Two Years Ago, and Still I am Learning to Practice What I Preach...

Two and a half years ago, I wrote the following as my farewell "Life at Work" column that appeared in the Baton Rouge Business Report. I wrote this column just as I was deciding to begin pulling back my career, the first time. Reading it now, I am astonished at the tugging, to-and-fro nature of this decision. I knew the answers back when I wrote this column, and still, have to come back to the questions over and over again. Such is the nature of life, I suppose. So here, I decided to go ahead and reprint this column. It first appeared in June 2006, when Ryan was a baby, commando crawling everywhere, months before his sister was even conceived. Life since I wrote these words has been so sweet, such a gift. I see the growth and feel a bit bugged by my own judgment of stay-at-home moms embedded in this column, even as I danced to join their ranks. Make no mistake. Being a SAHM is no frou-frou, frilly, can't do anything else, silly existence. This is serious work. I am humbled by it.

Life at Work
first published June 6, 2006
Baton Rouge Business Report
(c) Amy Alexander

Perhaps the greatest gift of being the owner of a small business is flexibility. Granted, there are times when owning your own business feels anything but flexible. Weekends can turn into marathon work sessions, as can evenings and the dead of night.
Still, woven within those long hours is the freedom to decide, in what can feel like big, choppy, intuitive moves, where your life—and hence the life of the business—is going. This can change over time, of course, as your values shift and evolve.
A few columns ago, I shared a bit of my story about working from home while juggling the days and oft-interrupted nights as a stay-at-home mom to my 7-month-old baby boy. I anticipated that I’d feel differently about my work after he was born, but decided I wouldn’t make any changes to my business until after I’d experienced a few months of motherhood. How else can you know, for sure, whether you want to work or stay home with bambino?
Seven months in, I’ve decided to make raising my son at home my main priority. To make this happen, I’ll need to cut back my freelance writing workload a great deal. That means—with an achy heart—putting down the pen on this column.
It seems oddly fitting that this goodbye is appearing in the issue where Business Report celebrates influential women. Today, women have the opportunity to become influential, and they have the right to decide for themselves what it means to influence others.
Making the decision to step away, temporarily, from bylines and deadlines feels sometimes like a step backwards. I find myself wondering if I am betraying all of my foremothers by choosing such a “traditional” role. Then I remind myself that what my foremothers fought for was the choice. As a modern woman, I can survey the landscape of wonderful writing opportunities, intriguing interviews in executive suites and entertaining lunches with contacts and opt, instead, for sandwiches eaten while plopped on the floor, chasing after blocks and pulling my precocious boy off of power cords and plants. I know this choice—and the chance to pace work to mesh with motherhood—is a privilege that precious few have, even in this time when women are told they can do anything.
Far too many mothers are pushed to make a decision about their careers and families while they’re pregnant or have just given birth. Then, it can feel like a rigid, confining either-or selection. Either you log into the office at 7:30, get home at 6, and try to shove homework, dinner, meaningful dialogue, time with your spouse and a wee me-hour into ever-dissipating twilight time. Or you sign up for a fairly isolated existence at home being all things to your little ones, doing laps around the mall to tinny shopping music and praying desperately for a good afternoon nap.
The hope I have for myself and other women out there—especially those who influence in ways that aren’t celebrated in our culture—is that we can carve out a way for women to knit motherhood into the pursuit of their goals and fulfillment of their educations. I’ve been blessed with a supportive husband and understanding editors who have allowed me to line up the stones and pave my own way. On-site daycares, paid extended maternity leaves, creative scheduling and community resources could transform what I deem serendipitous luck into every woman’s right.
“Life at Work” has always been written to help employers, professionals and just about anyone understand who they are and figure out how to expand on that and reach their potential. That calls for constant questioning: Why do we do things this way? Is this method working? How can I get from here to there? Signing off, I hope that in the last four years, I’ve inspired a few folks to see beyond the cages of the way things are, into the possibility of what can be. I hope that workplaces are learning how to operate as productive communities, always searching for the connection. Keep that line of thinking alive, Baton Rouge, and thank you for reading.
I’ll see you at story time.

CoMOMitment

The other day, I caught, for the first time, the film "The Karate Kid." I know, I know. It came out, what, 30 years ago and has been parodied over and over again (wax on, wax off!). But in one scene, the elderly Asian Mr Miyagi played brilliantly by the late Pat Morita, says "The man who is in the middle of the road, eventually, squssssh. Same with Karate. You either do, or you don't do. Otherwise, Squssssh."

The past few weeks have led me to decide that, for me, this is how it is with motherhood. Up until now, this blog has been all about how I plan to juggle journalistic pursuits with parenthood. I don't know if it was Hurricane Gustav who came and swept my energy into a focused beam or if I have lost my mind, but it has become completely clear to me that this, motherhood, is the task that has been delivered to me right now. I must focus on this and only this. I don't think this is some dogma that all mothers must embrace, but I think that God has a really good reason for calling me to be a student of my children for awhile. To lead them, learn from them and uphold my family in this way. I still have no idea how I will fill the days.

