On Motherhood: Working full time with two kids

On Motherhood

Working full time with two kids

I spent the first part of my life as a mother working. I was blessed with two boys in the span of four years. Then, while pregnant with my third I was downsized and began life as a stay at home mom. This is my experience written in a three part series. See Part 1 Working full time with one kid and Part 3 Life with three kids.

Pregnant with one kid

My husband and I had always known we would have at least two children. We decided it was time when our relatively independent two and a half year old started making constant demands for us to come and play with him. When I was three months pregnant, he was able to understand that Mom was cooking up a baby sibling for him to play with. It was a happy accident that we would refer to his siblings as his property. Your brother. Your baby. He was the happiest boy in the world skipping around waiting for HIS brother to appear.

By this time I was working for a startup in Boston. I was taking my allotment of three months for maternity leave and my company was stumbling through the process of setting me up. This meant a few stumbling blocks but because I had been through it before, I knew what to look out for and made sure we had adequate insurance and that all the forms were signed.

Every pregnancy is different and the fatigue that came with number two was immense. I also had an aversion to meat and smells that made life into hell for the first three months. As far as my life in a work environment, I was ever vigilant to the stereotypes people hold of pregnant women. In my first pregnancy I felt some people purposely walk on egg shells around you thinking you are a bomb waiting to go off. For that reason I would always be composed and well equipped for any challenge. If I was tired, they would not see it. My most famous complaint for being pregnant was that I was carrying yet another boy and not the desired for girl.

Challenges while working and pregnant included having to ask a coworker to pull out my car because someone had parked next to me in such a way that I could not access the car. The constant need to empty a bladder and thus step out of our offices to access the toilets. A belly that is so huge that you can not fit into the driver’s seat of the car. Arriving home and passing out on the couch while my son who I had just picked up from daycare played solo in his bedroom. Reliance on the man of my dreams, who just happens to be my husband, for everything.

I developed terrible varicose veins during my second pregnancy and the extra swelling in the ankles were a constant issue. During the final month the hip pain kicked in making it impossible to find comfort. Yet, we managed. I survived the pregnancy and hired a Douala for the delivery. My gorgeous baby boy arrived after a long miraculous drug free labor, yet another 10 lb baby.

Two kids

Two weeks after having our second son, my husband and I looked at each other and collectively said,

“What have we done?!”

We had willingly just upped the intensity of parenthood with one baby screaming and waking the other. The two of them tag teamed us in the early months.

Both my husband and I worked full time while maintaining an apartment and a dog. By this point my older son was attending a small family run daycare a short walk from our house. We had the confidence this time to sign up our infant son to join his brother when he turned four months old.

Not all kids are made the same. My second turned out to be a difficult candidate for breast feeding. He would snack on the breast and expect to be fed every twenty minutes. I soon became well versed in pumping his feed so that he would take a full feed at designated intervals via a bottle. Life with a pump consumed my time and I became anxious when I realized that I was spending more time at the pump and not enough with my children. Sadly, I was not a mom blessed with milk bursting from the breast. I diligently hauled my pump to work only to find I had been designated a ill equipped closet space. As with my older son, I found pumping at work uncomfortable and nothing I could do could change that. To me, pumping milk at work felt like having sex in a public washroom. This is great for some but not for many, definitely not for me.

I pushed to work from home as often as I could to maintain my milk supply. The final frustration occurred when bottles of milk were returned home from the daycare smelling like detergent, a clear sign of breast milk gone off. We transitioned to formula.

While all of this breast feeding drama was unfolding, we were packing up our household as we were moving home. Home was Toronto, Canada. Waiting for passports and paperwork, we were not to move until my son turned 6 months old. The move would mean having more exposure to grandparents as well as a more older community of uncles, aunts, and family friends.

In the meantime, I worked, I cooked, I cleaned. Gone were the days when I would sterilize everything for the baby. Now, he was lucky if we remembered to take out and wash the things that had fallen on the ground and been put aside.

Having two kids meant walking into my living room to find my proud 4 year old displaying his artwork having used a marker to draw swirls all over his brother’s entire body and himself. There are no controls over what a 4 year old gives an infant. Now that my son had HIS brother, he was diligently wanting to sing to him, look after him, and to play with him. He would pick up his brother and frog march him around the house. Our youngest lapped up the extra attention and showed us that his brother meant the world to him.

We were still able to keep the small toys away from our infant. Magnets too were off limits. He started eating solid food a little sooner than his brother by virtue of monkey see, monkey do. He also started to climb the stairs and furniture sooner. I was so paranoid that he would get into and eat the small lego.

My relationship with my husband was full of hurdles as we both tried to juggle all the things included in a big move, working full time, commuting, raising two young kids and walking a dog. Communication often failed. We were saved by our family run daycare that ran from 7AM to 6PM. I would rush home from work around 4PM to avoid traffic to pick up the kids. Meanwhile, he would drop them off in the morning or pick them up when I ran late. We would often order take out when things were particularly busy. Hardest yet was how to handle late night work when we were both on call.

We managed. As a product manager, I treated each thing as it appeared in front of me in its own imaginary Kanban style. Laundry basket full, put a load. Kitchen low of food, cook. The kids routine bedtime of 7 PM helped. We were also established in our community with a wide group of friends with identical issues and young children. Seeing others in the same plight and giving a hand while getting a hand is what helped us through this period.

