I went to a mellow birthday brunch this weekend for a friend’s 2-year-old. While Ruby picked out “Happy Birthday” on the piano and Jake pretended to drill things to the Christmas tree, I sipped coffee in the kitchen with a few other moms. As usual, the conversation turned to the questions that seem to plague all American mothers of young children (or at least the ones who have the luxury of asking these questions):

Should I quit my job? Can I afford to go part time? If I quit, will I be able to get back in later? If I don’t have a career, what will I have when the kids get older?

One of the moms had recently convinced her boss to let her do a job share so that she could reduce her hours.

“I told everyone it was about having more time with my family,” she said. “But it was also about having time for me.”

I was so glad she said that. When people heard I’d quit my job, several of them said things like, “You should be proud! You’re doing the right thing for your kids!” As if that was why I’d done it. For my kids. What I did wasn’t nearly so noble. I did it for me.

The job share mom said that when she was breastfeeding her twins, her doctor told her what foods she needed to eat to keep healthy.

“What happens if I don’t get enough of something?” she asked. “Will my babies get sick?”

“Oh no,” the doctor said. “The babies will get what they need. They’ll suck it out of you. You’re the one who won’t get what you need.”

She said that’s how she felt about working full time. Her kids got what they needed. She got the leftovers. In other words, she was getting sucked dry. That was my experience, too. Strangely, it was a relief to realize this. I wasn’t a bad mother, as I’d feared. I wasn’t ruining my kids’ lives by giving so much to my job. I was only ruining mine…

~Pssst!…Speaking of getting sucked dry, did you vote in the poll yet?~

After the birthday party, we stopped by an ornament-making party at another friend’s house. Jake napped in his stroller while Ruby, rather than decorate the styrofoam balls provided, ground one to bits and sculpted a beautiful snow scene. (That’s my girl. Transforming her destructive impulses into art.)

Meanwhile, I hung out in the kitchen with a whole different set of moms. After we’d talked about Obama and devoured the homemade fudge, the conversation, inevitably, turned to the work dilemma again. (OK, maybe I devoured the fudge. Everyone else was very ladylike and had only one piece.)

One of the women had once been a hot shot vice president of something or other. She’d managed the job stress by eating Tums by the handful, until she finally quit and had kids. She took a few years off of work to be home with her babies, and was just starting to freelance part time.

She told us her daughter came home from kindergarten recently, starry-eyed about another kid’s mom who told the class about her job making robots and sending them into outer space. The class was so inspired that they did an art project involving robots and outer space.

So my new friend was trying to think of what cool thing she does that would impress her 5-year-old.

Honey, did you notice what a great grocery list I make? I put it on the refrigerator and update it EVERY DAY.

I joined in with my own version:

Honey, do you know how clean the laundry is? Have you noticed that we never run out of milk or clean underwear anymore?

Ouch.

But instead of getting quietly snarky, as many of us might be tempted to do, the grocery list mom did something very open-hearted. She emailed the robot-making mom, told her how impressed her daughter was, and how jealous she was that she didn’t do work that was nearly as impressive.

And the robot mom wrote back saying how jealous she was that the grocery list mom was able to work part time.

So, the grass is always greener…

We keep talking about it at every gathering, about this mommy work dilemma, because it’s a puzzle we’re trying to solve, a Rubix cube we keep turning around in our hands. The solution seems tantalizingly close, but one colored square always seems to be on the wrong side.

I don’t understand why we can’t have both things. Why can’t we make robots that go into outer space, and do it in less than 30 hours a week? Why can’t we put in a good day’s work in six hours, instead of eight, or 10 or 12? Why does work have to suck so many of us dry?

I’ll leave you with a statistic, because you know how much I love statistics:

Americans work longer hours than workers in most other developed countries. Whether we have kids or not, we’re all trying to live on leftovers.

Most jobs aren’t made for people who have children. Which is one of the reasons a lot of moms and dads start their own businesses. Lately several blog readers have been asking for advice or stories about this. So I asked Heather Sobieralski to write a guest post about why she decided to start her own business.

Heather has two kids, is a life coach for moms, and also works part time as a middle school counselor. You can read more about her coaching services at My Mama Mojo, or about her own journey of motherhood on her blog.

