through the aisles, pulling things off the shelves–a robotic claw Jake has been obsessed with for weeks, a spy pen like the ones Ruby and Martha have that he covets, a kid-size rake so he can do something besides defoliating the plants with his baby scissors when he “helps” me in the garden.

Birthday presents. Check.

“OK, guys, it’s time to get in the car.”

“Aw! We’re not ready yet–”

“I’ll give you a candy when we get home,” I said. I had sunk to a new low. Candy Bribes.

I will spare you the rest of the gory details. It suffices to say the second half of the day was as fun as the first half. Short nap for Jake. An art project that I never helped Ruby with because Jake woke up too soon. A whiny trip to the grocery store. Arguments over dinner. Lots of wondering how my mom did this. Lots of wishing, for the millionth time, we had grandparents nearby. Lots of worrying about my husband, flat on his back upstairs.

When the kids were in the bath, I emailed my friend Angel. I needed to complain to somebody but didn’t want to make Brian feel worse. Later that night, she sent this email back:

…both of mine are finally asleep-Amalia after getting all cranked out and crying for 40 minutes and Paloma after having a dramatic fighting/yelling/crying battle in the shower (doesn’t want to wash hair)…this comes of course after telling Paloma it was time to get ready for bed and finding a huge mess in her room (having told her several times to clean it up already today) complete with a glitter spill all over her bed-which she knows she is not supposed to get out on her bed. Oh yeah, and Amalia peed on the floor while she was waiting to get in the shower. And my husband was sleeping this whole time after working the whole day.

mothers day is whack.

but some day, when our kids won’t even remember to call us because they’re in Paris, or NY or wherever, and you and I are at the spa in Calistoga for a “girls’ getaway”, we will reminisce about when our beautiful children were still ours to love, and hold, and feed, and wash, and scream at. We’ll long for these times, or at least remember them with a sentimental warmth in our hearts.

I have to wash the glitter off my feet now before I go to bed.

Monday morning came. I took the kids to school. Brian showered, shaved, dressed, and drove to work, just like nothing had happened.

You know what would be a great way to recognize mothers next year? Stop burning out the dads.

~

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Exactly one year ago today, I went home sick from work and I never went back. I hadn’t planned to leave my job, but my body refused to obey orders.

For years, I’d felt like a circus performer spinning plates on sticks. As my family grew, and my responsibilities at work grew, more plates went up in the air. One plate for my daughter. One for my son. One for my stepdaughter. One for my husband. One for my team at work. One for each project and one for each client. One for Ruby’s school. One for Jake’s preschool. By the time I realized there were too many plates, I was trapped. If I stopped, they’d all come crashing down.

And then I did stop. And a miracle happened.

Nothing crashed.

My clients didn’t cancel their accounts. My company didn’t shut down. My kids did not run in the street like wild unloved animals with dirty hair. My husband, who was also chronically overworked, did not leave me or collapse in a heap or develop a drinking problem. In fact, he rose to the occasion. He kept his own plates in the air and somehow added a few of mine. Family in Seattle and New York and Detroit, old friends and new friends, jumped in and started spinning plates. The show went on.

Every mother I know has the same fear. Every one of us is haunted, at one time or another, by the burden we carry and believe we carry alone. We are doing so much. Many of us are doing more than our share. If we had to stop, it seems like the world would stop. We’re so focused on our purpose, so distracted by our busyness, that sometimes we can’t see the people around us, the ones who love us and want to help. This last year has taught me that there are a lot of people around who want to help. I would like to thank them now.

Thank you, first and foremost, to Brian for being everything and more. For continuing to work so we could keep the lights on and not forgetting to wash Ruby’s hair or pay Jake’s preschool and never once making me feel like I screwed up. I didn’t deserve you when I got you. I still can’t believe my luck.

Thank you, Linda, for flying out from New Jersey, taking time off of your own over-busy schedule to cook and clean and lavish attention on the kids when I couldn’t.

Thank you, Randall, for sitting with me in the darkest places I’ve ever been so I didn’t have to go there alone.

Thank you, Thania and Jose, for being our extended family when we didn’t have any around, for picking up the kids on more than one Sunday afternoon so Brian and I could both rest.

Thank you, Dinora, for the roses and the delicious homemade pupusas and empanadas which fed us for weeks.

Thank you, Angel, for the surprise gift packages left at the door, for running out to get cold medicine when we were all sick, for never holding it against me when I made plans with you and then canceled because I couldn’t stand to leave the house.

Thank you, Kat, for encouraging me to “swoon” like they did in the Victorian novels, and for reminding me of what I had.

