I usually have an idea of what Monday is going to look like for me by Sunday night, and I try to organize accordingly.
Today was pretty routine:
Feed baby, check.
Pump breastmilk, check.
Make plans with friends, check.
Breakfast, check. Cereal all around. (Only the baby got breastmilk though.)
So here’s where things start to get wonky.
I live on the top floor, the fifth, of my building. The laundry room is on the first floor. Doing laundry involves taking both girls and a giant dolly holding my clothes hamper all the way down a walkway to the elevator, all the way down to the bottom floor in the elevator, then all the way down another walkway to the laundry room. Meanwhile my baby is in my arms kick kick kicking and my five year old is chat chat chatting. Then we go back up while the clothes wash, then back down to move the clothes to the dryer, then back up, then back down to get the clothes.
But, hey, I like to roll with the punches. I can do all that and get my kitchen cleaned, get me and the baby dressed, (the five year old dresses herself), and we can head out the door.
All goes well. At first. I also decide that today is a great day to make sure I start again trying to fit regular exercise for me into our routine. (The five year old gets plenty of exercise. If I sound jealous, it’s because I am.) I work four afternoons a week, Monday through Thursday, so on those days, if I want to exercise, I’ll have to do it with both girls.
“Hey Katherine,” I text my mom friend, “let’s meet at the Japanese Garden.” Why? Because I can walk there! Matilda can take her morning nap in the stroller, and Celaya can scoot.
Great! We’re out the door. We stop in the laundry room on the way out of the building to take our clothes out of the dryer, so as not to be in any neighbor’s way, but not to haul them back up again. We’ll do that on our way back home from the garden.
Celaya scoots her way ahead of us on the sidewalks. Matilda naps just fine. The girls have fun playing with dolls on the edge of the fish pond. Katherine and I visit a bit around interruptions from our children: “you have to see this!” or “she took my doll,” or “I’m hungry. Did you bring food?”
The problem begins when we head out. I have to pee. I know I have to pee, but I don’t want to stop at the Senior Center on the way out because it will involve leaving Matilda in the stroller with Katherine to wait for me, knowing she is bound to get impatient and end up pitching a fit instead of falling asleep. So I wait. I can walk it off, right? I live only a mile from the garden.
By the time we get home, I really have to go, but, oops, I still have to get the laundry. I’m not about to go all the way up five flights with both girls, pee, then come all the way back down to get the laundry, then all the way back up, hoping that Matilda will stay asleep in her stroller through all of this. So we stop in the laundry room, grab the dolly. So now I’m pushing the stroller, and pulling the dolly, and guiding Celaya on her scooter through entrance doors and elevator doors and down walkways. By the time I get into the elevator with the stroller, the dolly, and try to get Celaya and her scooter in, I can feel the urine desperate to release itself from my worn out bladder. (I’ve carried two children on top of this thing.) By the time I get to the fifth floor, get out of the elevator, get Celaya out, get back in, maneuver the dolly and the stroller out of my tiny elevator, the pee has begun to trickle onto my panties. And, yes, by the time I’ve finally made it to the door of my apartment, through the door, dropped everything and made it to the bathroom, I have made a sufficient enough mess of myself to require a wardrobe change from the waist down.
Oh well. Pee pee gate is not the first time this has happened to me. I have actually squatted outside my car at Costco before with both girls waiting for me buckled up. Urinating with two kids in tow is a task.
But hey, I still have a little more than an hour before I have to head off to work, and the baby is still asleep!
I stroll Matilda into my bedroom, train the camera on her, close the door, and work my way back down the hall to the kitchen in fresh panties and pants.
I start dinner, I start Celaya’s lunch, and I start packing up for my work night, which involves breast pump (with all the parts!), dinner and coffee with snacks, and my workbag with my laptop and work folders. No biggie. Water for pasta is boiling on the stove, veggies are cut for Celaya’s lunch (oh shit! I have to eat lunch too! Helloooo, breastfeeding. Don’t forget to eat Shanna.) So I start to think about scrambling together a salad as I’m putting the jar of sun-dried tomatoes for dinner on the counter. Scratch that. I slide the jar of sun-dried tomatoes onto the counter, and that evil, treacherous jar of sun-dried tomatoes in oil slides right off the counter and CRASH! lands on the hard tile floor.
Breathe.
Okay, I can do this. Just grab some paper towels, get up the big pieces, grab a soapy sponge, wipe up the oil, grab the hand vacuum, get all the glass you can possibly see. Oh! The baby’s up. Of course the baby’s up.
Head down the hall for the baby, then continue clean up, cook, prep, with Matilda on my hip.
I’m still remarkably calm. Because I’m Wonder Woman. I can hear the music in my head. “Wonder Woman!” I can do it all.
Yea. That Wonder Woman.
So I’m holding Matilda, I grab Celaya’s plate of lunch off the counter and walk over to the table to put it down when WHOOPS! I slip in some residual oil on the floor, CRASH! down onto the hard tile floor myself, on my hip, baby still in my arms, glass plate still in my hand, food all over the floor.
Whoa. I look over at Matilda. She looks at me. And she starts crying.
“Yes. That was scary wasn’t it.” I say softly. She calms down. Celaya starts to get out of her chair. (Cue my Batman voice): “Sit down. Stay there. Don’t Move.”
She sits down.
I put the baby down in the other room at the entrance to the kitchen. She doesn’t like that, so she cries. I have to let her. I get down on my hands and knees and thoroughly clean the floor. No more slipping, thank you very much.
And it all gets done. On time. Miraculously.
Dinner gets done. I make Celaya a fresh plate, and she eats. I eat my salad. I feed my baby. My husband arrives home. I share pertinent information with him, including the dramatic fall, kiss him goodbye, and walk out the door to work, and I arrive early.
The lesson in all of it? Is it that I can’t do it all? That I must lean out, regardless what Sheryl Sandberg says? (Imagine Sheryl Sandberg mopping up sun-dried tomato oil from her kitchen floor.) That I can either be the mom I want to be, the wife I want to be, or the woman I want to be, but not all of the above? That I should just settle for the life I have, the great job, the great hubby, great kids, great friends, and let the rest go? Now is not the time to start a business? Now is not the time to want more?
No, I don’t think so. I think the lesson is to slow down. Take a breath. I could have gotten all of the things done that I wanted to get done, at a slower pace, less frantically. I could have stopped to pee. I could have made Celaya’s lunch and mine, and then made dinner. I could have let Matilda cry for a minute at the garden and perhaps spared the crying that came later. I did not have to put myself into a situation in which I attempted to do it all at the very same time, pasta flying through the air, baby on my hip, laundry on the floor, and the tagline for my new website in my head: the calm and the storm.
I have set a goal for myself that in 18 months this blog will be successful and people will follow me and be interested in what I have to say. I have a lot to say. And I got so excited in setting up this blog that I forgot that it doesn’t all have to happen today in order to meet my goal. 18 months is a reasonable timeline by all accounts, and I want to provide content that people want to read. Sure, with a six month old and a five year old that may mean some nights I’m up until after midnight (like tonight) so that I can write (my very first blog post on my new site!), but tomorrow I can take it slow. I can breathe. I can enjoy my coffee and not take on twelve tasks when I only have time for 10. Maybe 11.
I believe we can have it all. But I agree with Anne-Marie Slaughter when she says we can’t have it all right now. We have to prioritize, and for those of us, and I think that’s most of us, who want to be involved moms, the kids come quite high on the list. That doesn’t mean I can’t start my own business. It just means I can’t have it in the same timeline as someone who has no children.
And that’s okay with me.
But right now, I really have to pee.
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