An Honest Look At My Life

Work and Motherhood examined

The past six months have been a true testament to the phrase: It takes a village. It might take several villages for every day events to occur like eating meals or getting to work in my life.

Status Update

In August my husband and I were still running our small family business 100% alone. Our daughter was in daycare five days a week but I was breastfeeding so we had her there 8 AM - 3:30 PM before I went to get her.

One month later we had agreed to close our doors and join another detailing business that wanted our help and expertise to open their second location. The promise of more financial stability and the opportunity to fast-track our careers felt right. It still feels right, but there are many factors that have been roadblocks (or rather construction zones) for our family.

Daycare, which was once conveniently 3 minutes from our business is now 45 minutes away in the opposite direction. While we commuted for the past five months at the flagship store we had 1-1.5 hours of commute time in one direction on work days. That meant I left my house around 6:30 am, clocked in at 7:45 am, and left by 2pm to avoid traffic and get to the daycare before my daughter had to stay any longer. (She arrived there from my husband’s transport around 7am). Twice a week my family volunteered to pickup her up from daycare to give us extra time for work.

Now we’ve opened that second store, we save nearly 90 minutes in commuting for work but the exhaustion of it still creates daily anxiety for me.

How much can I get done? What time does one of us have to leave?

In the past week since our grand opening event we’ve been blessed to have my mother visit from out of town. She’s cooked, cleaned, and been able to stay home with my daughter when she was sick for three days. With her incoming departure, I find myself having stress dreams of our “tribe” abandoning us.

While I work on onboarding new employees and deep diving into marketing demographic data, I’m also silently panicking over the inability to comfort myself. I am currently unsure how to maintain a to-do list that is literally overflowing the planner boundaries and also meal plan, cook, clean, and care for myself.

There are no easy answers here and seasons change faster in parenthood than the four seasons of the year.

Continued reading…

I would like to link to an excellent article related to this topic from Harvard Business Review. In “How to Make Room in Your Work Life for the Rest of Your Self” the authors examine how we can make room for the multiple facets of our lives.

Read that article here.

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Coming up at Motherhood Minute

I want to hear what challenges you are currently facing in your multi-faceted life from work to home and in between. Please reply to this email or comment at Substack.