A study conducted by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and published in the journal Applied Ergonomics (read the original here) showed that exposure to the artificial light emitted by tablets can inhibit the body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate our internal clocks. The study showed that two hours of exposure to a bright tablet screen at night reduced melatonin levels by about 22 percent. Other studies have shown that once you mess with melatonin, you risk increasing your chances of developing obesity, diabetes, and other health issues. I know several people who say taking melatonin supplements help them sleep better, which makes me wonder if cutting back on screen time at night—in effect letting the body naturally produce adequate levels of melatonin–would have the same effect.

Although vegging out in front of the t.v. or playing around on the Internet are easy enough traps to avoid if I put my back into it (and we all know that I’ll fall on my sword before I read for pleasure on a tablet), working on the computer until right before I go to bed is sometimes unavoidable. Sure, I’d love to take an hour to dim the lights and play soothing music and maybe dab my wrists with lavender oil before I slip into my comfiest jammies and drift off to dreamland, but the reality is I often workworkworkworkwork until I crash face-first into the mattress in whatever T-shirt I’m wearing and then wake up the next morning exhausted but grateful that I got whatever little sleep I managed snag. It’s easy to blame a night-waking baby for my poor sleep habits, but it might be more useful if I acknowledged the things I can actually control, like, for instance, my Candy Crush habit.

How do you engage with technology before going to bed? Is shutting it down part of your pre-bedtime routine, or is using it one of the ways you look forward to relaxing at the end of the day?

A survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project shows use of e-readers and tablets rose in 2012 (up to 33 percent, compared to 18 percent in 2011) and that the percentage of those who read printed books dropped (to 67 percent from 72 percent) in the same period of time. Now, the e-reader numbers obviously grew in part because more people are acquiring e-readers who didn’t have them before, but the fact that readers of paper books dropped during this same time shows that in some cases e-readers are becoming a replacement for the real thing. Gasp.

Skipping over the minor details that (a) I work in book publishing and (b) because I read books for a living–and mostly on a screen–chances are slim I’ll be getting an e-reader during this lifetime, I’m curious to hear some real-life data. Do you read e-books? (The study shows tablets are now more popular than e-readers; do you have a preference?) Are e-books replacing *gasp* printed books in your life? I’ve heard e-books are cheaper, easier to get, easier to travel with, and somehow faster to read (wha?), and although I will swear on my forty-pound abridged OED that comes in a box with a little drawer for its own magnifying glass that I’ll never make the switch, I’m…intrigued.

Image courtesy of adamr/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Is there such a thing as a relaxing vacation when you have kids? Even if you leave them home while you fly off to some exotic beach resort, aren’t you still wondering how they’re doing, if they miss you, how many cookies Grandma let them eat before breakfast that day?

We’re not flying off to an exotic beach resort this week but in fact staying home and just trying to survive the days until we drive over the hills and through the valley to Grandmother’s house for Easter weekend, where there will be extra sets of adult hands to help with the feeding and rocking and wiping and snuggling. I taught the four-year-old the word “staycation” when he asked why he didn’t have to go to school but we still had to do “boring things” like go to the grocery store and fold laundry. This is life, kid. It’s time you learn the truth.

We’ve been having fun, though, and the real pain has been keeping up my regular work schedule while having both boys home with me all day. Whether you’re vacationing away or staycationing at home, as working people we’re all so constantly connected that it feels like it’s never enough to say “I won’t be checking my email” unless you can also say “because I can’t check my email,” by which you’re implying you’re going to Australia to spend Spring Break in the Way, Way Outback with the wallabies.

Do you take time off when your kids are on Spring Break? If so, are you able to treat it like a vacation and actually relax?

Putting aside the pipe dream of not having to work at all, most of the moms I know (thanks for answering my late-night poll, Twitter friends!) say a flexible part-time job would feel just right when it comes to balancing Mom Time and Work Time. So why are so many more women today eager to clock 40-hour (or more) work weeks?