Why did you decide to start your own business?

It’s something I was called to do.

When I first became a mother, life I as knew it changed. I felt as though everything I had previously known from my pre-child self was gone. My confidence disappeared. I had no I idea who this woman was occupying my body. I was embarrassed and ashamed that I was not enjoying motherhood. I was supposed to be happy right?

I tried on numerous occasions to have “real” conversations with other mothers, but they seemed to be nothing but sunshine and roses. If they admitted the least bit of self-doubt or discomfort they would always wrap up with, “Isn’t all worth it?” Well no, actually. Some days I rather miss my old life thank you very much!

I craved someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t judge me or tell me what to do. This is how My Mama Mojo was born.

My original idea was to create a business where mothers could seek support on the phone and via email from a professional. At that point, I had never heard of a life coach. I already had a master’s degree in counseling, but that didn’t seem to be what I wanted to do. I wanted to specialize in helping moms re-claim their identity. I wanted to support them to figure out how to make their post-child life full of joy and MOJO! I wanted to do this via the phone and email so moms could get support while their child took a nap, on their lunch break or when the house was quiet at night.

I remember when I had my moment of clarity about what I wanted to do.  It was if everything I had been through suddenly made sense to me. My personal hell was for a purpose. Within a few days I had enrolled in a coaching program and had a business plan.

It is now almost a year later, about $5,000 invested and many arguments with my husband about how much time and energy I was putting into this “idea.” But I love it! Every time a woman finds me and breathes a sigh a relief that she is not the only one and will feel better, it is all worth it.

What are the most common themes you hear from your clients?

Every client is different. I have had mothers of newborns and mothers of teens, but there are consistent themes.

• How becoming a mother has impacted and continues to impact their career and lack of “choices.”

• Inequities in parenting compared to their partner.

• Guilt, guilt and more guilt! Guilt for working, guilt for staying home, guilt for not enjoying being home, guilt for breastfeeding difficulties, guilt for yelling at their kids, guilt for failed relationships, guilt for being stressed, and guilt for feeling so damn guilty!

• Loss of identity.

• Self-neglect and exhaustion.

• Feeling like they are the only one who feels like this.

How have your clients solved this whole work/life dilemma in their own lives?

At the beginning of coaching I take clients through activities to identify their core values. The rest of our work together is based around what they value as important. Often after becoming a mother our values either get “lost” or change. It is amazing when women make the connection between why they have been so overwhelmed and unfulfilled. If you are living out of alignment with you values, you are not living an authentic life.

Clients have solved the work/life balance by:

• Committing to the coaching process, carving time and space to work on self-development

• Taking a good look at what is working and what is not

• Giving up comparing themselves to others who are “doing it better”

• Ditching the guilt, getting rid of the “shoulds,” and taking a look at what is really important (identifying core values)

• Trusting their decisions and new direction

Do you have any advice for women who want to start their own business?

If you are being called to do something in particular, listen!

I am just going to lay it out there…it is a lot of work, time and love to start a business. You need to be highly driven and self-motivated.

Create realistic short- and long-term goals, but be kind to yourself and allow your master plan to be fluid. If you need the security of money while building your business, hang on to your job (even part time) if you can. It takes a year or two to build a business—and this means no income coming in!

Count on your “doubt loop” coming to visit from time to time. Tell it to go away and stay focused on your vision.

Stay light and keep it fun. View it as a journey, not as a checklist.

Hire a coach! I never could have gotten my business off the ground without my own coach. It is amazing what a difference having someone to hold you accountable makes in any new endeavor.

Do you have a story or advice about starting (or NOT starting) your own business? Leave a comment here, or email me: katrina@workingmomsbreak.com.

I just got back from my sister’s wedding: a small, lovely ceremony on the beach in La Push, Washington, home of the Twilight vampires.

Luckily, (as you can see from this picture), the vampire threat levels were low. If something had gone wrong, half the wedding guests, who were trained firefighter-medics, would have known what to do.

But nothing went wrong. The weather was unseasonably sunny, the kids spent days playing tag and climbing giant pieces of driftwood, and my sister and her groom were surrounded by people who love them.

