Mommy tracking

I read a short article this morning on one of my "feminist" blogs that was outraged, again, at the wage disparity between moms and childfree women, between moms and dads, etc. And outraged again at the suggestion that mothers deliberately take jobs with less responsibility and less time demand and therefore lower wages in order to care for their children. Nay! They are forced into these horrible jobs!

And I sat, and thought ... well, let's face it, I'm not a typical case. I'm a relatively highly educated white woman in a nice part of a nice city with a very cushy position. A cushy enough position that I'm ok stopping and pressing pause on my career while my child is young

But the fact is that I am choosing to do this. Oh, not without some trepidation, I admit, of what this will mean for my career in five years or ten years or twenty. I know that my earnings will be less than they otherwise would have been had I remained childless. (But really how much of a hardship is that when I'm earning more than the average woman in Canada?)

In the end what I've realized over the past two and a half years is that I can't have it all. Some women maybe can. Some women can work full time jobs and care for a child and run a household and work hard enough to continue to be promoted. Some women can either handle all that, or they can tamp down the guilt from not doing any one of those things well or they can go without personal time to make up for the time they need to devote to writing briefs or making little sandwiches for small people's lunches.

I am not one of those women, and I happen to think that I'm neither alone nor unusual. And so to try and maintain some semblance of balance and sanity, I am here coasting through a career, coasting in one place for a few years, while I devote more of my brain to other things.

I hope very much that one thing that will come from all the mommy-blogging is a realization that this is hard. Parenting is hard; working as a parent of a small child is seriously the hardest thing I have ever, ever done. Maintaining the balance needed to preserve me in the middle of the multitude of demands is seemingly impossible, only achievable if I let my standards fall in one thing or another. And that sucks. I am a perfectionist, and letting my standards fall is also extremely hard. So hard I can't even begin to tell you how difficult this realization and this fight has been.

But you know, one of the other things I have realized over the past few months is this: it doesn't matter. My kid won't be irreparably damaged if I am not perfect mommy every day. Let's aim for 75% of the time, and 100% of the time just making sure he knows I love him even though I screw up. My work colleagues don't hold me to the standard of perfection I set myself -- the pressure is all mine, and let's face it: nothing really that bad happens if I don't churn out the perfect document. They don't hire a writer to ensure everything that ever is written is perfect; they have hired a writer so that other people don't have to write, so that they can use their skills in other areas. 

And my husband ... well, he's the one who's in this with me, who can hopefully understand when I can't be as wifely as I want to be because my mind is so caught up with details of this project and what will we eat for dinner and where's that sippy cup and what did we need for daycare tomorrow and oh yes darling, you are a splendid tiger. I hope that most of the time, in future, he won't have to understand, I can be there for him ... but in the end we are in this together, and we'll muddle our way through.

And maybe that's all we really need in life. An understanding that things will never be perfect, and someone to help us muddle through it. We don't need to have it all, and really, how exciting would life be if we did? I think maybe the muddling and the imperfection is the actual beauty of living life, available only to those who slow down and breathe and look around, if only just for a moment. 

Disparate wages? Come on. There are flowers blooming over here. Which is more of a miracle?