Despite swearing off marathons a few years back, this spring I signed myself up for the 2014 Parish Walk.
It’s a unique to the Isle of Man endurance event with an 85 mile course that runs the perimeter of the island. Finishers have to complete the course in under 24 hours. It’s intense.
People with more modest ambitions enter it and set goals usually in the 20-30 miles range. This year I’m aiming for 20 miles (down from 32 miles after this news) and have so far done a few long walks at 10 and 12 miles. Much like marathon training, the long distances can get pretty boring especially if you don’t have a training partner but I’ve been listening to a lot of Podcasts and they make the miles fly by.
Recently I listened to this NPR interview with Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte about her new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time. Schulte has some good observations about how parenting has changed since the 1970s, how the school system has not adjusted to working parents schedules and how some of our overwhelm is self-inflicted. If you listen to the interview take note of her story about ballet class. Nice reminder that yes, some days kids can miss an activity when a parent has a pressing deadline and/or the child isn’t interested in going to the activity.
You might be wondering, why do you care about work life balance and the challenges that families with both parents working full-time face?
True, this isn’t my scenario right now. But it could be in the future. And feeling overwhelmed happens to stay-at-home-parents too. Today’s working parents actually spend more time with their kids than stay-at-home-parents did in the 1950s. So you could assume that with this cultural shift to more engaged and hands on parenting, stay-at-home-parents are also seeing an increase in their time with children, and a pinch for child-free leisure hours.
In Brigid’s NPR interview she describes working with a time researcher to see how she could better maximize her hours to get it all done. After completing the time log the researched calculated that she had 27 hours of leisure in her week where she was not working. This ranged from lying in bed for 15 minutes in the morning listening to the radio to two hours stuck at the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. What the researched called leisure time was hardly relaxing or carefree hours and most of it was in the company of her children. This was a good reminder for me as what I view as leisure time is often mixed in with childcare time. While fun activities with my kids can be considered leisure time it certainly isn’t the rejuvenating alone time that I need as an introvert.
One of Schulte’s concepts that really rang true for me is that of “contaminated time”. Essentially, multi-tasking and the drive to do more robs of us our true leisure time. We contaminate our time by answering emails or thinking about work when we should be engaging in our leisure activity. I can struggle with this. One of the reasons behind having a “stupid phone” so I don’t have access to the Internet when I’m out of the house.
At the moment I’m in a season of life that hasn’t allowed me much time to write here on the blog or work on other creative writing projects. It’s been frustrating. For the last few months I have felt that I was doing something wrong because I can’t find the time for my modest word count goals. Our youngest is in that “into everything” stage and doesn’t nap much. Our oldest is in a phase of getting out of bed repeatedly in the early evening. When I have the energy, and the family schedule allows, I get up early to work out. When a quiet evening actually happens I want to spend it with my husband or a good book.
Hearing this interview with Schulte on NPR, while intended for parents working outside the home, made me reevaluate my job(s). A friend asked me when our oldest was a few months past one what I did all day. She had a baby the same age and had returned to her pre-child job and her child was in daycare. She was genuinely curious – this wasn’t a judgmental question. I answered her with all that we were doing: meals, meal clean-up, diaper changes, library story time, laundry, the park. My days were full enough.
I’m lucky that the work I do is flexible and the income from it not required to meet our basic needs. Because my children are somewhat inflexible. Umi Zumi on Netflix gave me thirty minutes the other afternoon to work on some increasingly urgent family paperwork. As I write this my youngest is napping on my back in a carrier. The clock ticks on picking up my older son from preschool and there is laundry to be hung (getting a dryer soon). I’m solo parenting for 24 hours so the current early evening wake-ups + my youngest’s six am rising, I will hopefully get 30 minutes of reading in tonight before bed. I’m not overwhelmed but after listening to Schulte I’m feeling better about the times we skip swimming class, the birthday party we said no to so that our weekend had more white space and that, despite it being an exam week for my husband, I pushed to take a weekend morning for myself so that I could get a long walk in while listening to Podcasts and enjoying the beautiful Isle of Man coastal views.
When I don’t find this alone time, when I don’t make it a priority, I do start to feel overwhelmed. I feel burnout from my job(s):parenting, work, housekeeping and supporting a spouse that is working outside the home, travels and is studying for a graduate degree.
