Don’t Quit Your Day Job

This is a post on how frustrating (impossible?) it is to work from home while caring for your children. The fates must be smiling on me because they so aptly illustrated that point by having my children pull me away from the post I was composing. I left my computer with such haste that I failed to save my work. My browser then crashed and all is lost.

This goes part way toward explaining why I have recently counseled two friends to scratch the work-from-home schemes they have been hatching. I told them that it wouldn’t work, that it couldn’t be done, even though my own career plans have been driven by a desire to find some way to work from home ever since I became a mother. You see, my attempts to earn a regular, dependable income through freelance writing done in my “spare time” have largely been unsuccessful.

The past couple weeks, since deciding to work toward earning enough ad revenue with this blog to replace my mat benefits by October, have seen me at peak productivity. But I am up late, really late. I sometimes have to ignore my children to meet deadlines or conduct business over the phone. My work suffers because I am constantly distracted and my children suffer, too. And I don’t even see a paycheque on the horizon. I can (barely) do this, though, because I am not trying to replace a full-time workload and salary like my above mentioned compatriots. Meals and naps and outings are important for your children and they take time — a lot of time. Any plan that doesn’t fully account for all the work that goes into child-rearing is doomed to fail. Trust me. And don’t even ask about the housework.

Still, my ideal situation is to earn enough to pay for part-time childcare so I can have a couple days to really work. And that’s less work-from-home than it is part-time work — I’d gladly go to an office if I had one. So when I came across Angie Wagner’s AP article about work-from-home parents yesterday, I had already been giving this topic a lot of thought. She cites Lisa Roberts, author of How to Raise a Family and a Career Under One Roof, as dividing parents into integrators and segregators. Wagner identifies as an integrator, doing work whenever and wherever, while caring for her three-year-old. I desperately want to be a segregator. I try to work while the kids are sleeping as much as possible, and will plan to have someone else around to keep an eye on things while I conduct phone interviews, etc. My dad earned his PhD and wrote a number of books while taking care of us kids, but we knew the score. Dad’s in his study, so do not bother him. He would pop down to his basement study for 15 minute increments when we were little, but those 15 minutes were his own. And he would work around the clock; not everybody can do this.

Joanna Weiss heralds an era of telecommuting workers as some new golden age for parents in this Boston Globe op-ed, but I’m not sure that it’d offer much more than saving on the commute and wardrobe costs. I applaud The Mama Bee’s criticism of Weiss’s argument, her insistence that publicly funded maternity benefits and universal childcare are the real solutions for the working parent. I disagree, however, with her perception of freelance journalism as some dream job for parents. Like any aspect of parenting, work-from-home solutions constantly need to be reinvented as the children grow in size and number. The Other Life of Nancy describes a patchwork work schedule that is always morphing. Being at home has other challenges, too. Read Loser Moms for a hilarious post about PHC (Pie Hole Control).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Don’t Talk To Mommy Time seems to be up.

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