Category Archives: Washington Mommy Blogger

Re-Branding “Stay-At-Home Moms”

Sorry I didn’t have a chance to post yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend a press conference hosted by Highlights Magazine where they announced their annual State of the Kid survey (more on that next week because the results are fascinating and somewhat upsetting). So today, let’s get back onto our discussion of work-life choices and talk about stay-at-home moms. Earlier this week I threw out there that I really believe this label of “Stay-At-Home Mom” is extinct. Who is this person? I don’t know this person, do you know her?

I’m making the case that I think all of us are digital moms, whether we go to an office full-time or we don’t, we are bound to technology. It bleeds into our day, we work in spaces that seem unorthodox and counter-productive to work – like our cars waiting to pick kids up from school. Women who have quit their full-time job to “stay home” are doing so much work, some paid, some unpaid. Yet the label “SAHM” implies she is a dud, she doesn’t “do anything” and she probably wears mommy jeans.

Do they look like any moms you know? I didn't think so.

First, let’s talk about why women stop working full-time. I can speak for myself here. I wasn’t given any flexibility, I spent much of my time wondering why I was leaving my  kids all day for that  job, I wasn’t saving the world or curing infectious diseases, and I couldn’t reconcile how it was worth it. I was willing to risk “stepping out” and the financial security net that came with my  job, to try something else. Prior to making this decision, however, I fell into a camp that said I couldn’t afford it. Ultimately what I realized was that was an excuse, not necessarily the entire truth. For several years, I wasn’t willing to give up a lifestyle, I was afraid of how I would fill my time, I was worried about  my identity if I didn’t have the job. And until I was ready, I wasn’t sure I WANTED to be home. But it’s much easier to hide behind a financial reason than to tick off the list of what worries you. I wish more people would state the real reasons instead of using “I can’t really afford it” because many of us can afford it if we’re willing to make those tough decisions and I find it’s more helpful and constructive when I’m exploring my options when I’m honest with myself and my friends about my reasons.

So, now that the decision to stay home has been made, I’ve come to realize that the reasons why women stop working are never quite as simple as she wants to be home with her kids. I suspect the same is true for dads who stay home. The reasons are oversimplified in the media and in our quick labeling. But really, I think it’s a complicated and fascinating and important mix of factors: expense of childcare especially when you have more than one kid, career ennui (sweet scrabble word, right?), workplace that isn’t accommodating to the time demands that come with raising young children or seeking a different path in life. I think it would benefit all of us if we spent more time exploring the reasons WHY instead of just the sweeping generalization that career-focused and educated women are “opting out.” The WHY is the story and understanding the WHY might actually help impact some change in the workplace.

Which brings me to point number two – the digital mom – a woman who is likely seeking a different path in life. I was not surprised at all when I stumbled upon this Parenting article on today’s “SAHM”  digital mom. Turns out many of these women are a growing mass in our country, a small army of 10.1 million women-owned businesses. Our preschool parking lot is crowded with these entrepreneurs. They are starting their own catering companies, their own party planning businesses, their own PR freelancing shops, their own at-home daycares, their own blogs that generate some income. These women are working and many of them are doing it without hiring babysitters and nannies. These woman are also volunteering for school boards and working in classrooms helping teachers and planning school functions. All of this might be a far cry from steady paychecks, healthcare benefits and 401k contributions, but these women inspire me. They are starting new careers, they are forging new paths and the message they are sending their children is not one of opting out and forgoing their education and experience to make brownies. They are teaching their children that there are many ways to earn money, to gain experience and to work. Just like the leap of faith we take in getting married or having kids, opting out of a secure career and paycheck, is nothing if not a leap of faith.

And I believe it’s technology, smart phones, the internet, social media and the blogosphere that is helping these women forge new paths in life.

