Someone... somewhere... must appreciate the crap that I am doing for them.
Yes, with this post I am indulging myself in a nice, warm, comforting bubble bath of self pity. If you don't like it, go find another blog to read.
I work hard. Hard hard hard. I try hard. Hard hard hard. I work and try hard to be a great mom. I try hard to be a great wife. I work and try hard to be a great manager. I work hard to be a great employee, I try hard to be a great human being. I try to be a good sister and daughter. I have 30+ years experience at the latter two and so these ones I feel I'm actually doing ok at and not as worried about as the rest. My sister, I'm sure, will let me know if I'm offbase here ;-). The rest though... don't have that 30+ years of experience to help me feel confident that I know what I'm doing and am doing it ok. Even the wife part, despite Tim's constant reassurances and sweet support when I get into these funks. Because if I was a good wife I wouldn't make him have to reassure me so much and prop up my confidence. Therefore I must suck.
I know don't work hard to be a great cousin/neice/aunt/daughter-in-law and I feel bad about that. I love my extended family members dearly but man, it is hard. I also admit I don't work as hard to be a great friend as I used to. I don't keep in touch with people outside family really well; I am not as approachable as I used to be; I tend not to have much time to spend with friends outside of work and family.
But all that work and trying that I am doing is making me tired and really really really cranky.
Because it seems that no matter where I turn or who I am working "for" at that moment in time or how much time I am devoting to them, someone is always wanting something more than what I am giving.
More time.
More help.
More sympathy.
More empathy.
More devoted attention.
More 1:1 time.
More listening.
More problem solving.
More road unblocking.
More moral support.
More representation.
More opportunity.
More visibility.
More work group health.
More productivity.
More money.
More advice.
It's all about what more I can do for them. It's never about what I have done or are already doing for them.
And so, I sit, unable to tell people to back off; to tell them to go find someone else to care; to go do something about their own problems; to go get a better job/manager/career/mentor/representative/friend (note: mother and wife are NOT substitutable) because I aim to please. That's me. And it sucks.
I have 24 hours in a day. During the week, this is how I get to spend it on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays:
7am - 8:10am: Bobbin time. Get Bobbin out of bed. Get Bobbin dressed. Get Bobbin breakfast. Help Bobbin brush teeth, go potty, pack her napsack. Spend a bit of time cuddling with Bobbin and getting some quality 1:1 time in with her. Check email briefly and respond to urgent stuff and verify my schedule for the morning. Then put Bobbin in the car and head off to daycare.
8:10am - 8:30am: Drive to daycare. Take advantage of the time by singing with Bobbin, talking with Bobbin, answering questions, and having fun before having to part ways for the bulk of the day.
8:30am - 8:40am: Get Bobbin settled into school - knapsack and coat put away, yogurt snack ready, Goodbye hug and kiss.
8:40am - 9:00am. Stop at starbucks and get my hot chocolate and bagel. Revel in the momentary silence and then instantly feel a pang of guilt because I really do want to spend every waking moment with my daughter but at the same time need to have a little bit of me time and that's not selfish is it? Arrive at work at 9am.
9:00am - 9:30am. *IF* I am lucky, I get 30 minutes to get settled in, catch up on email, and respond to priority emails before having to spend the bulk of the day in various meetings. I manage a team of 30 people at this point in time. Of those 30 people, 7 of them report directly to me. 1 of my direct reports is on parental leave until mid-summer which means I also am having to allocate some portion of my time to helping to manage his 5 direct reports. Of my 7 direct reports, 1 of them works out of Europe, the other out of Asia. The other 5 are US based. the rest of my 30 employees are distributed across the US and Europe. IIn addition to having a team of 30 people to manage located in multiple regions, all of the projects that my team owns require heavy cross-group and cross-team collaboration and so we have a pretty complicated dependancy and relationship matrix that also must get managed. And of course, I myself have a manager who expects me to be able to deal with all of this stuff pretty autonomously because he himself has 3 other teams reporting to him and mine is one of the smallest of the four total that he is responsible for.
9:30am - 12pm. Meetings. Which are usually anything ranging from 1:1s with my direct reports, to impromptu meetings with non-direct reports within my team, to recurring meetings with other teams and/or managers that cover any range of topics from particular project reviews to business reviews, to quality of service reviews, to external partner meetings, to business deal reviews, etc.
