by Kimberly Crossland, Owner of Savvy Copywriters
A quick glimpse into my day so far: It’s 12:45. I’ve just picked up both boys from daycare. This morning, while they were gone, I knocked out two video scripts for clients and content for a workshop I’m building. After the noon pick up, I loaded my youngest into the baby carrier and my oldest into the fire engine shopping cart at Safeway, did a quick bit of shopping for dinner tonight, and then came home to unload. I unloaded the boys into their beds for nap time, unloaded the groceries, and now… now, I’m taking advantage of this quiet moment to write, keeping both fingers and toes crossed that I get enough time to finish what I start.
This article is for June and June marks Father’s Day. So this month, instead of writing about motherhood specifically, I’ve chosen to write about parenthood as a whole. The truth is we, as parents, are stuck in the middle of so much. We’re stuck in the middle of elation over the family we’re blessed to have and exhaustion from the longest nights of our lives during teething, sleep training, and all-night preparation marathons for meetings the next day.
We’re stuck in the middle of our personal lives with kids and our professional lives where we have to pretend we don’t have kids. This is an especially hard task for those of us who work from home and have to take conference calls (or do BBC interviews, if you remember that famous clip from 2017) in our home office with toddlers banging at the door.
We’re stuck in the middle of breadwinner status and default parent status.
We’re stuck in the middle of practicing and teaching healthy eating habits, and the temptation to order pizza (pizza usually wins that battle).
We’re stuck in the middle of a heart full of love and a heart full of frustration and fear.
We’re stuck in the middle of having the confidence to stand up for work/life balance and the reality that when we do, we’ll risk coming across as distracted, incapable, and inefficient – and that’s the best-case scenario.
We’re stuck in the middle of time seemingly standing still and time whipping by at warp speed.
It’s in this in-between space – the one we feel stuck in at times – that we reflect so much. We reflect on our childhood, planning to pass along some of our favorite traditions to our kids. We reflect on ourselves in parenthood and how we inevitably do 1,000 of the things we always told ourselves we would “never” do as parents. And we reflect on our humanity and how we have an unspoken desire to have it all – career, family, and a bit of self-care now and then, when we can squeeze it in.
We’re moving toward a world where careers can have more flexibility and where professionals can carve out new paths that honor to the lives they want to create as parents. But as we transition into a new societal rhythm, we’re stuck in the awkward teenage years of it all.
