Chicago Moms Blog

Laundry: A Rant

Is there any household chore that is less efficient or less satisfying than laundry?  I mean, sure, it's not the most vile task, not like cleaning toilets or scooping out the cat's litter box.  It's just that it's mind-numbing and ever-present. 

Some chores are a major pain, but there is satisfaction in having them done.  You can vacuum and then sit back and admire your clean carpet.  You can wash a pile of dishes and see your countertop again.  But when you finish a whole bunch of laundry, it doesn't matter because as you and your family are going about your daily lives, you are wearing clothes that are slowly getting dirty, thus necessitating the washing of more laundry as soon as the previous load is complete. 

Every mother I know complains about having too much laundry.  I kind of wonder if maybe our expectations for how much laundry we should have are just too low, like maybe we think we are supposed to do laundry once a week when in actuality it almost needs to be a daily chore.  Perhaps this is because we formed these expectations early in our laundry careers, at a time when our laundry loads and responsibilities were a lot lighter.  Remember college when you dragged your bag of dirty jeans and sweatshirts to the dorm laundromat every two weeks?  Or your first apartment where you trekked to the laundromat and had an entire week's laundry done in two hours? 

What I learned from going to the gym every single day in March

If I had to complete the sentence, I am good at _________, the only truthful action verb I could use would be swimming.  I mean, yeah, technically eating and sleeping are action verbs, and I'm very good at those, but in terms of actual, athletic-based action verbs, my only skill is swimming.

So, I swim. 

Mostly it's a mental health thing.  Swimming a mile is really the only thing that keeps me even remotely close to sane.  And since I typically like to stay as close to sane as possible, I set a goal to swim at the gym every single day in March.

March seemed like a perfect time for the goal.  There are no holidays in March.  It's unlikely that March will bring a massive, shut-down-the-whole-world blizzard or inhumane sub-zero temperatures.  (Yes, I swim in an indoor pool, but there are some weather conditions that don't exactly invite you to go outside with your hair wet.)  And now that I wasn't working, I had a lot more flexibility in my schedule to get to the gym. 

But still, it was hard to go to the gym every single day in March.  And as I swam in that pool, back and forth, back and forth, for what seemed like hours every single day (actually only 45 minutes), I discovered that my new goal was teaching me a lot.  Here is what I learned:

Maternity leave, motherhood, and me

I came across a British pro-breastfeeding ad that concludes by telling mothers to "speak to your midwife or health visitor" for more information about breastfeeding.  I didn't know what a "health visitor" was, so I turned to my favorite font of information, Wikipedia, which defined the British health visitor as follows:

"They work with mothers once postpartum care is handed over from the midwives, advising on feeding, care and support to both infants and parents, providing routine child development checks and have responsibility for child protection issues."

Ahh, yes, as we all learned from Michael Moore's movie Sicko, women in other developed countries get a lot better postpartum perks than we get here in the U.S.  These perks include, of course, much better paid parental leave time.  Here are a few examples of parental leave policies around the world, again from Wikipedia:

• Sweden: all working parents are entitled to 16 months paid leave per child; to encourage greater paternal involvement in child-rearing, a minimum of 2 months out of the 16 is required to be used by the "minority" parent (usually the father)
• Bulgaria: mothers are entitled to 45 days sick leave prior to due date at 100% pay, 2 years paid leave, and 1 additional year of unpaid leave; the employer is obliged to restore the mother to the same position upon return to work
• Canada: 15 weeks paid maternity leave for mothers (55% pay), plus an additional 35 weeks parental leave that can be split between parents (though this is paid for mothers and unpaid for fathers)
• France: 16 weeks maternity leave at 100% pay for mothers, 26 weeks at 100% pay for mothers having their third child; 15 days paid leave for fathers
• Denmark: 52 weeks paid paternal leave, 18 to be taken by the mother, 2 weeks by the father, the rest as they see fit
• Japan: 14 weeks paid maternity leave (60% pay)

Chicken Soup for the Facebooker's Soul: A Serious Message with a Silly Title

You can't go a week in the blogosphere without reading about somebody's recent adventure on Facebook.  This is mine. 

Let me start with some miscellaneous background facts  I have been battling serious depression for about a year now.  That wouldn't normally be the first fact I'd use to introduce myself, because there are many other more important and cheerier details about my life, but the depression thing is most relevant part of my life in terms of this blog post.  My mental health has steadily improved, but anybody who tells you that curing depression is as simple as swallowing a pill seriously doesn't want to cross paths with me. 

One lifestyle change that has helped me tremendously was my decision in October to quit my full-time job and stay home with my son.  Although this life change has been 100% positive for me, I wasn't so sure it was the right thing to do at first.  I wondered if being home full-time would actually make me more depressed.  So, like any modern woman, I admitted my angst on my Facebook profile, in a slightly watered-down, sugar-coated, I-don't-need-that-random-person-from-middle-school-to-know-I'm-on-Prozac kind of way.  I just set my Facebook status to say, "Shannon is quitting her job.  Please send good vibes." 

Whatever happened to the Great American Hobby?

