mommymoneybags

“If we want to raise grown-ups (and we do), we have to make this grown-up thing look good – for their sakes, and for our own.  Find something fun and give yourself permission to do it.” – KJ Dell’Antonia, How to Be a Happier Parent

Recently, while reading KJ Dell’Antonia’s wonderful book, How to Be a Happier Parent, a few things made me think about her section telling parents to Find Your Own Thing and inspired me to make more room in my schedule for myself.

First, I made a card for a friend, who enjoyed the card but was surprised that I “do art.”  This is someone I see multiple times a month, sometimes multiple times a week, but whom I got to know after our children were born.  That she was surprised to find out that I was creative made it feel like well actually, we’re really not that close.  Everyone who knew me pre-children knows that I can paint and draw, as I have taken art classes for as long as I can remember, up until the year I got pregnant.  Then post-children, large chunks of time became rarer, and my paints have mostly dried up.  It’s like Mommy Me is really just some alternate motherhood version of the real me.

Around that time I also watched Sing! with my children and felt shown up by Rosita the Pig.  A mother of twenty-five piglets and married to a daddy pig that doesn’t seem to notice her or care to help at all , Rosita yearns to rekindle days when she sang.  When she has that opportunity but can’t find a sitter, she pulls an all-nighter fashioning a contraption that allows her to be gone and robotically take care of her children, while she leaves to follow her own interests.  None of her twenty-five children or husband seems to notice or care that she isn’t there, underscoring how mechanical her time with her family has become.  Not surprisingly, her time with her family after she carves out some time on her own makes her happier and makes the time that she does spend with them better.

As silly as it may sound, I was motivated by Rosita.  If a mother of more than a couple dozen piglets and the wife of an indifferent husband could get out of the house, surely I could do it with my two kids and ultra-supportive husband.  So I found myself searching through the offerings at the local museum school.  The school had for a while offered a drop in figure drawing class, where you come and pay twenty bucks and draw for three hours from a live (nude!) model.  I had thought about going many times but didn’t, both because I felt I should get home to my children and because I was intimidated by the naked models and the students that could draw them.  But I found a seminar that was taught for the hour before the drop-in portion.  I thought I could commit to doing that, then stay for the live model when I didn’t need to get home or back to work.

During the six-week course I only missed two classes, once because I was at a conference and another time because I had a dinner with friends.  I also stayed for the drop-in session a couple of times, and it was amazing.  The technical aspect of drawing will take me more time to get back, but during the periods of time that I was hyper focused it felt almost meditative.

And I did feel different. In the six weeks of being enrolled in an art class made me go from someone who used to “do art” to someone who was enrolled in an art class, as short as the commitment was.  I’m also less intimidated by the drop-in figure drawing class and feel confident enough to go occasionally now that the seminar is over.  I’m now someone who can drop to casual acquaintances that I can’t do something that night, because of my art class.  What’s that?  You didn’t know I was into that?  Well here, let me show you a picture of my latest work.

I can also show my kids that look, Mommy has hobbies!  Also, kids, if you take lots of art classes you can someday stare at naked strangers, too.  (My husband and I debated but came down on the side of showing my daughter my sketchbook, reasoning that if we took her to a museum we wouldn’t shield her from nude drawings or sculptures.  I am just worried that she is going to tell someone that mommy showed her pictures of naked people.)

I do know that I am a different person than I was five years ago.  Motherhood has changed me, mostly for the better.  But carving time out to enjoy an activity that predated myself as a mom has made me feel more fulfilled, more creative, more me.

Earlier this school year I was elated when my daughter’s teacher asked my husband to be one of the room parents.  I immediately thought she was the best teacher ever. She figured out our family dynamic within a couple of weeks of school and wasn’t confused by it. I do take my daughter to school most days, but my husband picks her up every single day.  At 2:25. In athletic clothes. With a two-year-old in tow. At her previous school, it was the same thing, only he picked her up at 11:30 daily, but with the same wardrobe and company. When my husband worked and my kids were in full-time care, he usually picked them up early, most days after he had squeezed in a run between finishing work and getting her.  But he was always the one who would take them late if she had a doctor’s appointment or pick them up when she was sick. Yet he was never asked to do room mom-ish stuff, not once.

