Nine Fun Facts About Full-Time Working Mothers

1. We are resourceful. Let’s hear it for Thursday mornings when you realize that you have nothing for the kids’ lunches but almost-turned strawberries and leftover pasta in oversized Tupperware. While those other mommas are lovingly hand-packing turkey roll-ups with love notes, I’m like sweet! We have frozen burritos! WE WILL SURVIVE ANOTHER DAY.

2. We don’t mind traffic. After all, rush hour is a blessing.  Time alone without children to gather one’s thoughts, be mindful, pray, and listen to music.  That’s what I tell myself, at least. And yet quite honestly I am a liar. It’s a daily exercise in patience while you sit in a sea of taillights, mostly cursing.

3. We don’t like to repeat ourselves. Can CPS be called for yelling about putting on shoes? I mean hypothetically if there’s a chronic not-putting-on-shoes problem and said yelling can be heard in the general neighborhood at a high volume? Asking for a friend.

4. We encourage perseverance through life’s many little troubles. My daughter’s like “no one else has to eat cheese sandwiches for lunch.” Like something is wrong with cheese sandwiches. Suck it up, kid. Later in life there’s traffic and leaking oil filters and complex relationships. This is minor.

5. We cook healthy dinners for our families. Dinner used to be a time where we all gathered around a protein and two vegetables. Now it’s a mad rush to put macaroni and carrots on a plate before 7 pm.  When I actually do cook a real meal, the kids frown. “What? No carrots?”

6. We recycle. Yesterday one of my children got leftover pork roast, biscuits with jelly, and grapes for lunch. I fail to see the problem.

7. We encourage ourselves to be our best. Every morning, we stare at that woman in the mirror, the one with dark circles and hair that looks like it was shocked with electrical outlets. One voice inside says “Give in, hon. Just throw on a baggy dress and ponytail it.” But another voice, much more faint, says “Girl, you know you’ll regret that decision by 2 pm. So go ahead and make more coffee, wear those black strappy heels, and curl through the tangles. I taught you better than this.” I hate that voice. I snarl at it as I dab on concealer.

8. We focus on what’s important. Working full time means sometimes your kids are late to school, you forget things, you push them in front of television shows in order to jump on conference calls, or say things like “mommy is really stressed out today because of an acquisition that almost tanked and millions were at stake so HOW ABOUT WE NOT WHINE ABOUT THE FACT THAT WE ONLY HAVE PEANUT FLAVORED GRANOLA BARS.

9. We have a thing for pajamas. Sometimes I have dreams of taking my kids to school in pajamas. My stay-at-home mom friends tell me it’s not that glamorous, and if you’re home all day there’s laundry to accomplish, and they dream of going out to fancy lunches. I just keep yelling “PAJAMAS” in the phone until they finally relent and tell me that it’s actually pretty damn awesome.

Basically, working outside the home is hard.  Being a mom is hard.  Put those together and your children will eat lots of carrots.

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