12pm - 1pm. I try and reserve this for lunch and am pretty successful, but it is important to note that lunch consists of me running across the parking lot to the cafeteria, grabbing whatever is ready-to-eat, and coming back to my office to eat it and catch up on email at the same time.
1pm - 5pm. Meetings. More of the same.
5pm. Leave work to pick up Bobbin. Non-negotiable. I have a hard stop at this time. For the most part this works and I no longer feel bad about declining meetings that people schedule for me after 5pm, or up and leaving a meeting at 5pm that is running late. Regardless of who is in the room, including VPs. And for the most part this is respected.
5pm - 5:30pm. Drive to daycare. Traffic sucks so it takes longer to get there than it does to go from daycare to work in the morning. Leaving a bit later makes this worse. I tried it to see if I could sneak in an extra 10 minutes at work. I ended up picking up Bobbin at 5:45. My hardcore rule is that Bobbin gets picked up no later than 5:30pm period.
5:30 - 5:45pm. Round Bobbin up at daycare, have her say her goodbyes, collect her blanket, daily report, and any artwork she created, and get her into the car.
5:45pm - 6:10pm. Drive home. Take advantage of the time by asking about her day, singing songs, making up silly rhymes, and listening to her chat about who had potty accidents, who got in trouble for throwing rocks, who she played with, etc. I love this time of day.
6:10pm - 6:30pm. Get home, get her unloaded, get her settled with a snack. If Tim's home he's started dinner. Sometimes I'm a bit later because we stop at the store to pick up something for him to cook. Set the table, unload the dishwasher, chat with Bobbin and Tim about their days.
6:30pm - 6:45pm. Eat dinner with Tim and Bobbin.
6:45pm - 7pm. Clean up from dinner - wipe table, counters, load and start dishwasher. Bobbin usually likes to help here, which is sweet but also tends to require a little extra cleanup afterwards. But I encourage her to help - maybe it'll stick :-)
7pm - 7:30pm. Quality time with Bobbin and Tim. Reading, singing, playing, etc. If it's a bath night, I'll start the bath running, get towels etc, ready and pop her in the tub by 7:15.
7:30pm - 7:45pm. Start the bedtime routine: Have bobbin go potty, help her brush teeth, get her room ready (pull shades; start music, straighten bed); get her changed into her jammies.
7:45pm - 8pm. Night time bottle in the big chair with Bobbin, watching the Shushy-byes and then Harry Bunny sing Twinkle Twinkle. I have to tell you I am actually NOT looking forward to Bobbin no longer having a bedtime bottle. It's our cuddle time. I love it.
8pm - 8:30pm. Mommy time. Sometimes I work out. Sometimes I lie on the bed with my eyes closed and listen to music. Sometimes I take a hot bath. Sometimes I indulge in some tv in the bedroom. Sometimes I spend this 30 minutes going into Bobbin's room every 10 minutes while she complains of some sort of owie or other, or insists on trying to go potty again, or reassuring her that the sound that she heard was just me or Tim or Tommy and not a monster coming to get her. When this happens, it is not Mommy time anymore.
8:30pm - 10pm. Tim time. We watch TV, we talk, we relive some of the wackier phrases or antics of our sweet little daughter. We surf the internet, show each other pictures or videos we've taken, etc.
10pm. Tim usually heads to bed to watch the news. I will sometimes stay up to watch TV or download photos from my camera, or update my blog. I also usually check my work email for 30 minutes - 1 hour between 8:30 and 11pm to catch up on stuff that's happened since I left at 5pm. Because a lot of stuff does actually happen after 5pm. Moreso than I'd like to, but part of that is the geographic diversity. On rare occasions I too will head to bed at 10pm.
11pm. Lights out.
7am. start again.
Wednesdays are special days. I mentioned previously that I have employees in Europe and in Asia. I also have other groups I interact with in both regions as well. So Wednesdays are my "extended work days". I work from 7 or 8am (depending on whether or not I have a 7am meeting scheduled) so I can catch the Europe crowd before their day ends; and I work until 7pm so I can catch the Asia crowd when their day begins. These people usually have to sacrifice THEIR own personal time schedules in order to interact with folks in the US and so I figure this is my way of trying to at least acknowledge that and make it a little easier for them to catch me. some of the 8am and 6pm meetings are ones that I have scheduled - 1:1s or team meetings to try and get most of my team together. I will admit that the morning ones are the hardest ones to maintain on a recurring basis especially if I've had a rough night of it with Bobbin the evening before. And so one of the complaints that the folks at work have is that these meetings are not consistent enough. Fair complaint. I just don't know that I'll really be able to get much better at it.