More about the book Overwhelmed and Brigid Schulte:
- Too Busy To Live in the Globe and Mail
- Overwhelmed Book Review in the NYTimes
Anyone feeling overwhelmed? For parents, do you find it easy to step back and resist “hyper-parenting” culture and pressures? This is not an easy answer question and the issues Schulte brings up are both endemic, so hard to change, and also cultural. If you’re a family with both parents or a single-parent family, how do you find leisure time and do you get that time without children?
I’m 3/4ths of the way through Schulte’s book and I am a bit discouraged because I seem to be getting more frustrated with my life the further I get into it!! I’m a SAHM (though I do very limited (3 hrs/week?) part-time consulting from home) with two girls (2 and 4) and a stepdaughter (9 yrs old) who is with us in the summer. Since reading the book I seem to more acutely feel this loss of free time – coupled with the fact that my daughter has hit the terrible twos and I’m feeling more overwhelmed by the day! I’m also looking for guidance from other SAHMs with a husband who has a demanding job: Can you guys help me? I feel like I’m stuck in the 1950s at times. I do all the cooking, shopping, cleaning (ALL housework minus cutting the grass) and childcare, save baths (he gives the little ones a bath) and about 3 hours of time early Saturday morning when I go for my long run. After getting most of the way through this book I’m tempted to go back to work just so that I can not feel guilty about asking my husband to do some chores or help more with the childcare! I know he works all day and I know that part of my “job” as a SAHM is to support him and allow him time to relax at home but quite honestly I’m having a hard time lately when after having cooked a big meal, I’m doing all the clean up from dinner and he’s sitting on the couch relaxing. But because I’m a full-time SAHM I don’t feel like it’s “fair” for me to ask him to do chores on top of his demanding job. I don’t want to take my frustrations out on my husband – he’s a good man and works hard, but he was raised in a family where his mother did EVERYTHING and his father worked his job, came home, relaxed and didn’t lift a finger. Do any other SAHMs out there have this issue? Any advice??
A full-time SAHM has no limits for the work week. You work Sundays, you work holidays and you work 2-4am after putting in a 16 hour day. I know it’s hard, I’m in the same spot myself right now, but you have to shift the dynamic at home so your partner not only pitches in more but starts to see how much work a household takes to run – especially one with two youngs kids.
One of the best things I did this year for my family was go away for four days. I left my husband with our one year-old and four year-old while I met up with my sister for a long weekend. My husband was supportive of this trip but did not want me to leave the baby with him. In the end I did and it was great for them. The boys had a good time with their dad, my husband gained a lot of confidence from it and I started asking for more help around the house and with kids.
Jennifer, I could have written the same thing above. It’s still not a perfect balance at my house but it’s getting better.
And here’s a bit of a confession: we have a cleaner come two hours a week to do the bathrooms and wash the floors. I clean so much already making three meals a day from scratch, wiping up toddler messes and doing never ending laundry – that I just didn’t have the energy for the bathrooms and floors. This is an example of we do without ____ so we can have ____. We live in a cheaper home, drive a very cheap car (and don’t drive much) and we don’t buy a lot of stuff. But yes, we have a cleaner for two hours a week and it’s some of the best money we spend.
Hang in there and I’m hoping Schulte has some advice in the last quarter of the book on how to shift the household responsibilities.
I am new to this blog and am loving every word of it so far. I work a full time regular 9-5 job and I am overwhelmed. But when I was one my 2 year maternity leave, and a stay at home mom of two, I was also overwhelemed, but in a different way! LOL! Both require their own delicate balance and I have yet to achieve mine while working yet. I have only been back at it for 6 months and am now just getting the feeling that this pace is not sustainable. My mom always tells me that I spend far more time with my kids than she did with me (and I think she is the greatest mom on the planet). I think it just comes at the expense of personal leisure time and sleep. I sleep about 5-6 hours per night if I am lucky and the kids aren’t up too often. And I honestly can’t remember the last time I spent more than 20 minutes doing something I enjoyed (that was for me only…of course I enjoy playing with my kid etc.). Likely sometime back in 2009! Anyhow, it is my hope that with some changes over the Summer that we can find a better grove. Oh and we had a massive household purge and sold 450$ worth of stuff in a garage sale today. It was SO freeing!!!!!
