How To Define This Working Life

I am a full-time mom. Rob is a full-time dad. Rob also works 12 hour days, 5 days a week, and sometime 4 hour days on Saturday. I work 10 hours a week. I am not a stay-at-home mom. I don't stay at home all day. I am not a housewife. Am I a homemaker? But doesn't Rob help make our house a home just as much as I do? We've never found the proper term for women that give up careers, education, or the dream of both to devote all day to nurturing children while our husbands work to pay for the nurturing our children need. I've asked around, and no one seems to be able to come up with an alternate term. My cousin Celia, a brilliant woman who was quite the executive before choosing to "stay home", and then taught English part time at a Utah college, describes herself as a Mother. That seems the most accurate. Although I don't know any men who write Father in the blank on personal information forms for occupation, and every father is definitely full-time.

The first time I confronted this term-problem was when I had to fill out a personal information form at a doctor's office right after quitting my full-time job as a litigator at a big downtown Cincinnati firm. There was a blank for Occupation. I paused. Well, I'm still a lawyer. But I don't have a paying job (a job ''outside the home" - which doesn't include all those women who continue their professions from home offices). So I shrugged and wrote "stay at home mom." But it bothered me.

Seven months after Ellie was born, I got a call from a friend who practices intellectual property law part-time. She works 5 hours a week, exclusively from home. The firm is small, woman-owned, and comprised mostly of young mothers. We have one, lone male attorney. Bless him. They were looking for a part-time estate planning attorney, and I signed on. I work 10 hours a week for The Wolfe Practice (check us out at http://www.twplaw.com - we're awesome). I spend Wednesday afternoons in the office, and log in the rest of my hours from home. Wednesdays are sometimes back to back client meetings. I am finding that I can't get any work done at home unless Ellie is down for a nap. So days are definitely busy. But fun. I'm having a blast. I'm so happy.

Who watches Ellie while I'm at the office, I'm often asked. The answer? She goes to a daycare center a half mile away from the office. The Gingerbread Academy. I think it's a wonderful, nurturing, learning place. But I notice the moment of pause that people give at my announcement that I take my child to daycare. Daycare carries quite a stigma. I find myself always backing up the announcement with a paragraph about how much I love the Academy, how I think the socialization is good for her, how they give me ideas for what games and learning activities to do with her at home. Frankly, I'm a big fan of a good daycare center. But there have been several days over the last several weeks where I've needed office time two days a week rather than one. Not only is this expensive, but I've found that, emotionally, I can't handle having Ellie in daycare two days a week. I'm sure she's fine - plenty of children spend five days a week in daycare and grow up to be wonderful, contributing citizens. But every family has to make decisions about what's right for them, and for us one afternoon a week at Gingerbread is plenty.

You can have a lengthy, passionate conversation with any mother about "what's right for us" and how to balance "family and work."

Working mothers (but don't all mothers work, regardless of whether any of that work takes place in a office?) face different experiences than working fathers (and isn't fatherhood work?). I'm not saying that fathers couldn't have the same experience as working mothers. I'm just saying that by and large they don't.

And here comes the point of this blog: two hilarious stories from recent weeks. Last Wednesday, I was running a bit behind schedule getting to work. Just as I drove out of the driveway, my gas light came on. There was no time to stop for gas, and I calculated that my gas mileage was sufficient to get me to Gingerbread, then to work, and then back to Gingerbread, and then to the gas station down the road. I was correct, by the way. By the time I left work, it was pouring sheets of rain. I decided to stop at the closest gas station to work, rather than waiting for the cheaper gas station close to home, thinking that I definitely did not want to run out of gas in the pouring rain.

After pumping the gas, I went to turn on the car. Nothing. Literally, nothing. The guy at the pump next to me said it sounded like the starter was out. And this gas station had no mechanic. Luckily, there was a mechanic at the gas station across the street. So I pulled out the umbrella, put Ellie and I under it, and walked across the busy intersection through sheets of rain in my black dry clean only suit and 3 inch black stilettos. There was a tow truck guy in the waiting room, who towed my car across the street. Turns out it was the battery, which apparently had had enough of drought and heat and rain. An hour later, I had a new battery and was back on my way.

Next story, and this probably illustrates best what I find is unique in the experience of "working moms." I had a court hearing last week, on a day that Gingerbread is full and has no opening for a part-timer like Ellie. The hearing was a 9:00 a.m. I got Ellie bathed and dressed. I realized my black jacket was still at the cleaners. So we stopped at the cleaners on the way to the highway, where I removed the jacket from the plastic and put it on. We hit major, major traffic heading downtown, and I had to call the judge's chambers and tell the clerk we were going to be late. (By they way, the clerk was whispering, because the judge had a criminal docket before our hearing, and when I got to the courtroom I found three handcuffed, prison-attired individuals waiting their turn to make their case to the judge - fascinating). I stopped outside Rob's office - again, pouring rain - and picked him up. We drove up to the courthouse, where I hopped out and headed in for the hearing. The opposing attorney, whom I'd never met before, is just coming back to work after maternity leave, and we chatted about the difficult decision of how much to work and how to find good childcare before we started talking about the case. Forty-five minutes later, I called Rob (driving around town with a sleeping Ellie) and he came to pick me up. We dropped him back at work, and headed back to the 'burbs. All in a day's work. Thank goodness for team effort!

So there you have it. A long post, and somewhat indulgent on my part. Just a few thoughts I had to put out there. Now Ellie is down for a nap, and I'm going to sign on remotely to access my desktop and client files at work. Good luck to all women out there striking a balance. Let me know if you come up with a word to define what we all are doing.