Thank you to my sister, Holly, for the offers to fly out and help even though you have your hands full with four kids of your own, and for the countless pep talks while I sobbed on the phone in the parking lot waiting for Ruby to come out of Spanish class.

Thank you to the other Holly for totally getting it.

Thank you, Mom for being the person I could call at any time of night no matter how late, and thank you, Dad and Fran, for thinking everything I do is brilliant and there are no mistakes.

Thank you, Doris and Charlie, for offering to fly out from Detroit and take the kids back with you and them fly them back home, too.

Thank you, David, for calling once a week and telling me I could call back or not, and I could be in a good mood or not, and I could talk or just listen and it was all fine with you.

Thank you, Kristy, for the walk around the lake and telling me I had nothing to feel bad about. That really sunk in.

Thank you to all four of my grandparents who are a constant reminder of what is important.

Thank you, Deborah, Sandy, Dawn and Sherri, Maria M., Liz, Cathy, Marjorie, Gabby, and all those moms and dads on the playground for the words of wisdom and encouragement.

Thank you to my former coworkers—you know who you are—who reached out with cards and emails and phone calls.

Thank you, Andy, Bruce, Toby, Barry, Chana, Connie, Nancy, and everyone else in my writing group for shining your light.

Thank you, Elizabeth Gilbert, Pema Chodron, and Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Thank you, Joan Blades and MomsRising for recognizing what a raw deal we’re getting and trying to do something about it.

Thank you to everyone who’s written since I started the blog to share your own adventures of trying to make a living while raising a family without losing your soul in the process. I know I’m in good company.

I’m doing much better now.

***

Post script: Ugh! I was afraid I’d leave someone out. Kim M., the dinners together, the commiseration has been an important part of this year. Thank you, too. Who else did I leave out?

This morning, for the first time in almost a year, I did not take a pill when I got out of bed. The reason I took these pills, and the reason I stopped, has to do with a word I learned recently:

Iatrogenic, which means ’caused by the doctors.’

I’ll start at the beginning.

For six years, I “balanced” a demanding job, a commute, and raising young children. All things considered, I thought I was managing really well until just before my last child turned one year old. Then, the stress and exhaustion I’d been holding at bay engulfed me. I could barely get out of bed, or eat, or think. I couldn’t work, so I took a leave of absence.

We're making women crazy, then acting like there's something wrong with them for being crazy.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist who, naturally enough, prescribed anti-depressants. Makes sense, right? Because by the time I dragged myself into her office, I was really, really depressed.

I was also really, really anxious. I was having horrible, crippling panic attacks almost daily, and I was waking up in the middle of the night, shaking, heart pounding, unable to go back to sleep.

The anti-depressants were supposed to help with this also. Unfortunately, they made me jittery. Now, on top of the anxiety I was already grappling with, I couldn’t sit in a chair without jiggling my knee up and down. They gave me other weird side effects: night sweats, headaches, cotton mouth. I started having a lot of trouble sleeping, but it was hard to tell whether it was a side effect of the anti-depressants, since I’d been having trouble sleeping when I was working, too.

So my psychiatrist wrote me a prescription for pills to help me sleep.

Things slowly started to get better for me. Summer came and went. I stopped feeling depressed. I quit my job for good. I started eating like a normal person. But still, I couldn’t get a decent night of sleep without taking a sleeping pill.

I quit coffee and chocolate and started doing a lot of yoga and meditation. Still, I couldn’t sleep without pills. If I didn’t take them, I would wake up between 1 and 3 am, heart pounding, and stare at the ceiling for a good two hours before I could sleep again. After several months of this, I developed an eye twitch.

My psychiatrist, who was intelligent, thorough, and sincere, suggested I do a sleep study. I packed up my pillow, kissed my husband and the kids good night, and drove to a sleep lab in Berkeley. There, a young women with pale skin and dyed black hair skillfully strapped me to various machines designed to monitor breathing, leg movements, brain waves, and God knows what else.

Naturally, I had another terrible night’s sleep. Which was sort of good news…

When the results came back a few weeks later, there were pages and pages of detailed findings. There was a problem with my breathing, with my “index of sleep arousals” and with something called RERAs, an intriguing acronym that was never spelled out. In short, I had a “moderate” version of sleep apnea.

My doctor called as soon as she got the results.

“This could be what’s causing your depression!” she said. “We need to get you an apnea machine so you can breathe at night. Katrina, if this works, then all your problems may vanish!” She was triumphant. I was hopeful.

Six kinds of CPAPs. Because if we can't choose a less stressful life, at least we can choose the most comfortable nose plugs.