My suspicion was that it had a lot to do with what happened to the economy in those five years, and the research seems to agree, as women in more difficult financial situations are more likely to “prefer” full-time work over part-time–the quotation marks used here because I’m not sure you can call something a “preference” when it decides whether or not you can put food in your kids’ bellies. According to the study, 47 percent of women who said they “don’t even have enough to meet basic expenses” said full-time work was ideal, in contrast to only 31 percent of women who said they “live comfortably” and would still prefer to work full time. Makes sense.

Another surprising statistics was that the increase in mothers who would prefer to work full time was greater among currently working mothers than among those who stay home. In 2012, 37 percent of working mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time, up from 21 percent in 2007, whereas among non-working mothers, the increase was from 16 percent to 22 percent (which the people who understand the ins and outs of this stuff tell me is “not statistically significant.”) So much for the grass-is-greener philosophy that has led many a working mother to quit her job to stay home with her kids and then realize it’s not all snuggles and bonbons. (I am myself famously not a natural at the SAHM gig.)

The reality is that 60 percent of two-parent households these days have two working parents, so work is in the cards for most of us whether we like it or not. As I feel the crunch of what it would take financially to put my younger son in daycare while also paying for my older son to not only attend full-time preschool but start participating in extracurricular activities more organized than running around the backyard like recently guillotined poultry, work is about to become more important to me than ever. But would I venture to call full-time work “ideal,” even though the salary certainly would be? No, I don’t think so, at least not yet (meaning with kids who aren’t in all-day school).

I have so many thoughts about this topic, but the people who understand the ins and outs of this stuff tell me that if I go on and on and on and on, readers will click the window closed before they finish this post and (hopefully!) leave a comment. Are you ready to talk amongst yourselves? I’ll give you some bonus topics:

• According to the study, working fathers place more value on a high-paying job, whereas working mothers place more value on flexibility. This is definitely true for my household, and each quality is very heavily dependent on the other. Is it true for you?
• Check out the first table in the article, comparing distribution of time between mothers and fathers in 1965 compared to 2011. The women spent a crazy-high 32 hours a week on housework(!!!) and 8 hours a week on work outside the home (but somehow only 10 on child care?). Can you even? My doorknobs would shine like the top of the Chrysler Building.
• The study shows a significant gap in happiness between working and non-working mothers: 45% of non-working mothers say they are very happy, compared with 31% of mothers who work either full or part time.

What’s your work situation? Would you describe it as “ideal”? How much do you work? How much would you like to work? How flexible is your job? How happy are you? Discuss.

Now that I’m a mom of two, the household CEO, and a kind of sporadic employee for a handful of clients in a handful of different industries, my life is definitely less organized and more hectic, and the very first thing that slides is my so-called perfectionism at home. The house is a mess, the kids haven’t bathed in…a while, and most of the time I don’t even know what day it is. I keep myself from feeling like a total failure of a homemaker by telling myself none of things things are really a big deal in the big picture, and although I know I’m right (right?), I also know I’m rationalizing as a survival mechanism.

But the truth is I have to let something (okay, some things) slide because I can’t do it all 100 percent, as much as I’d like to, and that can give me a real case of the ughs. I hate feeling like a slacker in the areas of my life that I will always swear are my top priorities–family and home–while I simultaneously chase perfection in the work I do professionally. So what gives? Why do I churn out work that’s on time and shiny and complete while my kids are in the corner playing with dust bunnies? Do I simply have a higher standard for myself as an employee than as a mother? Yikes. I hope not.

Here’s what I think it is: I take advantage in the places I can take advantage. If the kids are dirty, they’re still my kids and they still love me. If the house is dirty, it’s still my house and it can always be cleaned tomorrow (or the next day). If I re-neg on a date night with my husband because I have to work late, he always forgives me and takes a rain check. But if I miss a job deadline or do substandard work or neglect my professional emails for a few days because I’m busy swiffering the floor or playing Spot It for the frillionth time, the reality is that I might not have those clients any more. And I need those clients, as much for my sanity as for the paychecks.

