Bloggity-Blog

I was never interested in reading blogs at all until I became a mother.  Then, I think it was more of a desperation thing, like, "This parenting gig is really so much harder than anyone says - is everyone else lying or is there something wrong with me?"  Official baby websites showing smiling mamas hawking toothpaste and laundry detergent while cuddling immaculately washed babes in designer blankets sure didn't look like I felt, trying to heft around a giant sweaty, often-barfing (acid reflux) Nugget.  But reading other parenting blogs gave me a voyeur's eyeful that parenting is universally difficult, and that we ALL struggle.  Mom-101, Girls Gone Child, Finslippy, Dooce...I'll never know these women in person, but they gave me permission to feel challenged as a new mom.  I felt better.  The guilt lifted.  The joy of parenting increased.  Thank you!

Now, in the toddler years, I turn to blogs for a different sort of fix.  Not the commiseration of difficulties, but to feel inspired.  The backstory.

All around me, people, dozens of people ask, "When are you going back to work?  What are you going to do?"  I was above the heated debate when I worked from home - really the best of both worlds and inscrutable from either side.  I was both home with the Nugget and participating in the work force.  Since the move though, I closed the business and officially became a SAHM.  Now with a verbal Nugget preschool-bound next fall, American society deems it time for me to return to the work force.  Everywhere I look, there are articles discussing how my resume is becoming outdated, how as a college graduate, I am depriving the workforce of my education, how as a woman, I'm undoing feminism.  

I.  am.  happy.  Right now, as I am.  As a sometimes boring, housework-challenged, mom.  It's taken me awhile to be comfortable saying that's what I am, "just" a mom, but I'm so there right now.  Someday I think I'll be ready to punch a timecard again.  Right now, I want the Nugget's cry to be my alarm clock.  I want the freedom to work around his routine.  I want permission to feel satisfied, fulfilled, and important just as I am.  I never felt more important than when I was an educator.  Ironically, I mean so much more, give so much more to the Nugget than I did to any of the children I taught, yet I have never felt less important.  Heck, I am important!  I am helping to raising the future of this country, of this world!  I think it's fantastic that many women in this country can choose to work after kids, can choose to stay home, can choose to say no to parenthood altogether.  Let's celebrate those choices, and be confident in the choices we make for our own families.  Here's some blogs that are helping inspire me to feel that the motherhood I've chosen is a worthy calling.  Thanks, Nie-Nie and CJane.