Working Mothers *bit of a rant*

Being a working Mother is tough, and it isn't always a choice we make willingly.  It's a fact, that in this day and age, many Mothers have to work in order to feed their families, pay the mortgage and help keep the proverbial wolf from the door.  With this comes the guilt for leaving your children, and the seemingly never-ending juggling act that is meeting your families needs.  As a working Mother I know and accept this, I don't complain about it, and I strive to maintain a work-life balance in my home, while meeting the needs of my husband and three children to the best of my ability.

The toughest part though, in my opinion, isn't being a working parent, and balancing day-to-day life, it's listening to the assumptions and assertions made about Mothers who work.  Fathers somehow seem to escape this kind of attention.  I'm referring to people who make the assumption that you work because you are career focused, or not the maternal type, and who secretly judge you for the choice you have made, people who blog and rant about the damage done to the children of working Mothers.

I don't judge anyone.  Parenting is a challenge, but so is life. I admire and respect parents that stay at home to raise their children, it's not easy being a full-time carer, but I also hope they realise how fortunate they are to have that choice.  I respect Mothers who admit to being career driven, or those that work because they find it hard staying at home.  I believe fundamentally that most parents want what is best for their children, and strive to provide it.

I have done my share of pureeing home made baby foods and expressing breast milk, volunteering at school and the playgroup run, and I loved it, I love being a Mother, most of the time.

Much of the guilt that I have felt over the years, however, was fuelled by sanctimonious parents with seemingly perfect lives and perfect children, people who I really shouldn't have listened to, because nobody is perfect.

I suppose my message is this.  To any of you Mothers, working or otherwise, who are feeling guilty, overwhelmed and sometimes struggle to get the balance right, give yourself a break!  It doesn't matter if your life isn't perfect.  Get a takeaway tonight, and eat off paper plates, spend your time reading to your children, or going on a bike ride, because that is what matters.  Something has to give, for the sake of your sanity, and it really doesn't matter whether your house is dust-free and your ironing basket is empty.  Give yourself permission to cut corners and find ways of saving time and money, so that you can focus on being a Mother and enjoy the time you have with your family.  They won't be little for very long.

Most importantly though, and this is hard, don't compare your life to other peoples, don't judge others for the choices they make, and never become one of those smug parents who think they've got it all right, because being a parent is tough for everyone, and if you don't know it now, wait until you have teenagers, lol :o)

Birthday

Today is my oldest Son's 17th Birthday.  Excitedly I laid out his cards, cake, Birthday balloon and gifts on the kitchen table, and eagerly awaited him waking up.

Granted, it is the Summer school holiday, and he was up pretty late last night. I waited................  10:00

Waited....................  12:00

I decided to 'assist' him by playing some rather corny Birthday tunes, very loud, outside his bedroom door, courtesy of i-tunes.

• CONGRATULATIONS (Cliff Richard)
• Happy Birthday (Stevie Wonder)
• Happy Birthday to you

Set the tracks to repeat...............

Waited....................  1:00

I gave up waiting and went to the Supermarket, only to return and find that he had got up, eaten chocolate birthday cake for breakfast, opened his cards and counted his money, then left to spend the day swimming with his friends, sigh :o(

Cicada (big, scary, flying insects to the rest of us!)

Another minor detail my husband chose to omit when he told me we were moving to Indiana, is that they have BIG BUGS, and lots of them.

I'm not renown for my love of insects, in fact, I'd go so far as to say that I'm bordering on the phobic.  I'm pretty obsessive about having bugs forcibly removed from all areas that I inhabit, and I am ashamed to admit to having subjected various members of my family to ridiculous physical feats in order to capture and eject unwanted visitors from my home.  

Let me introduce you to the Cicada - an insect I had never even heard of before moving to the USA.  They are very big, and very loud.  They crawl out of holes in the ground, then mostly hang out up in the trees, which suits me fine, but you occasionally see them flying around, or dead on the ground.

They make a strange clicking/whirring noise which has been likened to a saw drill, unlike any insect I have ever heard.

They kindly visit once a year, when the weather gets hot, and they are back!! I heard the first Cicada "song", as people refer to it, a few days ago, and now the sound is deafening, but I'd rather not think about how many of the little blighters it takes to form such a noisy Cicada choir.

I've been told they are a pretty interesting group of insects, with a variety of life cycles and characteristics. If, unlike me, you'd like to know more about Cicada than when they are likely to sing their last song of the season, then follow the link below.


http://www.in.gov/dnr/entomolo/4540.htm

Pot Roast and Yorkshire Pudding

Sounds a bit strange, but since moving over to the USA our family diet is evolving into a strange combination, or fusion, of English and American foods.  Partly through necessity, as we can't buy everything that we used to buy in the UK, and partly because some American foods are just delicious.

Tonight Mummy cooked and stirred all day, feeling a little guilty about yesterdays microwave dinner.  Youngest and I baked a lovely Victoria sponge, although we replaced the traditional butter icing with an American vanilla frosting.  The boys devoured the cake, so the substitution must have worked.

For dinner we are having a beef pot roast, which has been gently slow-cooking for hours, served in Yorkshire Puddings, with sage and onion stuffing, vegetables (carrots, peas) and mashed potato.  All of which is pretty British, bar the pot roast.

Teens and Troglodytes...............

It's been quite an education raising teenage boys, and mornings are the most interesting time of the day!  What can I say other than Troglodyte.  I visited a beautiful cave in Derbyshire last year, where the last rope-making troglodytes in England lived.  It was fascinating to learn about them, but their living conditions defied belief,  dark, dank and smelly.  They hardly ever emerged from the cave, and ate, slept, worked and raised their families in the mouth of the cave.  They even kept livestock with them.

When I tip-toe into my Son's dark, smelly cave to wake him (because his alarm has only managed to wake the rest of the house) I'm reminded of the Troglodytes, who would appear to the outside world to be a strange, primitive, anti-social group.  I remind myself, that they were perhaps not well understood, and were in fact an industrious people, who kept themselves to themselves, and quietly went about their business, in their way.

I gently shake my sleeping teen and am met with a deep, thundering growl of 'WHAAAAAAT', so I retreat swiftly from the cave, picking up the dirty laundry as I go.  I'm reassured in the knowledge that he's alive, and will no doubt emerge for food at some point.

On reflection, it seems a little unfair to compare my spotty, sweaty, lump of adolescent boy to to such an industrious group of cave dwellers, whose teens were no doubt skilled rope makers and foragers, not just grumpy, smelly, cave dwellers.

The Troglodyte parents had it right!!

trog·lo·dyte

   [trog-luh-dahyt]  Show IPA

–noun

1.

a prehistoric cave dweller.

2.

a person of degraded, primitive, or brutal character.

3.

a person living in seclusion.

4.

a person unacquainted with affairs of the world.

5.

an animal living underground.

Cook and stir...............

Late evening, little one tells me he's hungry, so I offered to buy pizza for dinner.  Hubby is away on business, we're having a chilled Sunday afternoon, watching the Harry Potter movies, in anticipation of next week.  I filled them up on home made pancakes with syrup and cream for 'brunch', and I don't have work tomorrow, so I figured I'd kick back and relax a bit.  Pizza seemed like a good idea.

A shriek of "Nooooooo I want something that you cook and stir" as he clung to my legs and threw his head back in despair.

My Son does have a little more of the thespian in him than I care to admit (I can't think where he gets it from!) so I tried not to beat myself up too much and made a him a microwave mac and cheese, reassuring him that Mummy would cook and stir tomorrow, maybe even bake a cake!