The day after the wedding, we celebrated with homemade, gluten-free, chocolate-filled donuts fried in bacon fat. (Yes, you read that right. They were fried in bacon fat. I ate two for breakfast on our last day and wasn’t hungry again until dinner.)

While I was gone, a blog reader sent me a link to this story. It’s about how she was losing her mind as a working mom, and then decided to quit her job and start her own business. It’s funny and sad and I hope you’ll read it because it has a very happy ending.

The story got me thinking…the happiest working parents I know are the ones who work for themselves. I include Brian and myself among them.

Of course, being self-employed is not perfect. It takes a while to get used to the unstable paychecks. Sometimes we work too hard. We still have bad days, or even bad months. But for many of us, self-employment is the best way to have both a challenging career and a real life outside of work.

You might think of us as free-range families.

People are simply not meant to be cooped up in offices all day, smashed into little cubicles under fluorescent lights, and force-fed cafeteria food. It makes us sick. It makes us crazy.

We need to be able to cut out at 3 pm to see our kid’s school play, or help once a week with the after school co-op, or get home in time to make a real dinner once in a while, or take a week off to go to our sister’s wedding and eat donuts (preferably fried in bacon fat).

I’m interested in hearing from other people who are self-employed. Would you consider yourself a free-range family? Do you know any free-range families? Has self-employment made your life better or worse?

Editorial note: After I wrote this post, I did a Google search for “free-range families” and found a lot of links to Lenore Skenazy’s “free-range kids,” which is based on the idea of raising children who can be self-reliant. While I think she has some interesting ideas, I am talking about something very different.

* * *

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Have you ever felt you had to hide the fact that you have kids when you’re at work?

I’ve been thinking about a comment Lily left on the blog about a week ago. Lily works in academia, where it sounds like it’s an open secret that being a parent is a professional liability. She wrote this:

I generally don’t talk too much about my kids in the work setting. A woman colleague mentioned to me that she didn’t realize that I had children until knowing me for over a year. She wasn’t married yet but said she could understand why I would omit references to family in the work setting…Very recently, a senior person, “Joe,” told me that he felt that my keeping references to children to a minimum was an “appropriate professional posture” to take.

Lily’s comment made me think about an argument I had when I was in grad school–I got my masters in journalism from UC Berkeley in 1999. One of my fellow students told me he had carefully scraped the Sierra Club bumper sticker off his car, and renounced his membership with that and all do-gooder type organizations. Why? He didn’t want to appear to have a bias when he started working for a newspaper.

I was appalled that he was willing to do this. I found the whole idea so de-humanizing. Don’t we all have a stake in having clean air to breathe, and clean water to drink? Don’t we all, no matter what our politics, benefit from having a beautiful, well-kept state park to visit on summer vacation? Do we really have to pretend not to have any skin in the game to be considered professional and “objective”?

Back to Lily. The pressure she feels to pretend she doesn’t have kids is very real. Experts say the “make it or break it” career years are between age 30 and 40. Unfortunately, these are the years when most many women* have their children.

In other words, the years we’re supposed to be putting in extra time to prove ourselves at work coincide with the years we are most likely to be pregnant, on maternity leave, sleep-deprived, and breastfeeding. It’s also when we are more likely to get sick and need to take time off to care for sick kids, attend parent-teacher conferences and other school events, and cover the random school holidays like Cesar Chavez Day and spring break.  Not coincidentally, these are also the years when women in academia and other professions very often drop into the “second tier,” careers, the dreaded Mommy Track. They go part time and lose the coveted tenure track positions. [1]

So it follows that if you want to stay in the game, you pretend you don’t have these shamefully expensive, time-consuming habits named Betty and James. And if, (heaven forfend!), someone finds out you have children, well, just make it clear that someone else is taking care of them. You won’t let them create any actual demands on your time.

I’m lucky that I never felt the pressure to “pass” as a non-parent at my jobs, but I do know the pressure to compete with colleagues who seem to have a endless bounty of evening and weekend time to move their careers ahead.

I would like to offer the idea that all of us, parents and non-parents, have skin in the game. We all have vested interest in each other’s well-being. I’m even willing to bet that if we could all make room for our humanity in the workplace–whether it’s our membership in the Sierra Club or the parenting club–people would be happier and more productive and everyone would benefit.

