As of right now, I’m officially a Stay At Home Mom, not a Work At Home Mom. I have tried to be careful how much I mention about losing my part time social media job. I know I wasn’t able to work enough hours to make my employment worth the company’s time. It turns out that since my children don’t sleep simultaneously more than an hour or so each day/night, and the company wasn’t paying me enough to hire a sitter or pay for additional days of Mother’s Day Out, I was only able to work around 6-7 hours each week. I’m sure it wasn’t worth their administrative costs to retain me. I do feel like I did the best I could while working for them and the parting was not performance related, so that’s good.
We definitely miss the income, and haven’t figured out how to replace it yet. In another way, I was relieved to have the obligation lifted. It was just another form of Mommy guilt. When I was playing with my kids I’d realize I hadn’t checked our clients’ Twitter or Facebook all day and I’d have to be on the iPhone checking. The kids would get jealous of the iPhone or the laptop and try to take it from me or throw their bodies in front of it. I’d feel guilty because they were completely justified in their action and I’d rather be playing with them anyway! So I’d play with my kids but feel guilty that I was being a bad employee.
Going from checking multiple social networks and email accounts constantly to just my own personal account has been a little weird. At first I found myself checking my personal accounts just as frequently as I used to check our clients’. Unfortunately, my own personal network can get a little slow (cause, uh, we’re all moms!), and oftentimes there was nothing to see when I was refreshing EVERY 10 MINUTES. Then I went through a period where I kind of didn’t check anything for a while and got totally out of the loop. Thank goodness I don’t have to monitor my Klout anymore, because I am sure it took a hit.
Somehow I also started dropping the ball on other things like making dinner, planning meals, and blogging. I guess my carefully constructed schedule is off. I think what happened is that I started to assume that I would have more time than I actually do, and I wasted those precious extra hours on things that should have been much lower priority. Where do those mysterious hours go, SAHM’s?
Do any of you SAHM’s have suggestions for me? Would love to hear them!
No suggestions. Just sympathy. Hours just go without explanation. I try not to feel bad for sitting with a baby on my lap and doing nothing. I hope it makes up for the times I ignore them so I can finish a task. I say, hold the babies. Play with them, it is an investment in time. You will figure the other stuff out.