Really, the answer is easy. But what interviewer wants to hear “I have four kids and want to be home when they are. I want to keep my house cleaner and make better meals. I want to walk my dogs and exercise and not have crazy rushed mornings where everyone has to be out of the house at 7:40. I want to make my family’s life better.” It’s all true, and those were the reasons behind my search, but it’s the type of answer that makes managers wonder whether you are going to spend your days working or homemaking.
A few interviews in, I narrowed down my answer to what it really was. Every day that I worked in the office, I lost at least three hours of my day. That amounted to somewhere between six and ten hours most weeks. I was spending up to forty hours a week on my 30 home ur a week job. And what it boiled down to was, I wanted that time back. It was my time, and it was disappearing every day, replaced by a long commute to a job I wasn’t enjoying anymore, sandwiched between a crazy morning and a stressful evening where I never could catch up.
So that’s what my answer became. I want that time back, to use in my way. I could be working, and getting paid for that time. Or I could use it for personal reasons. But the bottom line was, I wanted my three hours back.
After getting my job and getting my time back, my productivity skyrocketed. I found myself getting to things that I never had time for, keeping things cleaner than I’d been able to since long ago when I was a stay home parent who worked a couple hours a week. Within my newfound time I got my office moved out of the laundry room, and now have a much better setup in my bedroom.
I was able to bake cookies to bring to Thanksgiving, and made the decision not to rush our Thanksgiving travel on Wednesday, but instead to travel on Thursday, and spend Wednesday cleaning and doing laundry, a decision that allowed us to stay an extra day at the end of the weekend, since we knew our home was in order. I was congratulating myself on this good use of my time, but after Thanksgiving, I had a wrench thrown in to my time.
Two kids home sick, one for two days and another for three. No matter, they weren’t that sick and I was able to work and stay productive without much interruption. But then I caught it, and all my extra time was spent trying to recover. Easier than trying to work downtown while sick, but still no fun. Once I did recover, I tried to throw myself back into productive mode. I made a variation of Grandma cookies for a certain boy who forgot until the day of his scout party that he was supposed to bring Oreos. They didn’t end up getting eaten, but that is another story which I’ll call “the one where the kid forgets and his mom goes out of her way but then no one eats the cookies anyway”. But I still had the satisfaction of making them, and now we have fancy Oreos in our fridge.
It’s December, and as such, way too busy. Trying to catch up from being sick, and also get a little ahead, I took too much on in my day yesterday. My biggest error was taking my youngest two to the grocery store with me after school. Somehow I thought it might be fun, like the days long ago where I’d take them after preschool, or after pikcing them up from their grandparents’ house. I forgot one crucial element, though, and that is that in those days, I didn’t see them as much. I was downtown when they got out of school, I had night classes, I had homework. I didn’t see them every day from 2:30 straight until bedtime. Shopping with them was a change of pace, and also necessary due to my schedule.
They were fine, really. They did ask me the same questions over and over and make a million suggestions on what to buy, but it was normal kid stuff. But my patience wore thin, especially as I realized that my dinner plan would not work out, because we were on a time constraint because of a holiday concert and I still had $200 worth of groceries to put away when I got home.
The rest of the evening spiraled out of control. The kids ate leftovers while I put groceries away. I drove one kid to school for her concert and came back and tried to get the rest to get stuff done. They wouldn’t get ready, wouldn’t pick up their dirty clothes or put on their shoes, wouldn’t put away their homework. The room was trashed and I couldn’t deal any longer, and lost my patience and yelled at them. After we finally got to the concert and home again, I found out that neither had eaten a proper dinner. A hardboiled egg and cranberry sauce is not dinner. So I had to make plates of leftovers for them at 9:00pm. And boil new eggs, and put sheets on my bed, and unload the dishwasher, and make lunches, and still eat dinner. And that’s how I found myself up until midnight, grumping at myself and pre-peeling hardboiled eggs.
This is definitely not the productivity I’d been chasing. I took on too much in a day, which is a bad habit of mine, just ask my husband or my mom. I thought I’d learned something about using my time wisely at Thanksgiving, but I seem to have forgotten, less than two weeks later. The lesson I thought I had learned was that it’s still okay to say no, and to not push this new productivity to it’s max or I would end up repeating exactly the kinds of things I came home to avoid, like skipping dinner to put away groceries while the kids eat not enough leftovers for dinner, and yelling at two tired kids to keep their rooms clean when they had just spent two hours grocery shopping against their will. Instead I pushed through, trying to do the laundry and shopping and cooking and cleaning and parenting all in one day when I was only at about 75% and also work a full day. Not happening.
So today I was a little easier on myself. I worked in sweatpants which is something I try to avoid so I don’t fall into the habit of doing it every day. I picked some work tasks I could do on the couch and took it a little easy. I spent some time writing in the morning in an attempt to make sense of my difficult day. I made sure to clean up the kitchen and make my bed before I got started on my work day, to set my home day up to be more successful. I stopped work about 20 minutes before the girls got home, straightened up, made them a snack and sat and connected with them after school.
I can see that developing good habits and a standard routine is going to be crucial to my success at home. That and knowing when to say when, and when to say no. And lastly, knowing that just because I can take the kids with me grocery shopping, doesn’t mean I should.
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