I left my husband with the two boys for a week while I attended a work retreat. On my return the house had been turned upside down but the boys were well fed and well rested. It took me about a week to return the house to its original state.

After our move to Toronto we hired a babysitter/nanny to help us with the two kids. She was our savior who cleaned the now bigger multi-floored house and put away toys and laundry while the baby napped, picked up our older son from kindergarten and kept both boys occupied while we worked. I would stop work around 5 PM and shift directly into mom mode, cooking dinner and making sure the kids were fed and ready for bed by 7. The real reward here was that we were freer on weekends.

The first year of my second son’s life is a blur on account of our move. In my guilt, I kept him home a second year with the help of our nanny just so that I could see him more. By his third year, we enrolled him into daycare.

The sudden shift of not having our nanny was brutally apparent as we struggled to get ahead of the cleaning, laundry, and pickup/drop offs. We managed. My husband and I taking turns based on our schedules. The worst was waiting for a bus to drop off/pick up my eldest and finding out it was an hour late with my needing to join a work call.

I experienced anxiety that I was not spending enough time with my children. I would try to make up for this on weekends but then I was not spending enough time on me, giving up any personal time to be with the kids. I was also anxious that my work would suffer with two demanding kids and a sometimes equally demanding husband. I set fixed hours for work so that the office would always know when I would be online or offline. My husband in contrast functioned better with a fluid schedule that changed every day. He worked more nights and was on call for technical emergencies so our time together was limited. Our post 7 PM freedom from kids was eaten up by catching up on work we had missed.

The final nail on the coffin of our lack of interaction was the wild schedule of after school extra curricular activities. Swimming, soccer, music/piano and Taekwondo carried us through the evening. My oldest had started Sinhalese language classes and Sunday Buddhist school as well. My husband and I had to accept that ‘date night’ might just be a stolen meal together during the daytime or an episode of Game of Thrones. We barely found time to communicate with each other and depended heavily on a shared calendar and instant messaging.

Parents of two kids learn to let go

Mothers are exceptionally crazy the more loaded they are. Some will craftily take over all the household chores and stealthily make sure that everyone is well fed, well dressed, and well rested. Not so in our household. Because of the nature of our work either he or I would be on call for a couple of days to a week at a time. One parent travelling meant that we needed to be well versed in taking over for the other.

I had to learn to trust my husband and his methods which were very different to mine.

This meant coming home to what I perceived as a mess when I was away for a couple of days. But it also meant that I could leave and close my eyes knowing that my kids were in good hands. Many people will remark with wonder at how my husband can do this, of course he can! In my opinion it is the mothers who fail to give their husbands space to do their thing with the kids who are left holding the so called motherload.

Its called a ‘motherload’ because we mothers make it.

As a mother of two I had to learn to let go. I would not agree with how the laundry was done, but it was done. I may not agree with the food served up when he cooked, but we were fed. When I am in the pilot seat things are done my way and when he is, its his. He is equally fastidious about certain things like counters and floors. It was during this time in our lives that I came to value how our relationship worked where one partner filled in the blanks left by the other.

My husband and I also fought with each other to come to this blessed neutral state. We had to learn to appreciate each other.

Finally, I admitted defeat that I could not do all of the things. I hired a housekeeper to come every two weeks to help clean my large house with its multiple bathrooms. Now someone else changes the bed sheets, cleans the floors, and ensures the house is near spotless.

Lessons from the working mom with two kids

• Give your older kids ownership over the younger kids, this promotes responsibility and empowerment at a young age
• Don’t sweat the small stuff, as long as they are fed, dressed, and rested you are doing a great job!
• Cherish the time you spend with your kids, it helps if they share a room
• Keep to the bedtime and enjoy the quiet when they are in bed
• There will be a mess and you won’t be able to clean it right now
• You will have to periodically choose which kid needs your attention most. The other will have to wait
• You will have to periodically choose between work and your kids. Make sure that work has a reasonable expectation and understanding of what you can and can not deliver
• Communicate!
• Make sure to spend one on one time with each child where he or she is the center of attention in absence of the other
• The younger child will adapt to the older child’s activity
• Older children can entertain younger children
• Work with your partner to divide up the chores, if something is taking up all of your time rethink why and how it is being done and if needed and possible, ask for help or throw money at it to make it go away
• Respect and appreciate your partner
• Find time to maintain relationships and check out what your friends with multiple kids are doing
• Find time for yourself and take it guilt free. They (the kids, the office, the partner) will value you all the more for having taken it. You too will be refreshed and better adept at meeting their needs.

Advice from the more experienced mom of three

• Kids thrive from independence whereas parents feel guilt if they are not focused on their children. Let go of the guilt and let your kids run around
• Recognize when you have the focus to listen and cherish that moment with your children
• Put away your phone at set times like during meals or bedtime
• Focus on the relationship you have with your partner more than in parenting your kids. Parenting your kids happens as life happens meanwhile harsh words or actions between you and your partner can harm your marriage / partnership
• Ask for help
• Share experiences with friends, everyone goes through similar if not the same struggles, especially the struggle between husband and wife

Part 1 Working full time with one kid
Part 3 Life with three kids