My husband and I have a system where we delegate.  We are true partners and share responsibilities. I go to work so that we can have money for food and clothes shelter and preschool and activities, and he buys and prepares the food, keeps the clothes and shelter clean, and transports the kids to and from preschool and activities.*

This works really well for us, and I can remain unburdened by thoughts like What’s for dinner? or I wondered if I paid the utility bill, or I wonder if we can get through the week with enough clean underwear for all of us, plus a dozen more things that I don’t even know that I don’t need to worry about, because he just takes care of them.

When at previous schools I would get an email from a teacher or another mom about bringing stuff for a party or going in on a teacher’s gift or my upcoming snack duty, I forwarded it to my husband and he would handle it.  The first time I got such an email I completely screwed this up. I got a group email about our family’s assignment about bringing stuff for the Halloween party and completely dropped the ball. If the teacher was sending an email to the parents, I assumed that it was all of the parents, but it was in fact an email to just the moms.  This made no sense to me. My daughter was in daycare full-time with other kids there full-time, because both of their parents worked full-time.  Yet there was an assumption that it would be the mom who would take care of school duties.  The next time this happened, I replied to the teacher, saying thank you, I’ve copied my husband here, he will handle this, and can you include him on future emails?  Which rarely happened. I also could never get him added to group texts with the moms, so I found myself sending him screenshots of all of the parts of text conversations containing action items.

So this first month of school the teacher has endeared herself to me, and probably nothing she does the rest of the school year will make me annoyed at her.  First, because she recognized who might have the time to help out at school. Second, she finds that he is capable of doing it.  The fact that he is a man didn’t keep him out of the running.  And she asked him! And he’s doing it!

He is actually nervous about it (so cute).  He thinks that he can’t live up to room mom standards, or that the potential Pinterest-worthy standards for parties and various activities are going to be so high that he won’t want to live up to them because they are stupid and unnecessary and also four-year-olds just really don’t give a you-know-what about some of that as long as there is candy.  I pointed out to him that he is in a perfect position to call out anything that is over the top because the other room moms will either (1) listen to him because he is a man and probably right or (2) ignore him because he is a man and doesn’t know about party planning, but in neither situation will they call him a bitch or a control freak when he leaves the room.  But THAT is a topic for another day.

           *This is mostly a joke.  I do help with the household chores.  I do preschool drop off on my way to work and am mostly in charge of bedtime routine (after my husband has fed, bathed, and brushed them).  I also will put a load of laundry in the washing machine and unload the dishwasher occasionally when I’m not too tired and I feel like it. Also, the shelter is almost never clean.

Earlier this week I was listening to one of my go to podcasts, Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, where the host interviews writers about their work.  The host hits the high points of authors’ work and highlights the things most applicable to busy moms, and the episodes are in easily-digestible thirty to forty minute episodes, perfect listening for a workout.

The episode I listened to earlier this week brought tears to my eyes while I was running on the treadmill (no one noticed, promise).  The host of the podcast was interviewing Reverend Lydia Sohn, who wrote a blog post called “What It’s Like to Be 90-Something.”  Rev. Sohn interviewed her older congregants about their lives and posted about some of their thoughts on regrets, aging, dying, and relationships.  It was the discussion about happiness that I found most interesting (and that brought me to tears).  Sohn found that:

Every single one of these 90-something-year-olds, all of whom are widowed, recalled a time when their spouses were still alive and when their children were younger and living at home. As a busy young mom and working professional who frequently fantasizes about the far away, imagined pleasures of retirement, I quickly responded, “But weren’t those the most stressful times of your lives?” To which they all agreed. There was no hesitation though, that those days were also the happiest.

This discussion brought tears to my eyes, first because I had a sense of What. The. Fuck.  This week, the first week of school, marks the end of my lazy summer, the first time we’ve had weekly scheduled extracurricular activities for the kids, and the first school year with the concept of tardy.  With my oldest starting in “real school,” it feels like the end of something for me, and the beginning of a new phase for which I’m not sure I’m adequately prepared.  And in the middle of this adjustment there’s also been a simultaneous return of client activity after a nice lull in work.  Looking forward into the near future stresses me out and also terrifies me a little bit.  And this is the best it’s going to be?