Through it all, I haven’t relinquished my desire to be perfect, but I’ve learned to temper that fire with the cool mist of reason: I’m doing what’s necessary, and I’m doing the best I can. Besides, a dirty kid is loved no less than a clean one, and a dirty house is no less full of good family memories.

Have you found a way to balance your work and family lives such that the things you say are your top priorities are actually treated as such?

I kind of hate the image I chose to accompany this post because the idea that “working mother” equals “woman on a laptop while holding a baby” is a misguided and/or uninformed interpretation of how many versions of work-at-home motherhood there are out there. And yet…here I am, the lady on a laptop while holding my baby. (We do not, however, wear matching outfits that also coordinate with the giant arrangement of fresh flowers giving a “pop of color” to our sparkling white kitchen. Right now, for instance, I am wearing green plaid pajama pants that belong to my husband, and the baby is wearing oatmeal in his hair.)

Fashion aside, I’ve considered myself a WAHM since I shifted my office from a building with coworkers and a water cooler to my kitchen table, with a view of the neighbors’ garbage cans. When my first son started going to daycare in the summer of 2010, it made more sense for me to work from home, and I was lucky that my employer agreed and was flexible. Two and a half years later, I’m still based in my house (I just upgraded from the kitchen table to an actual desk, albeit one against one wall of the dining room), but the biggest change has been that we recently welcomed another child into our family. The baby is six months old now and doesn’t have a spot in daycare for another five or six months, so, after a generous maternity leave, I had to start working again in earnest last month and, whoa nelly, being a work-at-home mom with an actual child IN THE HOUSE is, as I said above, different.

Right now I operate mostly in triage mode: the baby is my main priority–followed by my older son, who’s away at preschool all day–and anything above and beyond the realm of changing diapers and cleaning oatmeal mush out of wispy blonde hair (his or mine) feels like a crunch. It’s a constant toss-up of what will get done–sometimes it’s book editing work, sometimes it’s internet writing work (*waves*), sometimes it’s housework, sometimes it’s crafting as therapy (join me, will you?)–and even though it’s not ideal that I do all these things at a frantic pace during naps or in the few hours between the kids’ bedtime and my bedtime, or while I’m standing at the kitchen counter with the baby on my hip just like in all those stock photos, I still love and NEED that on-a-deadline, use-your-brain, talk-to-other-adults work work in my life, so I don’t complain. Much.

But MAN it’s hard to excel at my job with a baby who naps in only 20-minute increments and doesn’t sleep through the night. And MAN it’s hard to excel at motherhood when all the work deadlines and details and demands are rattling around in the back of my head all day. My kingdom for an office with a water cooler and coworkers who don’t wear diapers.

Where are your kids when you work at home? If they’re at home with you, do you have help–a babysitter or nanny who wrangles them in the other room, or a neighbor you can call for a quick hour of relief?

When my son started going to daycare, I struggled a lot with the concept that one person’s job needed to be more flexible than the other’s. Our family’s previous arrangement was that my husband and I both worked part-time while the other parent was home with our son; there was no discussing who was in charge of domestic duties on a particular day because the answer was obvious. When my husband got a new full-time job, my son started daycare, and I began working from home (the second of those things precipitating the third), it took me a while to realize that the built-in flexibility of my career was a blessing not the curse it felt like when I was automatically expected to sacrifice my job at every turn.

Up to that point, I was so used to my husband and I doing everything 50/50 that it felt totally foreign (and, to be honest, unfair) that I was suddenly solely in charge of daycare drop-offs and pick-ups and daycare sick and vacation days. It felt like the fact that I had to be more flexible necessarily meant my job was somehow less important, that I was less important. I wrote about all this back then, and the conclusion I came to was I just needed to shut up and suck up. (I put it more gently than that, but it really was a hard pill to swallow at first.) If my son had a sick day, I was now always the one to miss work to take care of him. I was in charge of his doctor’s appointments, getting his bag packed in the morning, and knowing when to not dress him in a new sweater because it’s art day. It just made the most sense for me to fill that position, even though it felt lopsided.

