I’m one of those children of the 70s/80s who grew up thinking I should “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan,” and never let my man forget he’s a man. We were supposed to strive to be “Supermoms” who were able to do it all.

And, according to the recent Advertising Age white paper “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the Real Mom,” most of us do “do it all.” Their research showed that “…women with children still handle the bulk of the household and child-care responsibilities, the so-called ’second shift’ — whether they are working full time, staying at home or something in between.”

This is in an age when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports both parents were employed in 62 percent of the 24.6 million families made up of a married couple with children under 18. And, in the 2006-2007 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education noted women earned a majority of higher-education degrees.

The full report embedded here is filled with many more such statistics, including a 48-year comparison on education, purchasing power, and wages. But, the “real mom” to which its title makes reference is what they are really making a case for in the paper.

They posit that “the second half of this decade has brought a backlash against the mythical Supermom — that hyperactive type-A personality who whips up perfect cookies and perfect children — and an embrace of the likable, more relatable real mom, who doesn’t obsess over the little things.”

The case is made that millennial women (born between 1980 and 1995) are leading this change in attitude. They are apparently not as “conflicted” as my generation — Generation X. While I grew up being told I was equal to men, what I saw was my own mother doing an unequal amount of work to keep our family running - that “second shift” we women are apparently still working.

“[Millennials] grew up with seeing a lot of moms working, being outside the home a lot, and decided ‘Hey, this isn’t what I want,’” Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks said in the AdAge report. “So they may be at peace more with their not working or working.”

Nearly have of the women surveyed for the report said finding balance between family and career is “a joke” for working women and I will certainly agree with that. The tagline for this blog used to say that it wasn’t about balance, but about juggling.

As one journalist put it: “While no longer striving to be supermoms doing everything for everyone, mothers are looking toward being pragmatic and good enough, and making a real impact in the areas that matter most for them and their children.”

This AdAge report implies that marketers should help empower women to delegate responsibilities to spouses, children and even brands so that they will have “more time to be who they want to be.”

As Carroll Trosclair on Suite101.com rightly points out, “marketers have been helping women delegate work to products, services and brands for decades. But delegating work to husbands and children may be a new and controversial challenge for advertisers.”

Interesting Side Note:
While researching for this post, I came across a blog that mentions one of the ways information was gathered for the whitepaper. Kitchen Table Conversations, “a new user-generated video research service revolutionizing how qualitative research is conducted” was used to gather information on grocery shopping habits. If you’re interested in qualitative research methods, check it out.

It’s Wednesday morning. I love Wednesday mornings.

For now, anyway. Sometime next year, I’ll probably hate them. But I’ve come to accept that such duality is part of my life as a mother. It started at the very beginning. When my son was born a little more than four years ago, I hated motherhood.

After the colic and the breastfeeding struggles and the sleeping through the night struggles abated at about six months, I settled into a love-hate relationship with motherhood. Life was way better  than newborn-hood, but I still missed my pre-parental life more than I liked my present.

Between a year and 18 months, a period when I got a new job and we found reliable child care that we’re still with, the scale tipped toward the love end. So much so that the idea of a second child was broached, mulled and then manifested.

Said second child was born 11 days before first child turned three. We did not experience the alleged “terrible twos,” but three put me right back on the cliff of motherhood. Multi-round daily battles of will with my son poised me to plunge back into the abyss of regret and resentment. I was walked back from the edge only – to my abiding amazement – by the second child.

She was darling. She was sweet. She took naps. There were no breastfeeding struggles, no hours-long evening crying jags. My second maternity leave was one of the happiest times of my life.

And I felt guilty.

Parents are supposed to love their kids equally, right? Favoritism is unfair, breeds sibling rivalry, keeps therapists in business, etc. etc. etc.

So I tried to hide that I preferred her. I tried so hard, and since she was easy to handle and my son’s behavior – especially potty training – was all-consuming, I didn’t even realize how disproportionate my attentions became over her first year.

