There are no mommy wars when the real war is at home
I am having one of those days when I hate everything and everybody around me; though I mostly hate my life.
I hate living with one who hates travelling. It's one of those activities that are fundamental to who I am.
I am therefore I'm everywhere.
A huge part of why I love the internet is that I am almost liberated from the burdens of the body and geography. I can move along places and among people as fast as my time, my bandwidth and my repetitive-stress syndrome allow.
That is, as long as I don't have my family around.
Ever since I came back from Austin, I have been made to pay for my absence. It's not even the guilt for I feel none. It's the whining, the complaining, the ressentment thrown my way for doing something that does not involve neither my kids nor their father. Of course, the animosity is escalating since tomorrow I leave for DC for the last commitment of the season.
We're not happy
Mommy wars? There are no “mommy wars” when it's your own family doing the attack. Most women could care less about what I do. It's my own family who make my work a horrendously painful process to the point of making any non-domestic work an oddysey. I time, space and quiet to write or code. I get very little of that these days. And since I waste so much time being interrupted, I have very little time for domesticity. So I am doubly “whipped” for not being the homemaker I used to be.
Being a working woman, and a mother? You just can't win.
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Life | Marriage | Motherhood | Parenting
Maybe It's You They Miss
and their family life with you AS mommy, and not the chores?
Empathizing, but also trying to reflect what the ones left home can feel during a long absence, even if Mommy isn't the one traveling --
Last election year in our house (summer-fall 2004) Daddy was gone for several months without a single visit back home, seldom time to phone in briefly now and then, usually unreachable day and night. And those calls were very testy and unproductive after a while! I fell and hurt myself quite badly during that time, began to feel actual abandonment.
The worst of it, I think now, was that nothing had been been planned that way, not finances or family activities; it was more like Gilligan's "three hour tour" that turned into an indefinite sort of new reality that had been forced on us against our will. The children had become Red Sox fans because daddy was Boston-born and bred, waiting all their lives for the elusive championship but when it began to happen, mommy shared it with them, not him. He couldn't even enjoy it himself, where he was, much less with them. It was surreal after a while. Trapped and frustrated yet unable even to feel good about feeling righteously indignant - we both believed in what he was doing and why, but his actual work was discouragingly endless and all-consuming and unfortunately it didn't pay off in results, compensation or even satisfaction for all the family sacrifices. I was fantasizing some pretty radical and desperate solutions by the time it was over --
I don't know what this means to the Mommy Wars, except that I've been on both ends of this enough over the years, to see feeling locked in and left out at the same time, as applying as easily to mommy or daddy and often to both parents at the same time!