Being a Working Mom - Again or Still?

Most of the time I don't consider what I do, which is write, to be real work. It's not that writing is completely effortless or that I haven't come close to earning a living off it which causes me to view it this way. It's just the first time in my adult life that I have experienced what others speak of when they talk about having a career. I've only ever worked at jobs. Work that exhausted, underpaid and imposed on me. Work that stole from my family. Work that presumed too much of our not exactly mutually serving relationship.

Technically, I took no time off when my daughter was born. I was a middle school teacher at the time, and she was born at the end of July. The mat leave policy gave me six weeks from the date of her birth so when the new school year began a month later it meant I was allowed only two weeks of paid leave (the pay coming from my sick day bank). I took those two plus one more unpaid week and dropped my baby off at daycare for the first time when she was just seven weeks old. I worked full time until she was four, and my remarriage brought us to Canada, where we still live. 

It was at the insistence of Canadian Immigration that I became a SAHM in the first place and my career as a writer began and is still evolving. Until last spring my only monetary compensation due to writing came from a workshop on blogging I was invited to present at the county library. But just within the last couple of weeks, I scored my first paying blog job. 

Yep, paid to blog. Given the state of the blogosphere that is not something I ever expected to be able to say.

My now seven year old has been haranguing me to return to work since last spring when she discovered that her school friends, whose mothers work outside the home, were catching the bus to the Boys and Girls club after school every afternoon.

"The Boys and Girls Club is so much fun, Mom. If you worked, I could go there after school too and play with my friends," she said. The not so subtle implication being that my slacker ways were standing in the way of her social life.

When I told her about my new job, writing about education trends and reform for a cause site, she asked,

"Will I get to ride the Boys and Girls Club bus now?"

"No, sweetie, it's a blog. I can work from home," I said.

"Oh, so it's just like what you do now," was her reply.

But it's not. And this was a little frightening in a way I haven't felt since those first couple of years in the classroom. I am being called upon to measure up to expectations in an career I feel as though I have been working towards since I wrote that first half a page story about pirates for Sr. Rita in the third grade. I am stretching again and offering myself up to the outside. But I understand her disappointment, she sees daycare as fun and social. She doesn't remember the days when I dropped her off a little before 7 A.M. and didn't return for her until close to 4 P.M. or sometimes later, depending on my day. She goes to school with more children who are in daycare/ after school care than those with parents who stay home, which is the reverse of our life back in the day or just me and her.

In between then and now though, can I really say I wasn't working? I have written all along. First for a blog that is no more, Moms Speak Up, where I wrote my way to a contributing spot and learned about a lot from my first real editor, Julie Pippert. Next was the SVM network which hosts this blog, and where I have continued to grow in my craft. As I wrote, I momm'd and wife'd and kept house, things that are my top priorities regardless of whether I am working on a book or freelancing or being rejected endless by fiction magazines.

My husband teases me about the life of Reilly that I live. I can flex my time in a way that his engineering job doesn't allow. I go to yoga three times a week, can take a morning off to host the local writing group or just take a long walk through the river valley - not the latter happens a lot because I am a tiny bit afraid of badgers and I have yet to walk the river and not run into one - but my version of work certainly doesn't look like work to people who punch a clock for "the man".

The mommy wars seem to be in season again. I stand as far to the middle as I can, looking for a DMZ when possible. I am not convinced there is a working mom or a stay at home mom. There is an infinite variety of women though and that's all I need to remember as I pursue a career for the first time in my life.

This is an original 50 Something Moms post by Ann Bibby of anniegirl1138 and Care2.com.