Katherine W. Goldman - Working Mothers 101

For Tessie, who taught me more than shell ever know.
(On second thought, wherever she is, she probably does.)

Were all smart women.
If there were one way to do this,
wed all be doing it.

Baby and Child Care? Yep.

What to Expect When Youre Expecting? Certainly.

Your Baby & Child? Its there.

Okay, you have them. You made sure they were on the shelf before you were a mother. But now that you arenow that youre a working motherare you finding what you need between the covers?

Is there a rundown of carpooling, packing for camp, cleaning your house, making Thanksgiving dinner, interviewing a prospective sitter, filling out your family calendar, shopping at the supermarket, finding a good plumber, meeting your childs new teacher, and planning a vacation all while holding a full-time job?

Not exactly.

Heres a book about you. About your child, to be sure, but first about you. With the number of chores, duties and responsibilities that you have, you can often feel that you dont get anything done or you dont get the right things done, that the tiny detailswhich are still eminently importantovershadow the big things. You might even wake up in the middle of the night worrying about what you didnt do. Your life feels out of control, that you cant even tell anyone where to begin to pitch in. Youre exhausted, overwhelmed, and mess up simple tasks.

Youve come to the right place for help.

Now that your life is inflated with children who are filling up their lives and their rooms with who they are, you want to downsize your life. Simplify it. Make it easier, more organized, less complicated.

In these pages youll find answers. You wont learn how to be Supermom. After all, Im merely a working mother, just like you. Im not talking to you as a sociologist, psychologist, pediatrician, or organizational expert, although Im not too bad at any of these. Im a Doctor of Thinkology like the scarecrow in TheWizard of OZ. I can figure out a few things, and if I dont know the answer, I know enough to ask. To find more strategies and tips for you, I went to our greatest resource: other working mothers.

And just because I say you can get organized doesnt mean I believe, insist, or even faintly imagine that you can do it all. Your life is already crammed with compromises. Theres not a chance you can do everything and be everything, and you should not feel guilty about it.

This is a book to help you take a deep breath and categorize your life. It will help you put things in order and check off things youve done. But as much practical stuff there is to do every single day, always remember that were talking about bloodlines, not bottom lines. Find the joy in your family, your career, and the world around you.

Were fortunate to live in a society that is acknowledging our responsibilities as well as our need to raise our children to be the best people they can be. Finally, we can keep pictures of our children on our desks, leave early to get to a Little League game, ask to work from home if a daughter is sick, or take a sons call during a meeting to help him with his homework.

Never forget who you are. Always be proud to walk into a meeting and say, Hello, my name is Mom.

I have no time to make time.

I know you dont have a lot of time, so lets get right to the point.

Oh, no, heres somebody else telling you how to live your life to be the perfect mother-worker-wife. Fear not. I live far from the world of perfection, and I not only cant draw you a road map to get there, but Im sure a few of the bridges are out.

Go into any office tomorrow morning, at any level, and youll hear the women who are talking about potty training, pediatricians, day camp versus sleep away, and making brownies at midnight. How many working mothers do you know who say that all they want is a life?

The real reason we take it all on? We still see ourselves as good little girls. Would any daughter of a certain age sit at the dinner table and watch her mother clear and do the dishes? Dont you make coffee and clean up the dirty mugs at the office?

WE HAVE A VISION OF HOW IT SHOULD BE

Louise is a bank executive specializing in risk management, but she has the good little girl still operating in her brain. When she was given a forty-page document to distill into a two-page report, she worked on it immediately. When her boss called to ask whether shed even had a chance to look at the original document, she looked at the finished report sitting on her desk.

We also notice certain things that indicate whether we are managing the home scene well. Jane, a marketing executive, left for a business trip early one Tuesday morning before her two young children were up. When she returned home Wednesday, she saw that her children had been dressed again in the same clothes shed put them in on Monday. Dont you think someone would realize it? she wondered. A mother would.

We are still struck with this idea of expectations: our jobour real jobis to manage the home and family And even though boys are beginning to understand that they too live in a world thats full of varied responsibilities, we know that if we want to have that other outside job, we have to become juggling masters.

The only surprise is that weve grown to like what we do outside the home, that theres something rewarding about having responsibilities and making money, and that we want all the experiences life has to offer us.

If we want it, we better get organized.

Youre going to have to find ways to put more space in your day and to make more of it available for the people and activities that youve decided are most important to you.

Theres too much going on to keep it all in your head.

• Get an organizer. Any organizer. No matter what kind you use, from good old-fashioned paper to a sophisticated, patented system you were taught at the office, to software you installed on your laptop, be in charge of it.
• Live by lists. Keep the Mother of All Lists. Hidden between the lines on our lists to pick up the dry cleaning and buy more juice boxes are unwritten reminders to save for college, teach values, and get those college applications in on time, even if were the mothers of newborns. We have the whole twenty-five years in mind from day one.

No mother has ever regretted on her deathbed that she didnt spend enough time at the office