Moms Make it Work: Darci from North Carolina

Today's guest poster is Darci, one of my long-time 'internet friends' from waaay back in our wedding planning days. She is our first mom who works from home (full time!) and I love her take on mommy guilt and the adjustment to a baby who will NOT sleep. Enjoy!

Hello!  My name is Darci, and I am a 34 year old Mom who works full-time from home.  My husband Brad and I are Chicagoans at heart but (sort of) recently relocated to Charlotte, NC. We were married in 2008 and our daughter was born in August of 2011, not long after we made the big move.  I used to blog pretty regularly at With This Nest, but now I can be found mostly on instagram. As everyone else has mentioned, I was thrilled that Julia asked me to be a part of this series.  I've been loving all the posts so far and as I started to write my own entry I was surprised at how cathartic it was!  So huge thanks to Julia for organizing all of this and apologies in advance for the personal therapy session written out in novel form below.

What is your background story? What was your career/schooling before you became a mom? And now where are you?

For most of my life I thought I wanted to be a teacher.  I even applied to college as an elementary education major, but realized rather quickly that I don't have the type of patience required for such a demanding job (teachers are truly saints)! I switched majors two more times and ultimately graduated with a marketing degree from the college of business.  I also met my husband in college and shortly after graduation we bought a condo in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago and quickly acquired a mortgage, a dog, and all the battle scars that come from renovating a home together (one of our biggest fights to date was over a type of toilet seat in Home Depot.  Renovation might make people even crazier than weddings). When we moved to Chicago I found a job in the marketing department of a large human resource consulting firm and worked there for two years in a role that was a mix of public relations and entry level marketing.  It was exciting in that it was my first "real" job, but I realized after awhile that I was much more interested in finding new restaurants for lunch than I was about logo placements for promotional golf balls.  I then found a knowledge management role at an executive search firm and have been there for the past seven years.  The position is research intensive and more of an analytical role than my previous job, which I really like. 

About three years ago, Brad and I decided that we were ready to sell our condo and make a move out of Chicago.  We still absolutely love it there, but my family was slowly migrating East and it was time for Brad to make his exit from a stressful job in the finance world.  After living in a condo we were very ready for more space, and honestly I was done with the winter weather! I knew that I didn't want to leave my current firm so I approached my boss about the situation and proposed the idea of working remotely from Charlotte.  We don't have offices here so I knew I would be at home full-time, but our firm is international and the way we're structured lends itself well to the flexibility of telecommuting.  That being said, not a lot of people in my roll actually do work remotely so I was a little bit petrified of making the big ask.  But you know, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and Lean In and all that - so I asked and my boss said yes, and it was an amazingly smooth transition.  Now I work from home, in the guest room of our house.  Yes - most of the time I am in some version of yoga pants.  No - I don't always manage to get in a shower everyday.  But I can confidently say that I am far more productive in my little home office than I was in a corporate environment.  There are things I miss about being in an office for sure, but for me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

As I mentioned, my husband needed to get out of his work situation in Chicago so he left his job when we moved.  The day we unpacked the moving van in Charlotte we found out we were pregnant, which was a huge shock because at that point we had been trying for about two years.  After a lot of thoughtful discussions we decided that Brad would remain at home once the baby arrived, since at that point he was mostly day trading and working for himself.  Given that we needed the stability of my job and that he could be more flexible with his time, he kind of fell into the roll of primary daytime caregiver after my maternity leave was up.  Definitely not something we had ever talked about prior to getting pregnant, but it's what works for us at this stage in our lives.

What are the best parts of your situation? What are the biggest challenges? 

The best part of my situation is that I am home all the time and the biggest challenge is that I am home all the time!  I really, really love the flexibility of working from home.  I get to eat every meal with my girl, and am here to snuggle her cuddly post-nap self almost everyday.  There is no commute, so when I am done with work I walk out of my office and there is my family.  I was also able to breastfeed for an extended amount of time because I almost never had to pump - I just took a break to go feed my girl and went right back to work.  That being said, it can be challenging to balance (and separate) home and work sometimes. When something is really wrong and only mama will suffice (which, in terms of toddler dramatics can mean a lot of the time) Em knows that I am just a room away.  And "me time" is pretty much nonexistent - during nap times I am working, and when work is over for the day I am right into the fray of cooking dinner, spending some quality time together and then starting the bedtime routine.  Sometimes I fantasize about a 20 minute train ride after work to sit quietly by myself and read a book.  But the same can likely be said for any role...I don't think I've ever heard a Mom complain of having too much downtime!