Which brings me back to Wednesday mornings. Wednesdays are one of my days off and until this fall, I spent them home with both kids. But my son started preschool in September. He goes Wednesday mornings, giving me three hours alone with my daughter.

One of those first Wednesdays, I realized I didn’t have to hide my preference. Since my son wasn’t there to see it, I could snuggle and kiss and coo and babytalk his sister as much as I wanted. (Plus there’s the fact that she’ll still take a morning nap, giving me precious writing time.) As I let it all flow out, I realized how much I’d choked myself back – in the name of fairness to my son.

How fair was that to my daughter?

But before succumbing to yet another wave of guilt (you do that, too?) I managed to somehow scramble up to a higher perch. Surveyed from above, I could identify my motherhood pattern. Call it duality, a pendulum, yin-yang, a see-saw, call it whatever, but it is a fact of my life as a parent. Now that I’ve experienced this pattern repetition, I’m no longer all that concerned with the conflicting rhythms between each child or each day, and forces that push and pull me toward one one or the other. Now that the three-year-old battlefield is behind us, it’s shifting already in the pleasure and gratitude I feel being with my finally four-year-old son.

It’s taken me four years to learn, but my norm is to yo-yo both between the kids, as well as between deep contentment as a mother and nagging, grass-is-greener thinking about a different choice. To fight it or wish it away is to deny myself. To realize it, accept it and say it publicly here is huge.

Gotta go. Less than two hours left this Wednesday morning.

Since President Obama was named the Nobel Peace Prize winner last week, vats of ink, servers full of pixels and hours of airtime have been expended debating whether he deserved it, especially in light of the long careers of his fellow nominees.

It's lonely out here.

No one has mentioned my nominee, however: Lisa Snyder, a mom from Middleville, Michigan. Snyder watches her neighbors’ kids for about a half-hour each morning, filling in the gap between when their parents must leave for work and the arrival of the school bus, which stops in front of her house.

Admittedly, I’d never heard of Snyder until two weeks ago. Her 15 minutes of fame came up because someone reported her neighborliness to Michigan authorities as running an illegal daycare. Rightfully, the media coverage has taken a tone of aghast incredulity, and it looks like the law here in Michigan will be amended.

And yes, I’m being facetious about Snyder as a Peace Prize contender. But not a lot. Lately I’ve often found myself in a state of mind I’ve dubbed the “back 40 blues.” Everyone knows the beautiful proverb turned hackneyed political cliché: “It takes a village to raise a child.” My personal adaptation adds a coda: “It takes a village to raise a child – and I’m living on the back 40.”

Most of the back 40 blues trace back to having a second child, as I wrote on my personal blog last week. In a way I didn’t anticipate, the demands of two vs. one completely drain the reserve energy, patience and time I used to rely upon when everyday issues and inconveniences cropped up.

In other words, I’m far less able to cope with disruptions to daily routine – illness, car problems, daycare holidays – at precisely the same time the odds of such disruptions have doubled.

Look in the mirror, right? We didn’t have to have a second child. True. But that easy blame-guilt response doesn’t feel fair. I compare myself to my mom. She didn’t work out of the home when my brother and I were as young as my kids. But when we were in elementary school, she took a part-time teaching job three days a week – the same kind of schedule as my part-time community college PR gig.

Maybe she just handled it better. (She was, after all, almost 15 years younger than me at this stage of motherhood.) Or maybe it’s because, on our same block, she had three peer moms, all raising kids in about the same age range. A posse of Lisa Snyders, if you will. The kids were all friends. The moms shared toolbox and cupboard inventories without hesitation. Most importantly, they backstopped each other when it came to pinch child care and errand-running. Maybe my perspective’s skewed by green-colored glasses, but they all helped make everyone’s lives run more smoothly – dare I say peacefully?

I look at my block. The house next door was foreclosed on over a year ago and has been vacant for more than 18 months. On the other side, our elderly neighbors spend half the year at their second home. Though we’ve lived here six years, we have barely a nodding acquaintance with the rest of the block, which offers only one other home with kids. Several rentals, with their short-term occupants, challenge any efforts to develop my own backstop.