I wanted to comment on the “it’s ok for a kid to miss an activity.” We let our daughter miss gymnastics on days when she doesn’t feel like going. Some days she’d rather spend that time playing with friends. It’s tough to let her miss it when you know we are paying for the time whether she goes or not, but sometimes it’s better to let her decide if there is something else she’d rather spend her time doing.
Eric – Can you share some of your simple cooking ideas that kids like?!? Or is there a post on here that I have yet to discover with some tips on this? This is one area that continues to overwhelm me! I want healthy natural foods, but have very little time after work to prepare. I try to prep on the week-ends…but it just annoys me when cooking takes an afternoon from our limited family time. My kids are too young to help at this stage to help much. Pizza is about the extent of it!
My experince raising my kids was really hard when they were younger as I ended up being a single mom. I never had much time and was always on my toes as they all were so dependent on me. It was hard getting any alone time and even individual quality time with each of the kids that was so needed was dififcult. As they grew a bit older I have learned to let go of commitments that overwhelm me to compensate for time they need me to be there. Sometimes playing play-doh helped more than taking my kids to an overrated music class. So the kids never had after school activities but I made sure I took them out plenty for physical activities as well as learning experinces outside school. This year we tried to get one of the girls into acting and dancing and she herself quit when she realized she would be tied up two days of the week instead of coming home and relax and play with her sister. I work in a school and luckily by 3:30 I’m usually home. I cook simple meals and have a routine for cleaning wich has also gotten easier as the boys 17 ans 14 clean their own room and the girls 9 and 12 can also clean their rooms ( not as great as I would like but if helps). I get alone time in the car while I drive back home, haha. The kids go with their father to visit two sundays a month all day, then I get alone time to do things quietly. It always gets easier as kids get older and it helps to keep a simple and minimalist lifestyle. The less we have at home, the happier we feel. I’m not quite sure though how september will be as I’m gong back to college to finish my B.A.
Women of our generation have been told they could have it all, but it is… (drumroll…) a huge lie! There is always something that will have to be sacrificed at the price of something else. My solutions, as a busy working mom, include
– working freelance
– including hubby and children in chores (hubby does the groceries, cooks supper and puts the kids to bed 9 days out of 10 I would say – Children do age appropriate chores on a daily basis)
– tolerating some level of dirt and chaos
– taking time for myself
I do home daycare (Montessori) and I often get that same response that I must have so much free time and freedom. I have six little people messing up my home on any given day, lol, and even with a naptime, that’s really just more “prep” time for meals, snacks, activities, etc. After they all go home at the end of a 10-11hour workday, I need to clean up so that the house is presentable and clean for another day (no one wants to drop off their child to a house that actually looks like children live in it!), along with doing all of the necessary things to keep any business afloat, and then spend time with my little one, since she has had to share and compromise her mama and her space all day. I also do full-time school and blog daily, but even without those commitments, the fact is that our modern parenting standards are such a contradiction — we’re supposed to do it all, and make it look effortless. There is no room for self-doubt or displeasure, since who are we to complain — we get to “have it all.” (And I love that my job lets me stay home and be with my daughter full-time, and that my school also allows this, but it is still a lot of work, and it still requires a lot of sacrifice and other changes that couldn’t possibly be predicted.)
I am currently a SAHM. I have a 1yo, a 2.5yo and a 5yo (who is at school). I desperately want to go back to work so I can have a break. 🙂
Stay at home moms are so very seriously underestimated, underappreciated and misunderstood. I always said, if I do “nothing” all day then why are you willing to pay someone $400 or more a month to take care of your child.
The 168 hours book is great. I am now reading Finding the Space to Lead by Janice Marturano. It focuses on corporate women but has concepts applicable to every woman’s world in regard to how we use our time. I’m finding it useful.
A couple years back, I read “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” by Laura Vanderkam. It’s good, and touches on many of the same themes that Bridgid Schulte’s book appears to. As an attorney, keeping track of every minute is nothing new, but it can be revolutionary if you’re not used to it. I “billed” my time while on maternity leave and felt much more accomplished when I could see where that time (all that sweet baby time) went. Weird though – I feel like Vanderkam had the exact same tow-truck example of “leisure” time from a time analysis. Is there overlap here – did they work together or am I crazy? Because I haven’t read this book, so I’m not getting them confused.
