What Kind of Mother am I?

Stay at home mom, work from home mom, working mom, single mom – these are common ways to categorize moms with terms that don’t have a lot to do with how we do our actual mothering. One of these categories is how you might answer another mom when they ask what you do – it’s what they really want to know – how do you identify? what is your schedule like? are you jealous or annoyed by moms in my category?  Working moms and stay at home moms can be jealous of one another and feel guilty for different reasons. Single moms are usually also working moms, and cope with resentment and performance pressure. The newest breed, the work from home moms, sometimes feel disconnected from all the other kinds of moms.

I wrote about motherhood as an adaptation, about how around the time you get the hang of things, something changes.  Infants stand up into toddler-dom and preschoolers jump on a bus and become school-aged kids overnight.  There are tons of books you can read about how to handle all this – these kids that keep morphing into something new.

But.

Is there something out there to help us – those of us who have gone through motherhood changes that cause us to switch categories, to become what we never thought we would be, to make lifestyle changes that we didn’t anticipate, or want, or plan for? Over the past few years, I’ve managed to spend time in variations of each of those four main categories of “mom type”.

I started out as a stay at home mom. Bleary-eyed and frumpy feeling, I missed my career but loved my babies and being home with them. I wanted to go out the door to work every morning with my husband to achieve things like I used to do, but couldn’t manage to plan dinner by the end of the day.  As the kids got older, I started doing a few projects and some freelance work from home – I proclaimed that I was a part-time, work-from-home mom.  I spent all that “free time” preschool was going to give my stay-at-home mom self in front of the computer writing or doing phone interviews, but I was doing SOMETHING with my brain, and it felt good.

And then Craig’s job took him out of town for four days per week every week for over a year, and I became a part-time, single, work-from-home mom. And that was super hard, until I got the hang of it.  Other moms would feel sympathy for me and my two hoodlum children, and I did miss my husband terribly, but I also had quiet evenings all to myself and didn’t have to check in with anyone else when making day-to-day decisions.

And then Craig came home, and we started a business, and suddenly, I had an office to go to, and timelines, and deadlines, and meetings, and emails, employees, to-do lists, and networking events.  I was a couple weeks in before I realized that I had become a working mom.  Except that I still have consulting gigs and blog posts to write and conferences to attend that belong to that work-from-home mama that I used to be. And there’s still school drop off and pickup, soccer practice, swim lessons, PTA volunteering, and “when will you play with me?” that is the responsibility of the single and stay at home moms from days of yore.  And that was really, really  hard, because I didn’t want to NOT be any of those different moms, but I couldn’t be all of them at the same time very well.

AND let’s not forget that way back there, at the back of my brain and the bottom of my heart, there are still the pieces of me that want to just decide to step out the door and run five miles, or check out a great read from the library and devour it in a day, or swim laps for an hour, or have an uninterrupted conversation.

There are days when all this lies heavy on me, when I feel like something has to give, but I feel selfish wanting to take.  What kind of mother am I?  “Not a very good one,” I think.  And other days I feel super-human, self-amazed at the wide range of tasks and duties that fill one day, or blessed in the ability to take my children to my workplace, where there’s an indoor playgym and 3D movies AFTER we visit the library or go for ice cream.  Some nights ( like tonight) I feel guilty sitting up late to write a blog post that has been brewing in my brain for weeks, while other times I soak in the quiet  – a unique tender that my family and my home pay out to me after a day of toil. I am finding, too, that pulling out those really old non-mom pieces of me are also important in helping me keep my grip, they are the base components of my chemistry – ignoring them seems to bring slow implosion.

What Kind of Mother am I?  I don’t know.  I want to be every kind of mother, but most importantly, I want to be the kind of mother that my children can love, and trust, and hold tight to, the kind of mother that I can be proud of, the kind of mother that I never thought I would be. I hope I’m still becoming her.

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