Two-plus years and another kid later, I’m more comfortable in my role as a full-time mom and a career woman on the side, but I still felt the lightbulb go on over my head when I read Liz’s post because it articulated everything in a way that makes it all seem so simple and sane. I no longer see our situation as his job vs. my job but as a constant negotiation about how we shuffle our allotted 1.5 careers between the two of us in order to stay solvent and organized (mostly) and happy. It’s teamwork in a way I’d never thought of it before.

Do you have a 1.5-career marriage? Do the roles ever shift? Are you happy with the way things are now?

At the top of p. 146 of Pamela Druckerman’s excellent book Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (read it! read it!), I found myself sitting and reading and then smiling and nodding and then getting up for a pen and paper so I could leave myself a note to remember to tell you about the brilliant thing she wrote about that old familiar friend, Working-Mom Guilt. Here’s what she says:

For American mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the Internet or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’re not just selfish. We’ve “paid” for our lapses.

Here, too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Americans do. After all, they’re working while bringing up small children.  And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.

The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt.

Does that ring a bell for you? It banged a wall-sized gong for me.

Guilt, it turns out, doesn’t always make us feel simply bad, it sometimes makes us feel kiiiiinda sorta better about other things that make us feel bad. Guilt makes it easier to do stuff we think we shouldn’t (or perhaps better with air quotes: “shouldn’t”) be doing. When we do things like choose (”choose”) to go back to work after the baby’s born, or we say no to a playdate that will be good for the kid but boring/awkward/inconvenient for ourselves, or when we refuse to sign up our little achievers for as many extracurricular activities as they are years old because that’s what everyone else is doing, we often actually welcome that wave of guilt because if we’re guilty–if we feel “oh, just awful” about any lapse in parenting–that proves at least we’re not selfish, right? Our priorities are all squared away just fine, thank you, if we persist in feeling guilty about the proper things.

Before reading that, I never thought about guilt that way–that guilt gives us permission to be “bad,” even when “bad” is necessary, whether for reasons of financial stability, emotional well-being, or whatever else keeps us upright and functioning on the majority of days. That American mothers at large tend to, as Druckerman says, “valorize” that guilt is a familiar trope here on a forum for working mothers, but this idea that we might secretly use and need guilt to excuse behaviors [that may or may not need excusing]…this is new-to-me way to think about things.

What say you? Do you use guilt as permission or an excuse? Anything you want to confess? (I’ll confess to feeling oh, just awful about surreptitiously checking Twitter at the dinner table but then doing it anyway because I’ve let guilt make it okay.)

]]> http://workitmom.com/bloggers/workingonmotherhood/2013/01/23/how-guilt-gives-us-permission-to-be-bad-mothers/feed/ http://workitmom.com/bloggers/workingonmotherhood/2013/01/16/how-your-job-influences-your-personal-style/ http://workitmom.com/bloggers/workingonmotherhood/2013/01/16/how-your-job-influences-your-personal-style/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:00:33 +0000 Leah K http://workitmom.com/bloggers/workingonmotherhood/?p=303 My mom has a bit of a wild streak. “I wish I could dye my hair purple,” she confesses. It goes without saying that a fifty-something nursing supervisor talking to a bereaved family about organ donation in a conservative suburb would not pass muster with lavender locks, and so we go without saying it. When she retires, though, look out.

Now that I work from home 100 percent, I could so dye my hair purple. I could dye it rainbow colors, pierce my face all over, and wear a giant banana costume during my next conference call. I don’t, of course (too much work!)–most days you’ll find me in some combination of jeans and a T-shirt, workout clothes, and p.j.s–and the most adventurous my style gets is when I buy bright green nail polish that matches exactly nothing but makes my four-year-old squeal with delight and ask if I’ll paint his nails too. It’s as exciting as a cornfield around here.