Forging the new path isn’t necessarily easy or obvious when you stop working, however. Personally I have slowly stumbled upon my new path. I certainly didn’t leave my job with a plan. Earlier this week Samantha Ettus from Forbes sent me a link to her recent post on this subject and I think she hit on one fundamental challenge facing many women: keeping in touch with your contacts when you do quit work. The reality is when you have very young children, it’s difficult to find time to do anything but care for them. But suddenly the  months blend together into years and the baby is off to preschool and kindergarten and we have more…TIME.  The very thing that was so  scarce for so many years is suddenly accessible. So keeping our relationships going through those foggy baby years really is critical to the “NOW WHAT” dilemma so many women face when the kids are suddenly in school and there’s time to be part of that 10.1 million women who are small-business owners and entrepreneurs. For me, it’s been as simple as keeping up with people on Facebook, occasional emails, holiday cards, coffee or happy hour mixed in – the trick has been just not going dark.

In the end, I think no matter what decision we make – whether it’s to remain working full-time, to cut back on our hours, or to walk away and figure out the “now what” later – I will at least keep telling myself that nothing is final, my  needs and my kids needs continue to change with time, and if you believe in your decision and the consequences of your decision, then you will enjoy parenthood and your days so much more. The grass is really only ever greener when you’re not confident in what you’re doing.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall: I’m Totally Awesome

So yesterday I teased you with some research I’d done on moms. Let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about it a bit more. I’m totally channeling my inner-Oprah today…so emphasize certain words super dramatically when you read them and trust that I have my own list of favorite things that I’d love to give away…if someone would just send them to me already.

OK, so Pew Research announced some results back in 2008 that really disturbed me.  Here’s the cliff-notes version: When asked to self-score themselves as parents, on a scale of 1-10, a mere 28 percent of full-time working moms gave themselves a score of 9 or 10. 41 percent of part-time working moms gave themselves a 9 or 10 and 43 percent of at-home moms gave themselves a 9 or 10.

Why all the self-flagellation people? What good does that do anyone? Sure, I don’t know the full questions asked but let’s just presuppose the question was “Are you an awesome mom?” Why did almost 60% of part-time or at-home moms and almost 80% of full-time working moms declare themselves as NOT awesome?

What good is that doing anyone?

This is what I think an issue is – not the “mommy wars” (remember we are all totally bad talking about you if you go around trashing working or at-home moms). Why are mothers so damn hard on themselves? And let’s stop using cultural influences as crutches here – Oh, it’s my Catholic guilt, oh, it’s my Jewish mother guilt.

Please…as my dad would say…don’t buy a ticket on that bus.

In a moment of brutal honesty, I will tell you that I have plenty of nights where I lay there and seriously worry – was I too distracted today, should I have done that puzzle with her again, did I leave the TV on for too long, did I bark at them too many times – and on and on and on. This isn’t good. We could drive ourselves insane reflecting on and doubting every decision we make all day long while the sweet cherubs have visions of Popsicles and pizza and Halloween costumes dancing through their heads all night long.  And then roll yourself over when you are laying there fretting about the small stuff – what is your husband doing?

You think he's up all night worrying?

I thought so. Not a care in the world for old snore face.

So again – why the self-flagellation people? Why this quest for perfection? Why this insistence that we focus on all the areas that we fall short in the day instead of what we did that was super fun and awesome? How about all the stories you read for the 150th time, the lunches you lovingly packed, the 8th load of laundry you folded, the sweet frozen Trader Joes dinner you heated up? Why isn’t that all good enough?

I think that the quest for parenting perfection is laden with abuse, doubt and ultimately makes us worse parents, not better, because these kids can smell fear and insecurity and they know how to use it. It also enables you to be afraid of your kids because you are so worried about doing something wrong. Everyone responds better to confidence, kids, bosses and husbands included. Right? Am I Oprah or what?

I also think when we are riddled with doubt, we aren’t doing a good job of setting boundaries for ourselves.  So many women lack the confidence to say “No” when someone asks them to do something and the more we agree to other things, the more it chips away at the time we have for what’s making us insecure – which is most likely to be our work or our children. I’m a big believer in setting boundaries and not attaching guilt or doubt to them. Do I really need to volunteer on another committee at school? Do I actually need to attend that work event this week or won’t it go on just fine without me so I can get home and see my kids? Draw the lines and proudly stand by them, I say.