Back I went to my HMO. A respiratory nurse named Joan patiently outfitted me in the latest artificial breathing technology, a CPAP (pronounced SEE-pap) machine.

“Our newest model,” said Joan.

The machine itself was slightly larger than a lunchbox, a dark designer gray, with a corrugated hose that looped over my head and three slim black straps that held rubber nose plugs snug to my face.

“I gave you a medium,” Joan said, looking critically at the nose plugs, which were now plugged into my nose. “If that doesn’t work, you can try the large.”

The large? I thought. I am not a large person. Is my nose really so out of proportion to my body?

But it was not the time to be vain.

Joan snapped on the machine. Oxygen flowed up the vacuum-cleaner hose on top of my head and through the nose plugs. When I opened my mouth, air came whooshing out, like I was some kind of human leaf blower.

“Don’t open your mouth,” Joan said.

I closed my mouth and nodded.

That afternoon, I took the machine home for a two-week trial. I hated the Darth Vader breathing sounds, the itchy nose plugs, sleeping with a hose on my head…but I used it diligently. If it worked, I was going to have to buy one—about $1,000. My insurance wasn’t going to pay for it, so I had to be sure it was right for me.

After ten days, I caught one of the worst head colds I’ve ever had. I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all, so I gave up on the machine. I was still sick when I brought it back to Joan.

“I don’t think it helped,” I said. I could see she was disappointed. We stared sadly at each other for a moment.  I sneezed. She wrote me a referral to see a pulmonary doctor that afternoon.

The first question the pulmonary doctor asked was, “Are you sleepy during the day?”

“Tired? Yes. Sleepy…not really.”

“Do you take naps?”

“I find it hard to nap,” I sniffled. “I mean, I find it hard to sleep. Period.”

“If you’re not sleepy during the day, then you don’t have sleep apnea.”

“What about the sleep test?”

“There are different ways to interpret the results,” she said. “But the breathing issue that came up, that could be from the sleeping pills you’re taking. They depress the central nervous system. They could definitely cause shallow breathing. Especially if you’ve been taking them for a while.”

“I’ve been taking them for ten months.”

“That could do it.”

“But it I don’t take them, I can’t sleep!”

“Yes, the antidepressants you’re on can cause insomnia in some individuals.”

We smiled at each other. Because the whole thing was so stupid.

“And on top of it all, I got this horrible cold,” I said, because suddenly I was feeling really sorry for myself.

“Oh, yeah, I see that all the time,” she said. “The CPAP can dry out your nasal passages and make you more likely to catch a virus.”

Let’s recap here:

1. Trying to work full time and raise young kids put my body under unendurable strain.

2. My body broke down.

3. The doctors decided that something was wrong with me, so they prescribed pills.

4. Those pills made it impossible to sleep, so they prescribed more pills.

5. The second pills depressed my breathing and made it look like I had sleep apnea.

6. The doctors gave me a machine to treat the sleep apnea, which dried out my (medium-to-large) nose and made me sick.

!

I called my doc and told her the whole story.

“In conclusion,” I said, after pausing for a breath. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. I just needed to quit my job, which I did. Now the only thing making me sick is the meds.”

“There’s a word for this,” she said thoughtfully. “Iatrogenic. It means ’caused by the doctors.’”

Here’s my diagnosis: It is crazy to put working parents in impossible situations where they are bound to go crazy, and then act like there’s something wrong with them for going crazy.

Why am I telling you this story? Because there is a public health crisis afoot. We are suffering from a chronic state of busyness, particularly families with young children and two working parents.

We are also suffering from our adherence to a childish ideal of rugged individualism, which keeps us from supporting each other and from asking for help when we need it. This is not an individual pathology that can be solved with a pill (the effectiveness of which is now debatable) [1], but a massive cultural pathology that dictates everything from our individual relationships to laws and workplace policies that fail to support working families.

Make no mistake—at every step of this bizarre journey, I was in the hands of a competent and caring health care professional. They used every ingenious tool at their disposal to help me. The problem was, they didn’t have the right tools. Where I needed work that challenged me without sucking the life out of me, they had anti-depressants. Where I needed someone besides my overworked husband to watch the kids for a Saturday, they had sleeping pills. Where I needed the support and encouragement of my peers, they had breathing machines.

So I’ll leave you with this question: If our doctors can’t help us, then who can?

Cross-posted with the Huffington Post and MomsRising.

[1] NEWSWEEK, “The Depressing News about Antidepressants: Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo. In fact, they may be worse,” by Sharon Begley, February 8, 2010