But then the lump in my throat was for a different reason, as I realized actually, yeah, this is pretty freaking awesome.  My two-year-old may think it’s amazing to drop his diaper and mark his territory on my walls (and once even on my bed), but does anything beat his deep belly laughs that I can summon simply by crossing my eyes certain way?  Or his early morning cuddles when I wake him up, savoring the last months (weeks?) that he is truly my baby before he transforms into a little boy?  And I don’t know how many times I’ve stepped on a conch shell or accidently ripped a paper mermaid, ruining some sea scene of my daughter’s creation (of which there are many all over my house), and my god, she can stake out a position and hold it like nobody’s business and will not be swayed, no matter how severe or imminent the punishment.  But what can be better than watching her create her little worlds out of nothing?  Or holding her hand as she walks into her new school with a confidence that I only dream of possessing at this point in my life?

Thinking about that and how wonderful this all truly is, I also thought about my church’s current sermon series.  It is based on Anne Lomott’s book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.  In my discussion with my Sunday school class just this last week, I mentioned that I wasn’t so good at the prayer of thanks (not so good at any of them, but thanks is pretty low), so on the treadmill this week, I thought a silent prayer of thanks.

Yes, this shit is crazy.  But it is unbeatably awesome sometimes.  So to that I say THANKS.  Thanks for the pee-stained walls, the bruises on my feet from the conch shell booby traps, and everything they stand for.

After a few years of going back and forth trying to decide whether my husband could stop working, we finally decided he should go for it. A few weeks ago, my husband gave his notice at work, and we just finished his third week of not working. When I started this project (which isn’t much of a project at this point with this being my third post), he was a full time employee for nine months of the year, but with a very flexible job and nice, long breaks in the intensity of his work. Admittedly, he was underemployed, and neither of us thought that he would stay in this job forever, but he was having fun, and we were relatively comfortable, so we kept going. Then, for a variety of reasons, we made the decision that he would stop working. One of which was that his take home pay did not completely justify having two children in full-time day care. I know that so many families come to that conclusion, though we are unique in that it is typically the mom who stays home. I am excited and scared at the same time. Having to fulfill the traditional roles of both mom and dad can be a lot of pressure and hard to navigate, though that is mitigated quite a bit because I have a wonderful partner who is willing to take on the nontraditional role and who also seems oblivious to what society thinks he is “supposed” to do (or just truly doesn’t give a damn).

I have noticed that people’s responses when they hear the news of my husband’s new situation fall into three categories:

“So what is he going to do?”

This one is funny to me. We have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and he will be home with them the majority of his time. I don’t think he’ll be sitting on the couch all day eating pizza.

“Has he considered doing x, y, or z?”

And everyone wants to tell me about a job they heard about or introduce my husband to someone they know who might have an opening that would be a good fit. I could be wrong, but I doubt women who have just decided to stay home with two small children face the same type of questioning or “helpful” suggestions. Around the same time my husband gave his notice, a friend with a one-year-old gave her notice for her job. She has a masters-level degree, and I can guarantee that her salary pulled in four to five times what my husband’s did. Yet people accept that she wants to stay home and are okay with it. No one tries to fix her up with something new or introduce her to new networking opportunities.

3. “Good for him (or you).”

This is, unfortunately, the smallest category of responses.

I admit that I fall into these categories at one time or another. Depending on my audience, I have created some narrative about his plans. “Well he’s going to commit to staying home with the kids for another year or until they get to school and then he’ll consider x, y, or z.” Or, “He’s going to stay home with the kids but build up x, y, or z on the side.” Either one of those may or may not be true. I’m actually completely content if he wants to consider himself retired and never work again. I decided I’m no longer going to try to adapt the narrative to fit others’ expectations, especially about reading this article about the “man trap” and how men are perceived: https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-man-trap. I still struggle about what I will say when people ask me what he does. Both “unemployed” and “stay-at-home dad” don’t seem to fit for various reasons. I am trying not to worry about it and have settled on telling people that he is retired, and for now I am enjoying the clean house, coming home to dinner with my family, and getting more time together.

Because of how my husband and I divide our workload, I feel as if I am reminded fairly regularly of the ways that I don’t fit the typical “mom” mold.  Some of this is external, and may be a comment or question from someone  that may be well-meaning but that may be offensive.  Many times it may be internal as well – my behaviors as a mom don’t conform with what I have been socialized to think I should be doing.