And so, in my quest to ban all mommy guilt and mommy wars from our dialogue, I challenge you to give yourselves 9s and 10s the next time Pew comes a calling. Instead of getting all tangled up in our short-comings, let’s realize we all have them, and instead be proud of the kids and how great they are turning out.  Tune in tomorrow for more totally fabulous work-life discussions and a little less Oprah.  In the mean time, what do you think? Would you have given yourself a score of 9 or 10? Are we too hard on ourselves?

Re-Thinking Work-Life Choices in Parenthood: We are Digital Moms

Based some amazing comments in response to my post two weeks ago about work-life choices and the struggles facing working moms and at-home moms, I’ve decided to dedicate WM to this topic all week. First, a few housekeeping items:

1. Mommy Guilt is stupid and I hereby ban it. I ban you from this blog if you don’t agree to it.

2. The “mommy wars” are dead.

Can we declare this idea dead now, people?

More on this all week but again, I ban you from my blog if you don’t agree to it. And we’ll all totally talk about you (not even behind your back) if you don’t agree to it.

3. There are so many reasons I am certain the “mommy wars” are dead but one is because I think we are all, instead, Digital Moms. It isn’t so much about working moms vs. at-home moms as it is how technology  is changing our relationship with  motherhood and with how and where we work.  Also, technology is dramatically impacting how we parent (both with giving our kids access to it – and making sure we aren’t on our stupid phones too much when we are meant to be spending time with our children.) There is no road map for the impact of technology on modern parenting – there are no long-term studies on how kids learn from using the iPad instead of pen and paper. There is no decade long research on quality time with kids when we are constantly interrupted by our phones. And it is technology that is transforming the space where old-fashioned stay-at-home moms are becoming obsolete. Technology has invaded our home life in such a way that for so many, an office is obsolete, and we work from home. In our yoga pants. And pick up our kids from school. We are digital. Our lives our digital. So even having this debate about the mommy wars is antiquated because who are these people who work exclusively 9-5 in an office (instead of in the office, in the car, during soccer practice, later at night when the kids are asleep) and who are these moms who stay home and “do nothing”? Technology bleeds between the lines of these once clearly-defined spaces rendering such labels as “working mom” and “stay-at-home”  mom meaningless, in my opinion.

Now that we’ve gotten our housekeeping items straightened out – here’s what we’ll talk about this week and I’d love to hear more from you because it was your comments and emails to me that have inspired me to keep digging into this topic of work-life choices and the obsolete “mommy wars.”

1. It’s not the mommy wars, it’s looking in the mirror and unfairly beating ourselves up.  So many guilt-ridden comments from moms questioning their choices between work and home life prompted me to dig a little deeper. These self-criticisms strike so deep and undercut the confidence of so many moms and unnecessarily, I think. I think we are far too hard on ourselves. So, I did some research and located a Pew research study. The results show that working moms rate themselves far lower as parents (only 28% ranked themselves 9 or 10 as parents on a scale of 10) than do part-time moms or at-home moms (over 40% rated themselves 9 or 10). These results are really upsetting. I want to talk about how we need to spend less time on this quest for balance and perfection and more time owning our choices and being proud of our decisions – it’s called life and imperfection – why are we so afraid to accept that?

2. The mommy track and sacrifices between work and family. The August decision by Judge Loretta Preska to dismiss the Bloomberg case involving discrimination against pregnant and working moms is the most current blow to the quest for work-life flexibility.  The female judge’s harsh words indicating that working moms should not be treated differently than anyone else certainly set a ripple affect through the blogosphere and chills down many working mom’s spines. Here’s what she said if you didn’t read it last month: “The law does not mandate work-life balance,” nor does it “require companies to ignore and stop valuing ultimate dedication, however unhealthy that may be for family life.”  Harsh but is it brutally honest? What I’d like to explore is not the woe-is-me victim angle of the struggles and demands of parenthood. But instead – are we realistic in what we want – do we honestly ask ourselves if we want to climb the ladder or are we willing to compromise our success at work for more time at home – or vice versa – sacrifice time with our kids to instead move-up professionally? Does anyone really believe they can “have it all” with work and family?  Do we realistically approach the reality that having children impacts a career or alternately, having a powerful career impacts our time spent raising our kids? Do we, as new moms, set ourselves up for disappointment?

