Conversations about working moms

My work friend Erin recently started Such Small Steps, where she talks about the work/home balance. Recently she wrote about her own thoughts blogging based on a piece from Sweet Fine Day on the subject of Transparency. As Erin describes the post, it’s about “the need for honest conversation between women on raising a family, work, and more, and how she feels there aren’t many places for women to discuss those topics openly with each other, even on blogs, where it is fashionable (and easier) to stick with lighter topics much of the time.” It sparked a lot of conversation in both her and Jenna’s comments and really got me thinking.

First, this is the least private blog/site I’ve ever had. There was a previous iteration of She Has Moxie, read mostly by strangers who found it via BlogHer ads, which I tried to make into a home/life/style/personal blog. I hope this website will become more, as I have a very definite mission in mind. With that mission in mind, I’ve tried to keep the site less personal. I want people to find it because they are looking for real stories of women and what they do with their lives. But as I read the above posts from Erin and Jenna, I realized I have to open up, make this more about what I do.

I’ve been a working mom for a year now. I went back to work at the beginning of June, 2010, when my daughter was 14 weeks old. At that time, I felt refreshed and renewed, ready to get back to work. This year has been so hard and so good. In that original post about my ideal day, I wrote about the logistics, but I also had in mind that I wanted to keep a sense of balance and perspective as I went about the day, working at home with my daughter in daycare five days a week. My time off had reminded me of the importance of investing time in my self, family, and home, as much as in my career.

I’ve been meaning to revisit that ideal day post since January. There’s been an internet meme that pops up in a lot of other blogs, where people detail their days by the hour. It’s fascinating to read them, and the main reason I started obsessing over blogs and the reason my feed reader is plump with too many to track, is that voyeuristic, yet innocent, urge to understand what people do with their days and how they do it. I value the kind of aspirational writing that an “ideal day” post would be as much as I value the true story. I’d love to compare my own two types of day, real and imagined, on here soon.

As Jenna writes on Sweet Fine Day, “Our life path isn’t for everyone and I’ve never aspired to be some kind of role model for ‘the working mother,’ but if I’ve helped shed some light to anyone’s questions on balancing work and family by perhaps showing that parenthood and a career doesn’t have to be so black and white, that there are alternative lifestyles out there beyond a 9-5 existence, then I’m happy to have helped in that small way.” I’ll continue to write about my days so we can add to these stories. I firmly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, so being honest about how I get my work done, how I draw the lines between professional and personal life out of my home is important to the story I tell here.