Beyond the block, I do have local in-laws half the year. But a cancer recurrence this spring effectively quarantined my mother-in-law in the village. Babysitters? Our most reliable moved out of the area in June, leaving us with one in the stable.

So what to do about it all? One of the ideas I didn’t get around to executing this summer was to host a block party, to allow all the neighbors to at least meet each other. Granted, it’s a big step from sharing hot dogs together to the communal snow shoveling, car pooling and backup child care that I envision.

But the Nobel committee said Obama, despite lacking a long list of accomplishments, deserved the award for inspiring a world vision of peace. Likewise,  Snyder inspires me. The back 40 could get annexed to the village. So on behalf of Michigan moms, I’m awarding Lisa Snyder a Block Peace Prize. And if she wants to move up north, the house next door is a steal.

Image credit: www.oklo.org

The #10 book on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of June 21 was one titled “Womenomics.” I haven’t read the book because, well, about the only time I ever get to read is when I’m on a plane by myself and I haven’t had the opportunity to travel in six months.

But, this news article on “Womenomics” has been an open tab in my Firefox browser for nearly a month now, as my own blending of work and life has prevented me from writing about it.

What made that article really jump out at me was that it mentions “a legendary ad sold working women on the idea they could have it all” and I have to believe the writer was thinking of this one that had so much influence on me growing up:

I grew up with images like that, and terms like “supermom” being thrown around, and I know it shaped me. I watched my own mother work part-time, then go back to college and begin working full-time - all the while doing the bulk of raising three kids and pretty much all of the the housework. And that shaped me, too. Reality looked a lot harder than the media messages I saw, and I became convinced that marriage and kids were not in my future.

My how things change as we grow older, huh? Toward the end of college I started to wonder what all that career success I anticipated would be like if I didn’t have someone with which to share it. And later, after several years of happy marriage, I saw another reality where someone I worked with really did seem to be living that supermom-career-woman life of perfume commercials.

So, I ventured into parenthood - and was reminded of my mother’s reality again. And, a few years later I watched that supermom-career-woman mentor leave a successful corporate career path for something this book now says we shouldn’t have it leave it to have - flexibility.

The Wall Street Journal’s Juggle blog says the message of “Womenomics,” by ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman and BBC World News America newswoman Katty Kay, is that skilled female workers have earned far more leverage at work than they’re using, by virtue of their educational credentials, experience and proven value in management.

I know I’m extremly lucky to have a job that affords me much flexibility without my need to push for it. I work online with teams around the globe, so much gets done over e-mail, IM and conference calls - all of which can be done from anywhere. And, I work for a manager that understands that and doesn’t require “face time” in the office as long as what needs to be done gets done. That sort of work schedule is not just something that women want, however.

When Shipman and Kay spent 90 minutes with Families and Work Institute (FWI) staff and Corporate Leadership Council members, they heard of FWI’s latest research that shows men are also making work/family choices. Men are making changes to take family responsibilities. The FWI National Study of the Changing Workforce shows that men and women are both less likely now to embrace traditional gender roles. Only 41 percent of employees in 2008 believe it is better “if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children,” down from 64 percent in 1977.

You can see it online in the DadLabs motto of “taking back paternity,” in the posts from the fathers that have joined us here on This Mommy Gig, and many of the other fathers who blog at places like Dad-o-Matic.

We’re experiencing it ourselves as my husband has recently made the decision to leave the workforce to stay home with our daughter over the summer. And whenever he re-enters the workforce, he plans to make flexibility a main priority, so he can continue to spend time actively parenting.

I think it is great, and it certainly makes it that much easier for me to not have to worry about the logistics of summer camps. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some adjustments we’re having to make as traditional gender roles get a little blurry.

Sure I want to bring home the bacon, but what happens when someone else frys it up in the pan?  I wonder if anything like that is covered in the “Womenomics” book? If you’ve read it, let me know. And, if you’ve got any tips for transitioning from two working parents to one, please share those, too!