3. Why women choose to quit their jobs, how no one really is a simple “at-home mom” anymore and the fear of “Now what?” when the youngest starts elementary school. I found some research that proves my suspicion that the June Cleaver at-home mom of yester-year really is extinct. Today’s digital at-home mom is one of 10.1 million women-owned businesses. She’s freelancing, she’s volunteering on boards and at schools.  The at-home mom is no-more. Turns out she’s really busy and probably earning money during nap time. I’d call that work.

4. And if we have time before the week is up….the myth of “free” time, the increasing role of dads in keeping the house and family schedule going (apparently, to the detriment of  their precious testosterone levels) and do we have realistic expectations of our limited free time when we have kids or are we complainers? Husbands included in this one.

This ought to keep us pretty busy all week.  As much as I love to hog all the time and attention, I really hope you’ll chime in.

Today’s Topic: Owning a Business…along with Decor & Organization Tips for Kids Rooms

I am all but certain the Pottery Barn Kids catalogue is designed, printed and distributed to make parents feel like crap. I wince when I see it waiting for me in the pile of mail. I can hear its contents of happy children and organized playrooms mocking me as I inch towards it. And yet, like a masochist, I  can’t just throw it out. I have to open it. I get sucked in. I start to wonder not only what is wrong with me but why my children don’t look that happy and that clean and why doesn’t my playroom EVER look like that? So for this week’s expert, I turned to famed Washington designer and mom of two, one just 2 months old, Liz Levin of Liz Levin Interiors and Liz Levin Nesting. Not only does she provide us with some great tips on decorating and organizing a kid’s playroom but she also weighs in on the age-old question of balancing work with life, especially as a small-business owner.

Q: Tell us how long you have been in business for yourself?

Sure, I started seeing my own clients in 2004. I hired my first assistant designer in 2007 and by last summer, I had 3 people working for me as independent contractors. My operations manager is actually my sister. I always knew that I wanted to be in business for myself, well before I had children I knew this, and before I had the kids I really  had time to ramp up and work 24/7 on building my business. I was eager to work for myself but I knew I wanted to have a career that would allow me to see my kids right after school.

Q: We’ve been talking here on WM a lot about “balancing” work and family life and so, tell us how you, as the owner of your own business, manage to draw the line and really separate your work from your home life and give each one of them time?

It is so hard. Working for yourself, you get all the good and all the bad. It is very easy to get sucked in and believe that someone’s living room is a life or death emergency but with kids, I’ve had to learn to draw the line in the sand and keep the perspective that I have to set boundaries and stick to them. I worked out of my house at first when I had my first daughter and that worked out fine until she was almost 2. Then she was very aware of me being home, I practically had to sneak to use the powder room so she wouldn’t see me and I always worried that clients could hear a toddler in the background of phone calls. Now I have my own separate office space in Georgetown and I take Fridays off as my day to be at-home.

Q: I’ve found that it’s very difficult to stick to a shorter work schedule, that it takes a lot of confidence to say “no” to people and really stick to the plan of only working your set days of the week. Do you experience this and how do you handle it?

Definitely. Initially I worried that it took away the legitimacy of my business to work a shorter week. I would have my assistant handle calls because I didn’t want people to know I was home with the kids. I really was insecure about it but I kept banging myself on the head and reminding myself that this is my business and I can do whatever I want! Where I would then get tripped up was figuring out what it is that I wanted – did I want a bigger office, bigger staff or did I want to be home more? The reality is that you can put as much into it as you want but if you do good work, then you can take time off during the week and people will respect it. In my path to discovering that and believing in that, I blew plenty of nap times on conference calls and struggled with pulling myself away from work. I also worried when I saw my team, who didn’t have children, coming in earlier than me and staying later than me. But again, you realize that you put this stuff on yourself and we don’t need to put so much pressure on ourselves to be perfect and do it all.

