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Dear Lola,
Just wondering, are you a SAHM? When do you find the time for projects and blogging?
Carole S.
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Dearest Carole S.,
Thx so much for your email—I get this question quite a bit. No, I’m not a SAHM (stay-at-home-mom). I was at home for a stint when my girls were still babies. They are just 16 months apart in age, so for a coupla years, it seemed I was always pregnant, breastfeeding and/or changing diapers. I get tired just thinking about it. Although I cherished the time to bond and focus solely on being a new mom, I was often overwhelmed, exhausted and frankly depressed despite receiving lots of help from my mom and mother-in-law. I eventually went back to working outside the home.
Now my girls are school-age and much more independent. In some regards, however, they’re now more dependent on me than ever. Between homework, book reports, a multitude of extracurricular activities, play dates, birthday parties, fund raisers— not to mention working through the “she says she’s not my friend anymore, Mommy” situations and the associated tears—I sometimes feel that now would be a better time to be a SAHM than when they were babies. I wish our labor system allowed women (and men, for that matter) the flexibility to pop in and out the workforce as life demands without detriment to their careers, but I digress. Sigh.
Anyhoo, I’m an architect and consult for a non-profit organization which does allow for a lot more flexibility than when I toiled away for a corporate machine a few years ago. The pay doesn’t come close to what I was accustomed to making, but my time away from the office truly belongs to me. My weekends are typically jammed packed managing all the kid stuff I mentioned above, but I try to carve out a little time to “play” whether it’s mixing up a DIY beauty treat, or tending to the garden. It helps to have Honey and Cricket at my disposal should I need help—if you ever see a small pair of hands in the photos of my blog posts, that’s them playing “Vanna” while I click away. I try to keep a fairly consistent blogging schedule, but tend to think of LolaZabeth.com as simply a place to share projects I’d be doing anyway, blogging or not.
Cheers!
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