Wednesdays as a result are also my highest stress, lowest tolerance, and highest mommy-guilt days. I don't drop off or pick up Bobbin on Wednesdays. Two parts of my daily routine that I do really enjoy. I spend less time with Bobbin on Wednesdays than on any other days and I already feel that Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays I'm not spending as much time with her as I should or want to, and I only put in 8 hours a day on those days at the office itself plus 30 minutes - 1 hour on work email total from home at either end of that when Bobbin is either sleeping or occupying herself of her own volition. I rarely will actually work out on Wednesdays (although to be honest, for the last month I've rarely worked out on any other day as well) because of the extended schedule, and given that it is my highest stress day it is the day I most need to work out for pure health and sanity reasons. So the fact that I don't usually means that stress is accumulating and spilling over into Thursdays.
Saturdays and Sundays is quality family time. Bobbin and I go to L'il Kicker's soccer and have a blast; then mcdonald's for lunch, then home for quiet time. During quiet time I'll either take a nap myself if it's been a rough week and I need to catch up on sleep, or I'll do some housecleaning and chores. Afternoon we'll usually head out to a nearby park or playground, or we'll stay home and play games and colour and read and play in our back yard, or have friends over for a play date, or do errand outings to get groceries, etc. Sunday mornings are free-time; we do what we want when we want to. usually go ride Bobbin's trike at the playground and feed the ducks and then home for lunch and quiet time and afternoon if it's night we'll spend it playing on the deck or out on the climber and I might get some weeding or flower watering or planting done while Tim mows the grass (if he's not working the weekend).
And then it's back to the grind.
Family is important to me. The fact that I spend so little time with them compared to the time I spend at work is a constant source of angst, guilt, and pain. Despite the fact that I actually have a pretty good balance of work & family life. I typically work 45 hour work weeks. Most people would think that is awesome. Most would be surprised that my career is progressing as much as it is given that I am not putting in 60-80 hour work weeks. I do worry that I am close to stalling that progression; at some point 45 hours will NOT be enough, regardless of how hard our HR and diversity groups work to convince managers and employees alike that it should be and that balance is important regardless of your level. At any rate, family is important. It is in fact #1. When I'm not working I'm home with Bobbin and Tim. I usually can work in a little me time to exercise or veg or read or bathe. I can't do all of those me-things though. I have to choose each day which I will actually do. That's been the difference pre-Bobbin and post-Bobbin. I feel guilty even acknowledging that there is a difference, because acknowledging it somehow implies that I am dissatisfied with the current situation or somehow missing or longing for the former. Which is not true; I would not turn back the clock. But it is different and that requires adjustment and in almost 3 years I still have not quite found that right balance of me-only time. And every once in a while if I've been out of balance with my me-only time for a while, I get weird and cranky and unpredictable, and on occasion will even have to end up taking a vacation day from work just to recoup and get back on balance. And then I feel guilty that I'm taking time off work even though it is TIME THEY ARE GIVING ME - a bonafide vacation day that I have the right to take when I want to, yet I somehow feel that by doing so, I am skimping on my work responsibilities.
The kicker today was sitting at work reviewing feedback I recently received, and while I was reviewing it and trying to be as empathetic and objective as I could, and trying to look at it as constructive and informative for me as a professional, all I could actually think was damn, I guess I just totally SUCK as a manager, how am I even still employed and responsible for this stuff if I'm falling short in all of these areas, and at the same time I'm also thinking damn, what the hell do you people WANT from me, don't you see what I AM doing for you and don't you appreciate it and don't you know you actually have a pretty darn good deal here? Can't you just be happy?
Comments
You are a wonderful mom, sister, daughter, and wife. Just try to remember that when you're putting "family" first, YOU are a big part of that family. There is nothing selfish about taking some extra YOU time. It's necessary. It keeps you healthy so that you can continue to be a wonderful mom, sister, daughter, and wife.
Posted by Sarah on June 4, 2008 7:18 PM.Dad's always said "Nothing is worth your health", and that's sort of become my motto in life. It may not allow me to retire at 40, but at least I know I'll get there in one piece. (Knock on wood.)
Don't be afraid to say "No" sometimes. Even to people you care about. They care about you, too, so they'll get over it. :-) Trust me.
Love,
Sarah