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I’m addicted to my work: I’m addicted to writing. I’m addicted to email, the internet, Twitter (& Perez Hilton). I’ve been accused of having an affair with my Blackberry and with my social media friends. (The accusation actually didn’t come from my beloved wife, Patti, but she nodded her head in agreement and gave me that one-eyebrow-up knowing look in response.)

And, said wife implored me to keep my work at work. Instead of waking up and checking my BB before kissing anyone good morning and jumping onto my MacBook and carrying my laptop home ‘after work’ and setting it on the kitchen counter so that I could keep working into the night because I ‘just have to’ finish one more thing - she asked me simply to be at home.

I listened, and I’ve done a pretty good job of changing my behavior. I do check the Berry, but only when I’m expecting something really important, when no one’s paying attention to me anyway or when I’m in the bathroom - where I believe I can do whatever I damn well please. And I don’t turn on my computer at home during family time.

So, imagine my surprise when, over the last few weeks, Patti has been on her laptop non-stop. When I come in during the day to get water, snacks or lunch. While we’re making dinner. While we’re eating dinner!

My response? Well, I reverted back to preschool, of course. “Why do you get to be on your computer non-stop when I’m not allowed to be?” I demanded. (okay, I whined.)

Here’s the part where I get schooled.

Her immediate response was, well, to be really pissed. And, then, the next day. She sat me down and gave me a list of all the things she’s working on. Want to see it?

And that’s just the first side…the back is just as filled. And Photo Booth on my Mac is not smart enough to take a picture that isn’t a mirror image, so it’s ass backwards, sort of like me - but you get the point.

Apparently, while I have 8+ hours to come out here to my little writer’s haven, she has to get 50 million things done at home (including starting her own business, scheduling the Common House we share with 15 other families, serving on the board of our kids’ preschool, taking a shower and on and on and on) with two toddlers running around (they only go to school 1 day a week). So, I can’t come home and keep working, but she can and must work whenever and wherever she possibly can.

I get it. I done been schooled.

Image courtesty of Gareth Lofthouse

A sick child is a scary thing. As a parent, your instinct is to do whatever you can to make sure your child is safe and well and when they are sick, you are not fulfilling that duty. After your spouse or partner dies, you may have even more challenges to overcome than the feeling of worry when you can’t cure your child’s illness.

Overreacting

I have no idea what kind of parent I would have been if my first husband, Mark, hadn’t died. Or maybe just if he hadn’t died when Nicholas was only 5 months old. As it is, I can’t tell how much of any of my reactions or choices are “first time mom” choices and thoughts or are a reaction to the fact that the doctors never really knew what caused Mark to get sick and die. Because of that, I have a tendency to get overly scared when Nicholas gets sick. Especially if it involves throwing up since the doctors think vomiting contributed to Mark’s death.

So, when Nicholas gets sick, I have to stop myself from overreacting. Again, I don’t know if this is a first time mom thing, or a panic because Mark died thing, but it happens. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen as often now as it did the first year after Mark died. I think part of it was that I didn’t have anyone on-hand to bounce thoughts off of. I would often call my mother or Mark’s parents and describe sounds or looks (no, his poop is more of a chartreuse color), but it’s not the same as having someone hear and see for themselves.

I think some of the overreacting came from knowing that if Nicholas got sick, it was just me to take care of him and we’d both be exhausted. When it was just me walking the floors, remembering to give him his medication on schedule, etc., I think I would go into panic mode just knowing how hard it would be until N got better.

I can say now, when I don’t think I could have even a year ago, that part of my panic and overreacting was knowing (even subconsciously) that I would get angry with Mark for dying when Nicholas was sick. I would get mad because I needed help, I would get mad because Nicholas needed his Daddy Mark, I would get mad because Mark didn’t take care of his body and he died, I would get mad because I’d have to miss even more work, and I would get mad because I had nobody to talk me down from the panic. It took me quite a while to figure out that it was okay to be mad at Mark, and until I did, that was a big part of my worry during any of N’s illnesses.

