why i hate to leave my babies (and why i do it anyway)

I love my boys. And I love my job.

And I hate the tension between them.

While my commute being only a walk downstairs can seem enviable, working from home brings its own struggles. Boundaries are blurred. Child care or housework can encroach on my work time if I’m not careful. Or work can seep into every hour of the day and corner of the house if I don’t make myself fully present to my children when work is done.

Yes, working from home means I’m closer to my kids when they need me. Yes, working part-time means I’m able to be with them for much of the day-to-day of their early years. But it also means that when they are wailing upstairs, I can’t run to them – there is work to be done. Likewise, when they burst out in peals of laughter with the babysitter, I miss out on their joy. And that kills me, too.

Both sounds – the cries and the delights – tear at me when I can’t be right there. The flip side of being only a door away is that I am only a door away. And no white noise or background music can mask a mother’s most immediate and instinctive desire to run to her child.

There are other frustrations, of course. Trying to explain to a toddler why he can’t barge in on his mama whenever he wants a read or a cuddle. Pumping milk for a baby in the room right above my head. Navigating the tricky balance between letting a responsible sitter take charge of their care and feeling tempted to micro-manage since I’m within earshot.

And I’ve learned that living in-between worlds – that of the working mother and the stay-at-home mother – means I’m not good at doing either 100%.

Not being a full-time stay-at-home mom means that on the days when I’m with both boys from dawn till dusk with no break for my work, we are all on each other’s nerves by bedtime. I struggle when I’m home with them full-time.

Not being a full-time working mother means that on the days when I have to leave all day (or week) for meetings or conferences, the whole household is turned upside down to prepare for my extended absence. I struggle to get everything organized – for me and for them – to be gone full-time. To say nothing of hating how it feels to slip out of the house before they wake and return late after they’re back in bed.

So my work and my mothering are decidedly a muddle in the middle. Both/and; neither/nor.

And yet somehow I make it work and find the back-and-forth to be life-giving, if exhausting. I make it work because I love my kids and I love my job. I love using my skills and my gifts and my education to help make a small difference in my corner of the world. I feel called to this work and want to give myself to it.

But even knowing that I am blessed to have choices, and choices between good things, I still feel deeply torn on some days. The tensions I feel between my work and my family will never be fully resolved. I simply have to learn to live as best I can within them and rejoice in the fullness of my life writ large, pulled back from the daily effort required to keep juggling all these balls in the air.

One truth I did not know when I started on this mothering journey was how deeply compromised I would sometimes feel about the choices I would make. How much I would envy moms on one side of the fence or the other. But it turns out that parenting is a much more complicated picture than the pretty pastels I painted it to be in my youth.

Motherhood is also about compromise. And ambivalence. And guilt. And fear that if you choose poorly, you may somehow fail the most precious people in your life.

And when we don’t talk about the shadow side of mothering – when we insist upon the illusions of loving-every-second and complete-and-utter bliss – we sell ourselves short. All of us.

Including the God who mothers. The God who works. And the God who calls all of us to become the people we were created to be: people who give ourselves to work and relationships and service and others.

So I share my struggles here, in this space, with you, because I think it is only in the honest claiming and sharing of our stories that we create a community where diverse decisions and situations can be understood. I stake none of my choices as normative: this is simply the path I carved for myself. But showing the truth of it – the good and the bad – and inviting you to share your own story in turn reveals the many ways in which we are called and create our life out of our many calls.

One wish I have is for better language to share our stories. No “stay-at-home mom” lounges in the comfort of her couch all day, and all moms are “working mothers.” Women are called and gifted to serve the world in a myriad of vocations and professions. And it is the goodness of the work we are each called to do that makes our sacrifices “worth it” in the broadest sense.

So how could we more truthfully and creatively share the stories of the work we do as parents: inside and outside the home, paid and unpaid, for our children and for others? And how might this help us to tell God’s story better, too?

Where do you live in this tension?

How is your parenting shaped by compromise or conflict?

How do you embrace the choices you’ve made?

on guilt, growing up, and (ira) glass

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re happily reading some mildly interesting article, when all of a sudden – WHAM-O! – the expert or the study or the news smacks you with The Finding That You Should Have Known And Now Means You Have Completely Failed At A Major Portion Of Your Life.

