Of course it was a man without children who said it. “You just need to get up a few minutes earlier. Then you’d be here on time.” He said this, to chronically-running-behind-to-this-entirely-optional-activity me, the way you might tell someone the sky is blue or that they need oxygen to breathe. Poof! Simple solution. 

Except when you’re raising another human, working a full-time job and trying to live your life all at the same time, there is no simple. Any statement that begins with “just”or “only” or “why don’t you” could be the Jenga block that sends your teetering family-work-life tower crashing to the ground. And then, in true working-mama style, you’d rebuild it all the next day. 

Do not get me wrong – I LOVE my kid and my life. I even like my job. I have a pretty hefty dose of privilege, with a spouse and a support network, a great public school and enough financial resources that our needs are covered and some of our wants too. But sweet Jesus, even with all that on my side, so much of the time it feels like hopping off one treadmill and onto another. 

So I say to the man, in his well-intended cluelessness: I’m pouring my soul into being a mother and a breadwinner and we’re working with what we’ve got left here, chief. My blogging and my skating are going to have to subsist on the scraps that I’ve got to feed them with. In the reality of my working-parent mind, I deserve a medal for waking up before 7 on a Saturday, hauling it to the other side of town and skating my tail off for an hour and half….before heading home to write for an hour or so and then start the morning with the fam. Which, speaking of privilege, that right there is a huge one for working moms – the precious hours just to be me. 

Sketching the grand outlines of my dreams growing up – Change the world! Write best sellers! Travel the globe! – my grandmother summed it all up with, “You want to be a career gal.” 

But no. I didn’t want to choose between raising my babies and having great adventures – I wanted both. I wanted to be a parent, with fulfilling work. Which honestly, may be the most common dream in the world. But reality hasn’t caught up to dreams, because finding the thing that can make this so much more easier – a part time job with livable pay – is like lassoing a unicorn. 

For a sweet little bitty time in my life, I sipped from the Holy Grail. My daughter was a baby, my brain had crashed and my then-boss allowed me to return to my formerly full-time job on a part-time basis. That evolved into a contract gig, and then another offer of the Holy Grail Unicorn Edition: a thirty-hour workweek with benefits. It was amazing – like swimming in a mythical stream of parental time together and job fulfillment. And soon it went from reality right back to myth, cause when new management came in, my thirty hour week was toast. Auf wiedersehen, my darling, you were incredible while you lasted.

If you’re the type of person who loves treasure hunts and needle-in-a-haystack puzzles, try finding a part-time job listing in your field that you could conceivably care for a family on – say, $40 k or more with benefits. Based on my experience, this is a quest that could keep most of you busy for years. And we don’t have years, do we, my working parent-people? We’ve got projects to do, bills to pay and meals to cook, and all the while our hearts outside our bodies are morphing and changing and growing up, every single day. 

We’ve got to find the give where we can get it and celebrate our own greatest hits every so often. Greatest hits like….

The nine-hour drive that somehow became twelve, as my daughter and I hauled our cookies home from Washington DC this summer…..twelve hours that featured both urban and middle-of-nowhere traffic jams and my kiddo losing her shit over a ponytail holder gone missing at Panera, then again when realizing she left a stick behind on the National Mall. (“It was a speeeeecial stick!!”) Yeah – it was that kind of drive. The next morning, I summoned the best of my mama willpower to roll out of bed & go back to work. 

Or – the day my husband had a medical procedure and my daughter had soccer practice and I was leading a meeting and my car was in the shop, and I’d set a ridiculous number of reminder alarms to make it all work, except the hospital pickup was early and the school pickup was late and there was a thunderstorm at the soccer field and somehow in the middle of it all the rental car ate my keys, which led to me being probably the only parent in the history of my kid’s school to call the aftercare staff and ask them to check the parking lot for car keys  that I was convinced I’d left on the roof of the rental car that I’d then driven across town. Because that’s how those non-insertable keys work, right? You could start the car and then drive off without them? 

I don’t know. You know what I do know? That it’s a bad idea to make cars with key-sized console drawers that slide closed on their own and blend into the dashboard like a hidden crawl space. Like, seriously, Chrysler??

Those are like special-hectic-“You Survived!” awards. Then there’s the one I earn multiple times a week, the “Out of Bed Doing Things” award. Standing there on the ice after I’ve packed my kid’s snack, checked my work phone for emergencies and driven across town as the sun’s coming up – honestly, this is when I earn my medals. It’s not when I actually compete & put on a skating dress. That part is easy, compared to the years of feeling my feet hit the floor before sunrise and getting done all the things I need to get done so I can make it to the ice rink, again, that day. And then, after that blessed 45 minutes is over, going back home and diving back into adulting. 

I am so not Wonder Woman. I’m Working Mom Busywoman. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a better-than-average chance that you are too – or a working dad, or working caretaker for a parent, grandparent, sibling or friend. 

Even if you don’t know me, you know dozens of parents like me. Parents who earn their chaos- and coping medals on the daily. And the thing is, we don’t really want medals. We want some grace and some space and some peace. We want love, support and some cushion, whether it’s a little more time or a little more money or a little more of whatever we need to find some ease. 

If I were a space bajillionaire I’d do lots of things, and one of them would be to axe the rocket project and channel some resources into supporting working caretakers. This would be a perfect time to confess that I’m Jeff Bezos and I’m about to change my everything. 

But – reality, it’s your fellow working mama here. And I say, love to my fellow working caretakers. I see you, I love you and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are ass-kickingly amazing.