Although I’m certainly not a woman known first and foremost for her style, I do have fun experimenting with fashion and I do sort of miss having the opportunity to put together an outfit in the morning and then actually, you know, wear it somewhere people will see it (and maybe even care). The feeling is never so pronounced as when I go out with friends for mid-week, after-work dinner and drinks. I spend days picking an outfit and hours getting gussied in my finest array and then I devote the evening to admiring the professional attire (and jewelry and hair and makeup) of all those hip, young career women with offices in the city and commutes on public transportation and regular contact with stylish coworkers and stylish strangers whose appreciation for a cool new nail polish may not match my son’s in enthusiasm yet surpasses his in authority. (Sorry, son.)

I wouldn’t give up my current job situation for the chance at a few murmurs of adult approval when I wear a new pair of shoes, but, as shallow a complaint as it is, it’s still something I miss. I’m well aware that there are plenty of workplaces where I wouldn’t be allowed to paint my fingernails bright green (or dye my hair purple), and many other places where I’d feel just as out of place if I weren’t styled to the nines in the latest trends every single day. In fact, in the latter environment, I bet I’d spend a lot of time cringing like the country bumpkin who has prepared for her big trip to the city by studying the pages of a style magazine from two years ago and strides into the office wearing head-to-toe Missoni for Target, which she finds out soon enough was, like, sooooooo 2011. Then again, maybe if I were surrounded by fashionable people every day I’d step it up and be a total fashion plate. (But probably not.)

When I dwell on the subject, I start to suspect my Have-Not feeling is actually a Grass-Is-Greener feeling, i.e., my side of the fence feels less-than only because it’s my side of the fence. So I’m curious: Do you get to express your personal style at work? Do you get to have fun with fashion within a professional environment, or are you stuck in business casual beige day after day? If you have super stylish coworkers, do you consider them inspirational or a source of extra pressure? Do you think my grass is actually greener as you wish you could work in yoga pants/purple hair/a banana costume instead? (I am assuming none of you works in a banana costume already, although I would love to be wrong about that.)

Well, what I should say is that I’m not big on following through with resolutions. A year is a long time, and the fact that I’ve usually forgotten my resolutions by the end of January is a good sign I’m not going to stick with them through the end of the year.

This time, instead of going forward with my usual carefully constructed plan for failure, I’ve resolved(!) to set smaller, more achievable goals, to be tackled within smaller, easier-to-keep-track-of amounts of time. Rather than big, sweeping lifestyle changes (cut out junk food! make the bed every single day! learn to basketweave!), I’m aiming for more modest targets, ones that will hopefully, over the coming year (and maybe the rest of my life), add up to an overall sense of success and well-being instead of a dark cloud of dissatisfaction and failure. (Not that you can be that disappointed in botching your resolutions when you can’t even remember what they were, but you know what I mean.)

Because there are so many working parts to my life, I’m also setting up a kind of framework that will hopefully allows me plenty of room to have little victories in many different areas (and a few cop-outs as well). At the wise old age of thirty-three and a half, I’ve realized that doing well in one part of my life (say, office work) doesn’t always make up for feeling less-than in other parts (say, housework), ad so setting one small goal per month in each major category of my life will, in theory, help me get closer to that ideal state of balance and fulfillment. Besides, when you have a whole bunch of resolutions (seven per month times twelve months) instead of just one or two for the whole year, chances are better that even if I don’t have a perfect record, I’ll certainly have plenty to celebrate with champagne next December 31.

My goals list for January looks something like this:

Career: Send a resume and cover letter to at least one new potential freelance client.

Home: Bake an avocado pie. (I’ve never even tried one, but I’ve always been intrigued, and I love small goals that are also delicious.)

Social: Throw a good birthday party for my husband.

Marriage: Have an at-home date night at least once a week. (Something that involves actual conversation instead of just plopping down in front of a movie.)

Motherhood: Read a chapter book with my older son, just the two of us.

Fitness: Exercise at least 15 days in January.

Hobby: Put together one photo book for a gift.

Are you a big-resolution maker or a small-resolution maker? What are some of your goals for 2013?