Case in point. Yours truly was idly surfing through the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, generally equal parts interesting-news-articles and opinionated-Manhattan-mommies-up-in-arms about the latest parenting buzz. And being the parent of a child who occasionally expresses his disdain for my insufferable rules by wailing at the top of his lungs, I clicked on this post: Seeing Tantrums as Distress, Not Defiance.

So there I was, all innocently reading about toddlers’ inability to self-regulate their emotions and how parents need to lovingly guide them through this challenging phase. When I got to this line:

Dan Siegel, author of the “Whole Brain Child,” gave me the science behind this. “During those early years, the ability to coordinate and balance your own subcortical source of emotion is dependent on a caregiver’s response to you,” he said. We freak out, they freak out. Our ability to stay tuned in to them literally helps their brains grow.

WHAM-O! And the whole room slants. My (now fully developed) brain screams, “I KNEW IT! I LOSE MY TEMPER AT MY TODDLER’S TANTRUMS AND NOW I HAVE PERMANENTLY SCARRED HIS BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND HE’S GOING TO BECOME A SOCIOPATH!!! COMPLETE AND UTTER PARENTING FAIL.”

Ah, parental guilt. It bursts into a calm mother’s mind as quick and sudden as a newborn’s wail, and it lingers in her heart as long and pitiful as a toddler’s whimpers.

Before calling child protective services on myself, I thankfully went back and read the entire article again, only to find that it wasn’t as drastic and dramatic as all that. In fact, it might actually help me handle tomorrow’s tantrums with a bit more love and grace. (Maybe.)

But the memory of that flash of mommy guilt lodged itself in my brain and wouldn’t let go.

I remembered other sinking feelings from my first year of parenthood. Doctor’s appointments when I feared my baby wasn’t hitting every single developmental milestone. Parenting magazines whose glossy photos celebrated children who neither slept, napped, or ate like mine. A fellow mother in a “baby & me” class who actually uttered the words, “I just can’t believe how easy this has been!” in response to the question of the biggest surprise of motherhood. (I’m still surprised that my unshowered, bleary-eyed, anxious, hormonal self didn’t lunge across the circle of newborns to strangle her.)

Motherhood brings with it a new and special kind of guilt. A guilt that screams to your deepest fears and insecurities. A guilt that terrifies you into thinking you are not only making a mess of your life, but a brand-new person’s as well. A guilt that rears its ugly head just when you think you’ve cobbled together some kind of confidence about the whole raising-a-kid thing.

Along the way, I’ve learned to handle the outbursts of guilt with slightly more finesse. The second year of parenting brought with it the ability to forgive myself for being a decidedly imperfect mother. And the third year has dawned with daily reminders that since the many ways I supposedly failed my first child did not – it appears thus far – ruin him for life, I may actually be able to successfully help raise a second.

But I still feel the mother guilt on an all-too-regular basis, as I imagine many of you do, too. How can we help it? We want to raise our children well, and when we start out, we have no clue how. Fertile soil for the rapid growth of guilt, if I ever saw it.

So when I came across this delightful bit from Ira Glass, I was cheered. Not only because I love his wry voice and his quirky story-telling, but because his wisdom speaks to me as both a hopeful writer and a hopeful mother.

Ira reminds me that we can’t help but start off frustrated in the early years of any good work we’re trying to do. We have a grand vision of what we’d like it to be – the family we’d like to have, the book we’d love to write – but the daily slog often falls far short. Many days we want to throw in the towel and declare we’re beat. But when we stick it out and make ourselves keep going, we start to close the gap between hopes and reality. We find that we might actually have a chance of becoming the parent – or writer or artist or minister or teacher – that we dreamed we could be.

Nobody tells this to beginners, Ira says. And maybe they should. So the more we remind ourselves – and each other – that most everybody goes through this, the easier we’ll be able to breathe. And perhaps the guilt, or the fear of failure, or the frustration of not living up to our high hopes, can even spur us on to more than we dreamed in the first place.

It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.