Most of the time I am fine brushing off a comment or getting rid of negative thoughts.  But a couple of months ago a couple of situations related to my kids’ health happened within a two-week period, and I truly felt like a bad parent for a bit.

The first one happened when I ran into my children’s pediatrician, and she commented on how cute my kids were when she saw them the week before.  I asked her where she had run into them.  I was mortified when she told me they had been in her office for an appointment but managed to pretend like I knew what she was talking about.  It turned out that my baby had a scheduled nine month appointment, and my husband had taken my children along so they both could get flu shots.  (I was also simultaneously impressed that my husband took them to get flu shots.  I probably would have thought about doing that but then never followed up.)

Then a week or two right after that my son was back at the pediatrician after not feeling so well.   Here was our exchange when my husband and I talked on the phone after the appointment (I was did know that he was not feeling well and was being taken to the doctor):

“How did it go?”

“Fine.  He has a double ear infection.”

“What do you do for that?”

“Amoxicillin.”

“Okay, be sure to watch him.  I’m allergic to that.”

“Just like your daughter.”

“Ha ha.”

Silence…”You do know your daughter is allergic to that.”

“No she’s not?”

“No i’m being serious.  Please tell me that you know that your daughter broke out in awful hives when she took this stuff a couple of years ago.”

“That sounds kind of familiar?”

Full disclosure, I have been to the pediatrician a total of four times in almost three years for two kids.  That seems like not a lot since it seems like little kids are supposed to go to the doctor all of the time, not even counting when they have to go because they are sick.  I went with my older child to her very first doctor’s appointment.  I went to my baby’s first appointment (which was conveniently scheduled at the same time as my daughter’s two-year-old check up, so I got a two-fer).  Then the baby had some weight issues, so I had to go two more times.  The infrequency of my visits to the doctor is not something that I want to change.  I could go to more appointments.  My job is flexible, and I could meet my husband and kids there, but I don’t want to.  Does that make me a bad mom? Personally, I would rather work to get home earlier and take my kid out on her tricycle than watch her get weighed and measured and poked and prodded.  

What I do feel bad about is not knowing when the appointments are or what medications might harm my children.  That is something we are working to improve.  My husband now sends me calendar notifications so that I know when milestone checkups are, and we keep a list of things our kids are allergic to.  I will also forever go to the same pediatrician and the same pharmacist and hope that there are enough charts and computers documenting everything so that I never forget their allergies again.

Last week my mom, two-year-old daughter and I spent our Saturday morning voting for Hillary Clinton.  It was a very special moment when my daughter pushed the button for Clinton, and I was hopeful for her future in a world where she did not remember a time when a woman hadn’t been president.  

The results of the election upset me for many reasons, but one thing that I can’t get over is how Trump supporters criticized and dissected Clinton’s flaws while making excuses for and forgiving Trump’s indiscretions.   Throughout the election, it remained clear that society holds women and men to different standards.  I can’t help but think that if Clinton had been a man she would have won the election in a landslide.

Society’s different expectations for men and women is something I experience in my own life.  The day before Clinton lost the election my husband took both of our children to the doctor.  In the waiting room he was complimented by a stranger for his active parenting.  Men can’t seem to lose in the parenting department.  We praise them for being providers and good fathers when they work hard and excel in their careers.  We praise them for being supportive and good fathers when they take their children to the doctor.  On the other hand, I have never been complimented by a stranger for parenting my children, nor have I ever been complimented for working long hours so that I can provide for my family.    

When Trump won the election, I saw many social media posts vowing to do good.  Friends vowed to contribute to Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, and other groups that support the rights of women and minorities.  Others vowed to participate more in the political process, even deciding to run for office.  I was inspired as well and decided to start this blog.  As a mom who has two young children, a demanding job, and a husband who works part-time, I find myself challenging societal norms.  My family’s division of labor and responsibilities often confuses and sometimes bothers people. I wanted to start this blog to both find a community of other mothers like me and and also to make a contribution to the conversation about work, gender, and parenting.  

I also wanted to point out that my choice of the name “Mommy Moneybags” doesn’t imply that I am rich. I am beyond wealthy by any global standard, but I still have a mortgage, student loans and two kids in daycare.  “Moneybags” just refers to the the fact that ninety percent of my family’s expenses come from my salary.  Also, I’m a sucker for alliteration.