[1] Mary Ann Mason & Eve Mason Ekman, “Mothers on the Fast Track” 2007

From pages 4-5: It is between ages thirty and forty that women change career direction. This is the decade which I call the “make-or-break” years, when women are most likely to drop into the second tier. The demands of a first job in the fast track male-dominated professions are daunting. This is the time when sixty- to eighty-hour work weeks are not uncommon, and when extreme flexibility, including moving or constant travel, is often a job requirement.

But for women, this probationary period also coincides with the decisive years for motherhood. Very few women have children after age forty….Mothers, but not fathers, will take some time out of the workplace, from a few months to a few years. They may hope to return to the fast track position they left, but most will fall into a second tier position.

* As my friend Kat pointed out, the average age women in the U.S. have their first child is 24.9 years old. It seems that this number has been going up over the last few decades, many of us put off having children until we’re established in our careers. Thanks for the correction, Kat!

One of the great things about losing my mind is that I have more time to volunteer in my daughter’s classroom.

When I was working, I felt tremendously guilty for not being “involved enough” in my kids’ daycare and school. (I’m putting that in quotes because “involved enough” is extremely subjective and can be a hot-button issue. Who gets to decide what “involved enough” means?)

Ruby healing a goat on fieldtrip to Ardenwood Farm

After years of feeling like the slacker mom, I can report with great pride that I chaperoned three out of four field trips this winter, participated in some way in every school fundraiser, and never missed a meeting at Jake’s preschool, which take place during what used to be my afternoon commute.

One morning recently I spent a pleasant hour in Ruby’s class taping name cards to desks and then working one-on-one with Ruby and her buddies as they tried to sound their way through words like “right” and “school” and “vacation.” (When you have an emerging reader in the household you realize how little sense the English language makes.)

When it was time for me to leave, Ruby ran up to her teacher and said, “Mrs. Thomas, can my mom stay for snack?”

“Sure…but I don’t know if she has time. She might have to get to work.” Very diplomatic, that Mrs. Thomas.

“Oh, she doesn’t have to go to work,” Ruby beamed mischievously. “My mommy doesn’t have a job!”

Technically this was true. I didn’t, and don’t, have a job. Although I’m doing a lot of writing these days, I have no paycheck, no office where people monitor my comings and goings, no coworkers to gossip with or about. This is a choice I made, or was sort of forced into, depending on how you look at it.

However, as soon as Ruby made that declaration, I felt a horrible wave of embarrassment. Like she had just told everyone her mom was a bum who sits on the couch all day watching Oprah and eating chocolate caramels. (The best ones, by the way, are sold at that little chocolate shop on Solano Ave. in Albany. Delicious!)

“All mommies have a job,” said the ever respectful Mrs. Thomas.

I smiled at her bravely, and then agreed to accompany the class outside to snack.

I have spent most of my adult life working for other people and far, far too much of my self-esteem has been wrapped up in what I do for a living. At work, I got a lot of “atta-girls” when I gave a great presentation or helped win a new project or resolved a particularly gnarly personnel problem. Since I’ve stopped, my self-esteem has been on a roller coaster ride.

I’m also doing the lion’s share of the household chores and much of the kid care in the evenings, something my husband and I used to split evenly when I worked. I know my husband and kids love me and appreciate me and would never outsource my job, but there’s no public recognition for being the person who does the taxes or folds the laundry or remembers to pick up the dry cleaning. Stay-at-home moms and dads know this. I can’t even say I’m a stay-at-home mom since my youngest child is now in preschool. I’m staying at home; he’s not.

Although I was desperate to get out of the crazy rat race I was in, something smells suspiciously anti-feminist about my role now. And yet, I’m profoundly grateful to have this time to slow down and focus on what’s important. It’s confusing.

This whole experience has given me a newfound respect for the women and men I know who choose to be stay-at-home parents. Basically they’re choosing to accept a full-time–who are we kidding? it’s way more than full time–unpaid caregiving role, one that earns them no paid vacation time, no 401K plan, and nothing to put on the resume five or ten years from now if they decide to look for a paying job.

If you’re a stay-at-home parent, take a moment to give yourself an “atta-girl.” You deserve it.