Is this how you expected it to be pre-kids?

I always knew that I wanted kids, because my own family is extremely close and has always been such a force in my life.  But honestly, before I met Brad thoughts of family were always in a hypothetical sense.  Once he proposed (ahem, 10 years after we started dating) my way of thinking quickly changed and I knew that I was very ready to have a family of our own.  I don't think I had a lot of expectations beyond the desire to just have kids, until we struggled to get pregnant.  During the two years we were trying we had two miscarriages, the first of which was very late in the first trimester (11.5 weeks). I took it really hard. I would be lying if I said that those losses didn't change the way I imagined I would be as a mother.  I hesitate to use the word infertility because (as Kate already said) I know so many people who have been through much worse than we have. But the thing about struggling to get pregnant is that you have a lot of time to think about (and wish desperately for) your future family.  I spent months and months daydreaming about what it would be like if/when/how and I think I actually did myself a disservice in that all that imagining lead to some VERY high expectations.  I was going to cherish every single moment with my little future cherub, and if we were lucky enough to get pregnant I wouldn't so much as raise my voice to that little person.  I am exaggerating a little, but you get the point.  I would have the kid who sat perfectly in a restaurant happily eating anything on his or her plate (damn you, Bringing Up Bebe). I was going to have an all natural birth because I would have a quick labor like all the other women in my family, and I would politely sigh out a perfectly healthy bundle of joy (oh, the fall from that high horse is quite a way down.  I had a 24 hour+ labor that ended in an emergency c-section). But the truth is? It doesn't matter if it took two months or two years to get pregnant, or how your birth story ended. Newborns are the great equalizer.  Those little people can be HARD to live with and have agendas of their own right from the beginning, no matter how much you planned to be all Mary Poppins and sing their medicine into their mouths while knitting them sweaters every night.  So I've had to spend some time undoing all of those expectations and learning to just be the best mom and wife that I can be on any given day.  I read a quote once from Anna Quindlen that I now have in my office: "Nobody really needs a bath every night. Nobody really needs a perfectly balanced meal for every meal.  I should have let the freak flag fly a bit more.  It's hard to be a Type A mom.  I wish I could have been a bit more B plus, for my sake and their own."  

Is this your ideal situation? If not, what is?
Ideally, I would love to have a four day work week (maybe even three).  I always crave a little more balance than what I have now but I can't really complain.  Brad would like to return to working out of the house again soon and Em will start preschool part-time next year, so there will likely be some changes coming in our future. Right now we're both making sacrifices to maintain a situation that overall works pretty well for everyone. So I wouldn't say it's a perfectly ideal situation but it's close!

How do you handle mommy guilt that comes with your role?
Since I had set the bar pretty high for myself, I initially had a lot of guilt about how much I struggled during the newborn days. I somehow thought I would just be pretty damn good at the whole thing and even though I would be a little sleep deprived, I would still be me....just me with a baby.  I underestimated how much my life would change (honestly, what did I do with all that free time?) and I was hard on myself for being so overwhelmed.  Looking back I think a lot of those feelings of being overwhelmed had to do with lack of sleep.  Em was not a good sleeper (we still struggle with it sometimes...I've read and researched and tried everything and at 2 we are just now hitting a bit of a stride.  It's another novel of a post in itself).  I remember when I was in the thick of it saying to a friend, "when does this get easier?" And she gave it to me straight, "nothing will start to get easier until everyone is sleeping."  It's so true.  I felt guilty about the part of me that was a little excited to return to work, close that door to my office and sit and drink a cup of coffee in peace.  To interact with some adults who just knew me as Darci, not as a Mom.  I still struggle with feeling guilty about various aspects of motherhood but I am a lot easier on myself than I was in the beginning.  I think that's the key - cut yourself some slack.  Everyone is just doing the best the can, and that looks different for all of us.  B plus.

Tips on how you make this work for you?  Advice for new moms struggling with returning to work outside of the home? Or struggling to decide if staying home is the right choice? 
As far as making the decision to return to work (whether at home or outside it) or to stay at home, it's such a personal one.  And I think all you can do is decide what is the best fit for you and your family right now - and keep in mind that doesn't mean you're deciding the next 20 years of your life.  It doesn't have to carry that much weight. Do what works for as long as it works, and when it stops working then it's time to make a change!

Thank you again to Julia for hosting this series and cheers to all you moms out there who are making it work!