To that end, we decided to pull Ryan out of Mother's Day Out. He kept asking to stay home and I kept sending him because I felt like I couldn't survive without it. During the hurricane, I began to turn my perspective and to ask what am I missing out on by trying to do everything at once? Why not just really put all of my energy on these little people that we brought into existence? I am also cutting way back on writing. For now. Except for this blog, of course, and a novel I've been wanting to write.

So maybe it's true. You can have it all but not all at once. I fully expect that my career in whatever form I hope to take it will exist when these children go off to school and their own lives. If I invest in them with my full attention, I think we'll all be better for it.

Keep reading as I share this new chapter of this journey!

Discerning

Gustav blew in and raised the dust of my somewhat confused state of existence. It also allowed for some serious downtime; time to reflect on priorities. And then, my mother sent me the book "Mister Rogers Talks With Parents."

Fred Rogers is a big hero of mine. I had the fortune of interviewing him once and he is the real deal. In the first chapter of his book, he writes "There are reasons why close and consistent mothering are very beneficial to a baby's growth, but it is the mother's growth I want us to think about here."

And then, he quotes from educator Eda LeShan, who writes about regretting going to work full-time when her child was very small. "There are few decisions that I now regret more. Not for my child's sake, but for mine. She had much to teach me about wonder and curiosity, about joy and loving--and most of all about the refreshment of play. I wasn't mature enough to see that. What I could not comprehend was that when she left home at eighteen, I would be as vigorous as ever and have at least another twenty-five years of creative work ahead of me."

Wow. Here, I have been so focused on my feelings of stucktitude, my sadness over watching the news world pass me by, my regret at all the things I have been missing out on--not to say I feel this way all the time, but these feelings do come in strong waves. And I have never stopped to think that maybe I will regret it if I don't completely immerse myself in this very rich, fertile experience.

All I know is when that hurricane hit and it was tend to a deadline or tend to these two little people whose souls are rooted in mine, the choice was clear. I couldn't think beyond these kids and I loved sinking into that responsibility and letting it shape me. It has shaken me to my core.

We are okay...

The storm raged, and it ranted. It spit words I've never heard, and then some. But we emerged with only an unhinged fence. Driving around the neighborhood last Tuesday, we were amazed at the damage. Garage doors looked like pages from a frustrated novelist crumpled in a garbage can. Some of the trees we love stayed, but others looked like they'd been snapped in a moment of rage. On the radio, they described scenes of destruction. We sat in the dark, unable to go investigate. We were put on a curfew. We didn't dare go beyond our neighborhood. After the power went out on Monday, the heat began to rise. We opened the windows, but before long, the shelves of books and stacks of paper in our house began to buckle. We went outside. We talked to neighbors. Some were grilling some pork tenderloin that might be lost otherwise, and they invited us to come and eat with them. When we got there, several of our neighbors sat around the table, and we got to know them. We dragged chairs to the front porch and, with hurricane breezes still going strong, we laughed and talked about how this is how neighborhoods are supposed to be.

The nights were rough. But they were also sweet. We laid in our living room with all of the windows open and made shadow animals in the flashlight's enormous circle. Ryan got a kick out of that. I read my novel under a candlelight's flicker and tasted each word. You read much slower by candlelight.

Coffee was a big issue. David was determined to brew some cold drip. It was Chinese torture for him, watching each thick, globular, aromatic condensation of coffee land in the glass pitcher. Our neighbor has a gas stove, so after two hours, when we had a good bit of the brew, we toted our pitcher to their house for hot water. We sat out on the porch and talked and drank what is possibly the most delightful cup of joe I've ever had.

After a few days, though, the kids got desperate. Charlotte sported a constant ringlet hairdo from the humidity and her brow was sweaty. Ryan kept melting down. When David's sister returned to Diamondhead, Mississippi and invited us to her air conditioning, we couldn't pack fast enough.

We got back today, and our house was air conditioned and light. Not so for the rest of Baton Rouge, much of which will be without power for weeks. People are starting to get antsy and aggressive. Officials have banned alcohol sales, saying that it just makes things worse. And if you're not inside by 10 o' clock, you will be questioned. Grocery stores have limited supplies, so we shopped in Mississippi and stocked up.

Now, Hurricane Ike is brewing in the Atlantic, and is due to come somewhere near. We hope it doesn't. We can't even imagine going through this again so soon.

Power while you've got it

The wind is just beginning to pick up this morning, and the radio says we'll likely soon lose power. It appears the storm is going to come onshore to the southwest of New Orleans. This is better than a direct hit, but...

Postscript...As I was writing this, the power went out.