Under Reacting

In an effort to keep from panicking over every cough, sneeze and booger, I went through a period of under reacting about every illness. I didn’t want to make N into a hypochondriac, and I didn’t want to become a mom who completely freaked out each time he got sick, so I shrugged off some colds and an ear infection before I shook myself out of that stupidity. I’m careful not to get overly worried about illnesses, but I have to be just as aware not to underestimate illness. I’m very lucky (and so is Nicholas) that nothing serious happened during my time of under reacting.

Balance

Ironically, it wasn’t until Nicholas was diagnosed with asthma right before his first birthday that I confronted this pattern of my reactions when he was sick. I can only guess that the threat of a severe asthma attack put a sniffle or a slight fever into perspective. I count myself lucky every day that Nicholas is a happy healthy child. I consider it one of my biggest goals in life to keep him that way. I think I can do it if I can just keep from panicking.

About a year ago, I was fortunate enough to see Karol Rose of Flexpaths speak. This burgeoning company, and Karol along with it, is changing the way we think about work, workstyle flexibility and life in general….and I’m thrilled to be writing for them. After I saw Karol speak, I wrote about her theory of work/life balance - which basically states that the quest for ‘balance’ is a myth and a recipe for heartache and stress.

Karol maintains that we should reach for work/life effectiveness instead, and this weekend I was the poster child for her theory.

Take a two year-old boy + a three year-old girl + a Blackberry/Mac/Writing/Blogging/Twitter obsessed mom and subtract my wife (you know, the reigning Mother of the Year champ) and put them together for 53 hours with no outside help whatsoever.

The perfect storm?

It could have been, but I took Karol’s advice to heart. I needed to be effective at home this weekend. So, I turned off my computer, ignored my Blackberry’s charming gong that tells me I have yet another email and sunk deeply and contentedly into my role as Mom…And I had the time of my life.

Sure, some writing ideas popped into my head and I scribbled them down. Once or twice I checked Twitter to see what was happening. But my mindset was all about home. I can assure you that if I had had the goal of getting a few work things done this weekend, we all might have imploded.

In this case, ‘balance’ was found by tipping the scales profoundly and completely in the direction of home.

Apply this lesson where you will. If you’d like to be effective anywhere, anyhow, anytime - Just. Do. IT.

Cross-posted on Writing Roads

Image courtesy of Zen

I don’t think we did…but here he is…sitting at our dinner table, sleeping in our bed.

Because it helps, every now and then, to classify things into the categories that our brains have been socialized to accept, I’ll tell you that in my house, I play the role of the 1950’s style ‘daddy.’ I go to work every morning and then I come home in the evening. I have a briefcase (made of neoprene and striped with green, purple and red - but still, a briefcase). I swear like a truck driver.

My lovely wife plays the role of the stay at home mom. Because she was born with the patience of a saint, the ability to do flips off the rope swing at our pond and the aplomb to do ridiculous things like pretending she’s a Scottish onion while still looking incredibly beautiful.

We’ve also taken on these roles because being at home with her babies is her life’s dream and being a writer is mine.

One of our children, our youngest, is a little dude about to hit the big #3. He’s very creative, obsessed with all things construction, reminds me of a yellow lab puppy - and is deeply in love with his mama - the other one.

He doesn’t want anyone else to hug her, touch her, be carried by her or sit on her lap. This includes me, his sister, the dogs and, sometimes, the rabbit. He also doesn’t want any of us to hug him, touch him, be carried by him or sit on our laps (not all the time, mind you) - he only wants her.

It’s tough - and we try to simultaneously nurture his love for her while reminding him there are other people to love and love him back…and that he has to share. But two year-olds aren’t really good at sharing…especially when what they want is a superbly fantastic Scottish onion. I don’t blame him really (I’m in love with her too)…but I do hope he grows out of it soon.

[Image (that I couldn't possibly resist) courtesy of freeparking]