I’ve been accepted as an editor over at Type-A-Mom for the working mothers community. How exciting! I hope this helps me verbalize my own issues with work, the conflicts of being a parent and an employee. I want to understand (for myself) when those roles are not mutually exclusive and when they are to be separated.

I have been wanting to work on my writing for a while, but this gets difficult. I can’t find time at nights, I have little time during the days and I can’t seem to find a time that is neither night nor day. I will try to find a fine line and write something up at home tonight. Or not!! I have a ton of clean up to do, laundry to get reset and Girl Scout patches to sew onto two uniforms! 

I wonder how many moms do get caught in our current culture clash. How do you be a productive worker and a caring and present mother? Can you do both? What happens when your job is like mine, 9-5 doesn’t exist. When the spacecraft calls, we jump! When a far away galaxy has a sudden gamma ray burst and an astronomer requests that we move our telescope to observe it, we have to respond, sometimes within 24 hours or less to change the plans to deal with this. I am on call 7 days out of 3 to 4 weeks. The lead of our group drops out of the rotation every few times, so I can be on call with only 14 days off in between.

How do I parent when these situations arise? I remember in January, I was on the couch, telephone on my side, computer on my lap and Soleil woke up and wandered out to the couch. I was dealing with a situation where our instrument had rebooted and we didn’t understand why. It was 6 am. I let her curl up with me and I explained what I was looking at, how I knew there was a problem, and then explained that Mom might have to be pretty busy that day. Turns out I didn’t, but my multiple roles clashed there.

Oh, I am getting excited! This is going to be a trip!