We Can Do It.....ALL of it!

Our Grandmother's Genteration



Our Generation



 I wonder sometimes if the women who jumped into the workforce during World War II and after had any idea what the lives that women would look in the generations to come. They were, until the war and the Women's Rights movement, at home cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, and raising their children…many of them dreaming desperately to be able to put the kids on the school bus and then head off to the office! Now that this is completely an option for women, so many of us wish that we could skip the office and just be able to put the kids on the school bus and then head back inside the house to clean, cook, and do the laundry! We never can really be satisfied, can we?!? Seeing these images makes me realize that we, as working mothers, can and have to do it ALL!

I spent the whole decade of my twenties going to college, graduate school, and working hard to build my teaching career. Of course, that wasn't all I was busy with! I was also busy getting married, being a newlywed, and by the end of my twenties, I was already a mother of three small children. It the midst of all of this, if you had asked me if I would ever consider being a "stay at home mom", I would have most certainly let out a loud guffaw and assured you that that would never be of any interest to me. I would have probably said things like, "I would be bored to death at home", or "I have to feel like I am contributing something to the world". My how things have changed! Now in my thirties, with exactly the career that I was so busy building, I wish desperately wish that I wasn't constantly running around completely crazy picking up and dropping of the kids and trying frantically to keep up with everything from grocery shopping to PTO meetings. I find myself day dreaming on the way to work, after dropping off all 3 kids and already running 10 minutes late at 6:30 a.m.,  about a life where I had the option to spend my mornings hanging out with Connor, drinking coffee, and watching The Early Show!


Steven and I actually spent probably close to $300 on lottery tickets the week or so before I was to return to work this summer trying to win enough for me to be able to say home for at least one year! Rest assured, we were playing out of fun in a tongue-in-cheek way fully aware of the odds against us! (He did however scratch one $500 ticket!) The only thought that really gets me through the hard times is trying to remember that this is only one small phase of my life. Before I know it, it will be gone and I will be looking back on my 30s and thinking how incredibly smooth it all went!


While in graduate school, I stumbled across a theory called the "Quarter-Life Crisis' that has really stuck with me all these years. Feel free to google it for yourself, but in a nut shell, it recognizes a certain point that many thirysomethings reach after spending a good decade going to college and building a life and career for themselves. It calls upon the idea that we, just fresh out of own adolescences, are forced to make such enormous decisions like what whether or not we should go to college, what majors we should choose, whether or not to get married, have a baby, etc. All of these decisions often come before we are perhaps fully armed, both with the necessary experience and cognitive ability, to face the outcomes of the choices that we have made. It makes me really wish that we had a pause button to press on our 19th birthday so that our 33 year-old selves could step in and tell us a thing or two about how these decisions will impact our entire future! This is not to say, however, that I would have changed one single thing! If I could take a picture of my life now and hand it to my 19 year-old self, I am sure that I would be completely happy and proud of where I am.....even as chaotic and totally out of control as it sometimes feels!