The Secrets to Being a Working Mom (Without Totally Losing It)
If you’re a “working mom,” this might sound familiar…
Your alarm goes off at 5 am. You get yourself ready to go before you wake up the kids, then serve a messy breakfast that takes longer to clean up than you were expecting.
Now you’re running extremely late. You ask your partner to do the school run so you can make it to work on time. You spend the next 8 hours at the office, missing your kids.
When you get home, your second shift begins. You don’t catch a break until the kids go down for the night, and now you’re too drained to actually do anything on your list.
You drop into bed exhausted, knowing you have to do it all over again tomorrow.
Here’s how I see it: Working motherhood can seem like a thankless purgatory. Most days, we feel like we’re not fully present for our employer or for our family. And, of course, our society has all the opinions about what we should and shouldn’t be doing. If we work, we’re wrong. If we don’t work, we’re wrong. It’s maddening.
So whether you’re working outside the home as a preference or a necessity, you’re likely feeling a little burned out. I’m here to help
8 Ways to Conquer Working Motherhood
#1 Maintain excellent boundaries.
Boundaries are the fences we build around our physical, emotional, and spiritual spaces. And those fences help us decide who can come in, who can’t, and under what circumstances.
When we’re juggling so much, maintaining healthy boundaries with the people, places, and things in our lives is essential to keeping our cool.
One way to practice healthy boundaries is to truly separate (as much as possible) work from home. When you’re at home, be a mom. When you’re at work, be an employee. Wherever you are, be there.
Healthy boundary-setting also includes establishing your non-negotiables. Look at each piece of your very full plate, decide what’s important to you about each piece, and then plan for it!
Whether it’s date night, family dinners, kids’ sports games, or working out, when you identify and plan for your non-negotiables, you’ll be better able to maintain your boundaries when they’re inevitably tested.
#2 Share the load with your partner.
The invisible load of motherhood describes the unnoticed and uncompensated physical, mental, and emotional labor completed behind the scenes to keep our households happy, healthy, and running smoothly. And while we’ve made a lot of strides toward gender equality, moms still bear the brunt of this invisible labor.
So, it’s time to redistribute the labor and share it more equally with your partner. Check out this blog post to learn how to make that happen.
#3 Avoid the “motherhood penalty.”
Social scientists have determined that when a different-sex couple has a baby, they both experience changes in the workplace—but in dramatically different ways.
Male partners experience a “fatherhood bonus,” meaning they actually benefit in the workplace from having children. But women often experience a “motherhood penalty,” which includes things like generally being offered lower salaries and being perceived as less competent or committed than our childless peers.
While there’s no one-size-fits all cure to the motherhood penalty, here are some tips to keep you on the up-and-up:
Negotiate for flexibility. Negotiate for changes in hours, location, or duties as you need. Come in with a plan and suggest a trial period.
Reduce childcare costs. Use flexible spending accounts, childcare shares, and creative parental leave to maximize your childcare savings.
Maintain a healthy savings account. You’ll feel better taking more risks at work and prioritizing your family when needed, knowing you have a three-month savings to fall back on.
#4 Save time.
As moms who work outside the home, we often find there’s just not enough hours in the day. So make and prioritize a schedule and routine that works for you. Here are some ideas:
Wake up before your kids
Set everything out the night before
Skip the PJs and let your kids sleep in their clothes
Meal plan and prep
Order your groceries online and have them delivered
Delegate chores
Put a load of laundry in every morning
Say “no” to requests more often (You don’t have to coordinate every class party to be considered a good mom!)
#5 Pay attention to signs of burnout.
Parental burnout is the combination of overwhelming exhaustion, emotional distancing, and sense of ineffectiveness as a parent that results from chronic parenting stress (Mikolajczak, Raes, Avalosse, & Roskam, 2017). And parents who work outside the home are at greater risk of experiencing it.
In addition to the symptoms described above, watch out for:
A consistent bad mood
Inability to control emotions
Feeling “touched out”
Difficulty thinking clearly
Loss of pleasure in parenting
Numbing with addictive behaviors
Declining physical health
Quickness to anger
Forgetting or avoiding important appointments
If this sounds like you, get helpful tips and support for parental burnout.
#6 Find great childcare.
Knowing your kids are safe and cared for while you’re at work is crucial to being able to focus on work while you’re there. Especially if you’re working through some maternal separation anxiety, this step can make or break the work-mom balance.
#7 Tackle your Mom Guilt.
Mom guilt—that nagging feeling of “I’m doing something wrong”—can be a near-constant for us. And while productive guilt exists, what we more often experience is unhealthy guilt. This is the feeling we get about something we’ve done that doesn’t meet our own subjective, often unrealistically high—, standards.
Kicking mom guilt can be tricky. To get started, try these tips:
Address your shoulds. Avoid comparing yourself to what you think you should be doing, and instead embrace the challenges you’re conquering in the here and now.
Clarify your values. Parent according to your own values to avoid comparison with other moms.
Filter your information and news feeds. Carefully choose what media you’re letting into your space.
Prioritize self-care. Take care of yourself to increase your capacity for taking care of your loved ones.
Practice acceptance. Avoid judgment and affirm yourself as the incredible parent you are!
#8 Embrace a Good Enough Mother mentality.
The Good Enough Mother, coined by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, is an approach to parenting that involves being sensitive, responsive, and adaptive to our children’s needs and developmental abilities.
It stands in direct contrast to the perfect parent and affirms that you can’t be everything all the time. And that’s more than OK.
By embracing good enough, you allow yourself to be human and do the best you can with what you have in that moment. And by addressing and dismissing your perfectionism in this way, you can feel freer and more confident in your parenting journey.
You’ve got this, mama!
Working outside the home and being a mom is a lot to take on. But you’re doing it fabulously. (Promise.) For more support, follow @psychedmommy on Instagram!
Sources
Mikolajczak, M., Raes, M.-E., Avalosse, H., & Roskam, I. (2017). Exhausted Parents: Sociodemographic, Child-Related, Parent-Related, Parenting and Family-Functioning Correlates of Parental Burnout. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 27(2), 602–614. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0892-4