Q: OK. I could talk to you about working and home life all day long. But we are here to also talk about what might be the end of me: playrooms. And why I want to set a Pottery Barn Kids catalog on fire after reading it. It makes me feel so inadequate in every way. How does one have a playroom that looks like a magazine?  

Note Liz's use of bookshelves with closed doors to hide kid toys and splash of color. Photo Credit: Angie Seckinger Photography www.angieseckinger.com

Well first, there were probably 20 stylists without any children in sight who made those playrooms look like they do in the magazine. And the problem is that we all have more toys and more stuff than we do storage. I have a small townhouse and my daughter’s room is also part playroom. The truth is we all need to purge and store. Head to the Container Store and purchase some bins that fit under a bed, I use those for storing art supplies, plastic food, and then use baskets for blocks and puzzles. Initially we had bins in the living room but we learned that the kids don’t play with  half the stuff in the bins because they can’t reach that far into the basket. Storing the toys also helps because when they haven’t seen them in a while, they will actually want to play with them. Organizers often tell clients to have more storage space than you do stuff – and this really applies to children’s playrooms. Learn to think of yourself as a toy collector and reality is that you will be adding to your collection over time. So if you purchase storage pieces that have space for more things, you will have space for them as your collection grows. The other thing I am discovering and reminding myself is that kids don’t need a room full of stuff all the time. Less is more.

Q: I love this idea of thinking of ourselves as toy collectors. Great advice! So how about colors – are there trends in color for kids playrooms – any popular colors?

I don’t really think there are trends for colors in kids rooms but I encourage my clients to look for inspiration pieces when decorating a room. One playroom I did for a client who had 2 sons was midnight blue and white with red accents. We used navy window treatments and painted a blackboard wall. It was a really cute room but it also didn’t look like a romper room. I had a catch-all room at my house where I used a graphic poster as my jumping off point and accented the room with red-white wallpaper and a red desk. The trick when doing these rooms is more about the appropriate storage. I once had a client who added a built-in window seat with a lid that opened up and they added 4 dividers inside. This was a great idea for the kids play room but then they learned the only issue was the depth – again –  like those large bins I used to have in my living room – the kids couldn’t easily reach all the way inside. So that is something to consider as you are trying to figure out storage and kids rooms.

The dining room chairs...vinyl.... Photo Credit: Angie Seckinger Photography www.angieseckinger.com

Q: More excellent advice and I know I regularly fall victim to thinking something is a great storage piece and then realizing it is way too deep for my little 2-year-old’s arms to reach inside. Let’s move on to talk about fabrics when decorating with kids. Any advice?

Sure. Obviously you want to look for stain resistant materials like ultra suede or leather. I often use nano-tex technology   to treat material on furniture for homes with kids or pets to really keep it stain resistant. Outdoor fabrics are now softer and I like to use them as well. I have a chair in my living room with outdoor fabric on it. Another cool way to go is vinylizing fabric. It will give it a really funky look, like vinylizing a banquette seat in a pretty bold pattern and then it wipes off easily. I saw it once in an Elle Decor magazine and thought it looked great. Since seeing it, I’ve done it for a client.

Q: Ohh – I love that idea and would have never thought of it myself. I can see how that can be funky and certainly kind of retro. How about carpets?

Dark carpets are a great way to go with children because you really can’t see anything on them. There is a company called Fiber Seal and they will come treat your carpet for you, it’s not toxic and it should last about 18 months. I put a cream carpet by my front door and used Fiber Seal on it and it really works beautifully.  You don’t have to be in the trade to use them.

Awesome advice from Liz Levin today. I really appreciated her insights not only in running a successful business while also spending time with her kids, but on how to think of ourselves as toy collectors and manage the chaos with style! For more design tips, here’s a link to 10 tips from Liz Levin featured on HGTV. Be on the lookout for more expert topics from the amazing moms living around us here in DC, and be sure to “Like” the Wired Momma FB page or subscribe to the RSS feed to easily keep up with my shenanigans and rants.