Working Mama!

On Friday, it will be 7 months since I returned to work, and I thought everyone deserved an update.

I've learned a lot of things since that Monday, June 10th, when I left my precious baby girl with a sitter and headed to the office.  I have been very busy in that time, and perhaps, TrendSetterMom.com has not been updated as often as it should.  The truth is that sometimes, I just don't have time between juggling my three main careers: Wage Earner, Wife, and Mother.  I say "main" careers, because I hold many roles in this life.  Those are just the three that use up the most of my time, and the three that are most important... although I believe I presented the order wrong the first time.  Here they are in a better order:

1. Wife to Jonathan
2. Mother to Lucie (and since I'm carrying him now... Asher too!)
3. Import Entry Processor

Now, to anyone I work with who may read this... presenting my life in that order does not mean that I don't love my job.  In fact, I do, and I will miss it terribly while I am on maternity leave (Don't worry, I WILL COME BACK!!!)  I just know that if I did not work on my home life first, I'd be pretty miserable at my office job too.

I'd also like to point out that Mother is below Wife... but only slightly.  That's because I take my relationship with my husband, the father to my children, very seriously.  It's important that we are a united unit so that we can parent together- even if we do not always agree on whether or not Lucie deserves another cookie or candy cane, or when and for how long to put her in time out when she is misbehaving.  Being happy with myself and my relationship with Jonathan is important to be able to be the best Mom I can be to Lucie and Asher.  I may be a hormonal wreck with these pregnancy hormones lately, but Jonathan, I do appreciate you, and even though your sarcasm sometimes pisses me off, it's also the humor that made me fall in love with you.

What else have I learned?

Quantity of Time was traded in for Quality of Time.  I was with Lucie 24/7 before I started my desk job, and I have to say that our time was not really QUALITY time, despite there being so much of it.  I was bored, exhausted and disengaged from parenting.  I was feeling hit with postpartum depression for quite some time before the move to South Carolina... but being in a new state, all by myself with Lucie (Jonathan was still in Alabama for work), with no extended family to help, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. 

Over about a month's time, I realized that I just wasn't cut out to be a Stay at Home Mom, and I'm here to tell you that that's okay!  Upon realizing this, I immediately set out to find a sitter (I found Shannon on SitterCity and she was amazing until August when she went back to school and Lucie was transitioned to Day Care).  Then, I applied to jobs.  Within two weeks, I had had five interviews.  Two were with staffing agencies, one was with the freight forwarder who eventually hired me, and the last two were with a truck broker.

The day after my freight forwarder interview, I went for a drug test and headed to the zoo with some moms from a local Meet Up Group.  I couldn't believe my luck- just as we sat down to feed our kiddies a snack, the background check lady called.  I would end up talking to that background check lady a total of 10 times the next two days, and then... I did not hear anything for a week.  I started to get scared.  Could one of my former employers have said something bad?  I checked with H.R. at the forwarding company.  She informed that they had delayed the new hire training class, but that they were very interested in me because of my background.  Almost a month went by before I received my offer letter.  I did a happy dance, signed it, and emailed it back immediately.

You see, in that month... I was holding out hope that this would be the job I would be hired for because I knew how much I would love it.  In my interview, I had told the manager interviewing me how much work/life balance meant to me, and that I was a wife and a mother but also needed a career to be a well rounded person.  I had been home for two years, and I was ready to get back into the workforce.  The manager seemed to respond well to that, and had made a comment that people who are happy with their home life are usually the happiest people at work.

All throughout that month of waiting, I held Lucie a little tighter, made sure to spend as much time doing "fun" things as possible, and tried to be calm about not hearing anything.  I realized that although I had interviewed for other places, working for this forwarder was really the only one of those jobs I wanted to take, because I truly felt comfortable at the interview.  It would be three weeks between the day I accepted that job and the day I would start work.  Although I was ready to go back to work, I was grateful to have that three weeks more to cherish my time home with Lucie.

I was a wreck the first day I left Lucie all day with the sitter.  When I picked her up, she smiled, and she was okay.

Seven months later... sometimes she cries in the morning when I take her to day care, but  like her Momma, she is not a morning person.  She puts on this melodramatic act to let me know that she wants to spend time with me, and the minute I walk out the door to her class room, if I look back in through the window, she has happily changed her tune to playing with the other kids.    

I've learned to be okay with that.  She is happy, but she wants me to know that when I'm not there, she misses me.  That's okay.  When she does get to spend time with me, she appreciates me more, and I appreciate every snot filled tissue I wipe from her nose and every spilled sippy cup full of milk I have to clean up.

I'm here to tell you that it's okay.  I'm okay.  We're okay.  Rejoining the work force does not make me any less of a mom, and being a mom doesn't mean I don't work as hard at my desk job.  It just means that when it's time to punch out at the end of the day, I have an important place to be: picking up my daughter from day care.  Watching her smile light up her face when I walk through that door makes it all worth it.  She never smiled at me like that before I went to work.  :-)