I’m sure that, as women, we’ve all heard the phrase “having it all” before — you know, being a total success in your professional life while also balancing a happy, fulfilling personal life. But I think nowadays that phrase means something more along the lines of ” doing it all” instead.
If you’re a working mom, you’re expected to be able to expertly and effortlessly separate your family from the office, while also maintaining a healthy relationship with both your children and your spouse; you’re supposed to be an involved parent but you’re also supposed to climb the corporate ladder and show the world you’re still as ambitious as you were before you had kids.
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Oh, and your house should be kept clean during all of this.
Suffice it to say, “having it all” isn’t exactly the total dream women may have once thought it would be.
One woman recently got incredibly honestly about the exhausting realities of being a modern-day working mom.
In a post on her blog Hiding In The Closet With Coffee , mother-of-five Amy Betters-Midvedt described just what exactly a day in the life of a working mom really entails, just in case anyone out there doesn’t know what goes on behind the scenes.
“Just got 5 kids off to school, my helpful husband is out of town, so I’m all on my own here,” Amy wrote. “This is the run down, it might sound familiar.”
A usual day for this working mom begins with waking her extremely reluctant children up to get ready for school.
After pouring cereal, toasting bread, and cooking eggs, Amy said she usually finds herself tasked with signing permission slips and agendas, as well as stuffing envelopes with money and packing lunches.
“Cold packs found for those that needed them so no one dies of Salmonella,” she wrote. “Didn’t have to resort to ice in baggies. #win.”
Amy then expertly difuses arguments over stolen hair brushes, bathroom schedules, and one daughter’s tragically missing pair of shorts.
But the chaos of the day isn’t over, even after she’s herded her noisy troupe off to the bus stop and bid them good-bye.
That’s because this busy mom now has to somehow summon the energy to go to work.
“Here’s to the moms who have already done all the things before 8:30 a.m.,” Amy wrote. “Who like me are rushing to their jobs because despite how we feel, the day is just beginning.”
As Amy explained, “We’re in the trenches here, my friends, so sometimes it looks like a bomb has gone off.”
She shared the above photo of herself, post-morning chaos but pre-workday, to emphasize the state her house somehow finds itself in on a daily basis.
That mess you see there won’t be dealt with until later that night after work is done and she’s making dinner, even though she knows it will reappear the very next morning. But that’s just the life of a working mom.
However, as totally chaotic and unbearable it all seems *now*, Amy emphasized that one day, everything will suddenly be different.
“Someday we’ll be sitting in our tidy kitchens or leaving a silent house,” she wrote. “And from what I hear, we’ll miss this. We’ll miss these signs of love and life behind us. The crumbs and laundry and cereal bowls and stray socks.”
“So today,” she continued, “I choose to cherish the mess.”
It isn’t possible to “do it all”, Amy explained, because we aren’t meant to have pristine homes, perfect jobs, and well-behaved children at all the same time.
“We will have glimmers of each of these things some of the time,” she said. “And that is good enough. Because above all we have so much love. The mess behind me has love written all over it.”
To emphasize this, Amy included a photo of a touching note she found from her children, left behind among the mess.
“Look what I found when they left today,” she wrote alongside the sweet note, written on the back of a brown paper lunch bag. “This proof of love. Be still my heart, theses kids are the reason for the mess and they are the reason for the joy. And when they get tall they might also get thankful.”
If nothing else, Amy just wants to let every other working mom in the world know that they aren’t alone.
And there’s definitely strength in numbers.
“We’ve got this my friends,” she wrote. “Even if the state of our counter tops makes it look like we don’t.”