I am going to begin this post by admitting that a lot of my knowledge of historical periods is based on television shows.  Oh sure, I had a formal education with books and stuff, but what do those really tell you about the day-to-day lives of our predecessors?  Television gives you hours and hours of reference material, allowing you to gain a complete understanding of what it was like to live in the particular historical time period in which a show is set. 

Yeah, yeah, I know, TV is ridiculously inaccurate.  You certainly wouldn't want somebody in the year 2050 watching Friends or Sex and the City to get an accurate picture of life around the turn of the 21st century.  But, since this is a blog post and not a dissertation, and since it helps me segue into my main point, I'm going to cite television as the main source for my argument here. 

And that argument is that people in other generations appeared to have hobbies.  I'm not talking about people in the Little House on the Prairie days, because they had to spend all their time focusing on basic survival.  And by the 1980s, Roseanne had to spend all her time trying to make ends meet, while Murphy Brown was completely focused on her career and single motherhood.  But somewhere in the middle, in, say, the Mad Men years, people had hobbies.  Friends are shown coming over to play cards.  Betty leaves her children with a sitter so she can go out and ride horses. 

People don't seem to have hobbies like that anymore.

What's it really like to be a celebrity mom?

This post has been brewing for a long time, but this article about Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz's New Year's Eve party at a club in Las Vegas was the last straw.  The article mentions that the couple did bring baby Bronx Mowgli along to Vegas and left him back in the hotel room, but still, how many Vegas nightclub parties were you hosting when you had a newborn? 

Ashlee and Pete are just the next in a long line of celebrity couples who seem to have the ability to have babies and then just go right on with their lives, seemingly unchanged.  Here are J-Lo and Marc Anthony jetting off to Puerto Rico, allegedly sans twins.  And here are Nicole Richie and Joel Madden boating during their Hawaiian vacation, and it doesn't look like there's room for a Pack 'n Play on that boat. 

Now, I'm not saying that moms, celebrity or otherwise, don't deserve to have some kid-free fun.  But let's face it, when we normal people had infants (as all of the afore-mentioned celebrity couples do), most of our kid-free fun came in the form of a solo trip to the grocery store.  And even if we had the financial resources that these celebrities have, debilitating mom guilt would have prevented us from repeatedly jetting off to fun locales like Hollywood moms seem to do.  Which just makes me wonder, are these celebrity moms just wired differently than we are?

What is wrong with me?

I've noticed a disturbing phenomenon going on in my head recently. 

It's the obsession with having a second child.  No, it's not the weird biological baby fever that takes over women's rational minds in nature's effort to perpetuate the species.  In actuality, I'm not entirely sure I want another baby.  And therein lies the obsession.

At this point in my life, I feel like having another baby would be about as easy as suddenly having to go through life with a complete loss of my eyesight.  That is, I could do it, but it would be excruciatingly difficult.  Still, the second baby thoughts run through my head almost constantly.  Don't I want my son to have a sibling?  Do I want to raise an only child?  What if, God forbid, something happened to my son and I didn't have any other kids?  What will other people think if I only have one?  Could I really go through the whole baby phase again, this time with a toddler to contend with as well?  How would another child affect my marriage?  My career?

And, the biggest stumbling block of all:

The Cat is Out of the Picture

The biggest unexpected holiday stressor is the Christmas card.  It seems so simple: take picture, order cards, address cards, add stamps, and mail.  But somehow sending out a simple card to every single person you've ever known ends up being a big production. 

The picture-taking is, of course, the hardest part.  Being native Californians who send most of our cards to other native Californians, we always hope to take a festive holiday picture out in the snow.  In four years of living here, that has never happened.  In lieu of the "white Christmas" backdrop, we do some other standard like a photo in front of the Christmas tree or the stockings. 

Should stay-at-home moms use daycare?

That was the question an online poll I read about in some magazine in the doctor's office several months ago.  I can't remember the publication, and I doubt this tiny blurb was significant enough for the their website, so I can't give you a link to see the survey results for yourself.  But let me just sum them up: most people said no, stay-at-home moms should not use daycare. 

Now, I don't exactly know what they were getting at when they used the word should. Like, are they asking if stay-at-home moms have permission to use daycare?  That's not really up to some random Internet strangers to decide.  There are so many factors involved in choosing how much help a mom needs.  What if the mom has 10 kids?  What if she has a child with special needs?  What if the mother herself has health problems?  Or the father is, like, never around?

I could pose hypothetical situations all day and get angry at the way women judge one another.  But, right now, let's talk about me.

Confession: I still sleep when the baby sleeps

Everybody advises new moms to sleep when the baby sleeps.  I remember one such woman who gave me this advice, while I was still pregnant. 

"A lot of moms feel guilty sleeping when the baby sleeps," she said. 

"Why?!" I asked.

"Well, a lot of moms feel like they should be getting something else done."

"That's silly," I said.  Little did I know that when you birth a child, that giant void in your uterus is filled with all-consuming, irrational guilt.  That's probably the reason your stomach is never flat again. 

I admit that I didn't feel totally guilty sleeping when the baby slept as a newborn.  Exhaustion tends to trump guilt.  But now that my son is 20 months old, I feel guilty that I'm still taking naps.