Anyway, a close examination and tracking – be it time, food, emotions or possessions (as you well know) can really help quality of life in my experience. It’s hard to keep up but I’m always glad I did it. Like flossing and exercise. 🙂
That is a strange coincidence between Vanderkam and Schulte’s books. 168 Hours is on my reading list… just need to find the time for it. Ha! 🙂
I just read Schulte’s book and it is AMAZING. I love how she courageously deals with a lot of the cultural issues going on here. Thank you for the recommendation! (And I think my confusion was that I read Schulte’s original Washington Post article around the same time I read 168 Hours and my brains got scrambled. Frequent occurrence.) 168 Hours definitely occupies a different space, but both books are top-notch in my view.
I’ll have to add this to my reading list. I’m currently reading “All Joy and No Fun The Paradox of Modern Parenting” by Jennifer Senior and it’s very interesting. I’m a stay at home mom that doesn’t work. I maintain a small blog for fun, but that’s it. I constantly feel overwhelmed anyway. My husband works insane hours opening a business and I spend A LOT of time with my kids. In Senior’s book, she shares studies that report that the countries that have the happiest parents also have state sponsored child care from a very early age (France for instance). The happiest parents are the parents do not spend every moment with their children. I’m only a few chapters in but there is a lot of good information about the lack of sleep and the consequences adults deal with and the toll of parenting on marriages (especially in this day and age when we spend a lot of time with our kids).
If you haven’t read it, I think you’d really like it. There’s WAY too much to go into detail about but it’s all making sense to me so far. She also has a great Ted Talk called “For Parents, Happiness is a very high bar” http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_senior_for_parents_happiness_is_a_very_high_bar
Jessica – thank you for sharing this here. I will definitely watch the TED talk and check out the book. And thank you for saying you are a stay at home mom who also feels overwhelmed at times. Nice to hear we are not alone 🙂
I think part of the overwhelm I feel on a daily basis is mental. I have a hard time/inability to turn my mind off. Since I’m the main caregiver, in charge of finances, housework, etc. along with helping at schools, and trying to build my business, it gets to be too much. Tack on the fact that we are house hunting in a massively competitive market, and it’s just too much for my brain to bear. We purposely keep our boys from too many activities, but we still somehow always seem to have a packed schedule. We’re trying to get my husband to take over some of the burden, so I don’t feel like I have to be in the know with every.single.thing. all the time.
I find myself craving alone time too, and I mean alone without my husband as well. I’m an introvert and I find that if he’s there, I fuss over him, like I need to make sure that he doesn’t want to do something with me before I start reading my book…I need to think about myself first sometimes.
Also, we’ve started this ritual since we have two kids (16mths apart): my husband and I both take a day off and bring the kids to daycare and we spend the day together. We get quality time and it rejuvenates us (and our patience), then we’re more focused on the kids.
Reading this makes me feel a whole lot better. This morning is when I would usually take my 1.5 year old to the local children’s museum for toddler time but I choose to skip it this week. We had a big family trip this past weekend that we piggybacked onto my husband’s work travel and we are all still exhausted. (Also I am 9 weeks pregnant and early pregnancy makes me TIRED.)
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for mentioning this book and the author, and the whole concept of being overwhelmed, which I do believe affects at-home moms as much as working moms. The pace of life today and the standards we put on ourselves, in addition to the striving to do more and do it better, all contribute to a feeling that we’re never caught up.
Thrive, by Arianna Huffington, is a great antidote to this sense of hurriedness. I love her suggestion to act as if you had tons of time. When we hurry breathlessly, we just keep the pace fast and create more things for ourselves to do. I love how I feel when I act as if I have oodles of time. It helps to keep me calm and feel as if I’m getting just the right amount done.
All the best,
Amy
Wow I am shocked to hear that working parents today spend more time with their kids than stay at home parents did in the 1950s. How times have changed, I’m not sure if it’s for the better or not! I am at home with a 3 yr old and 4 month old and as I am exclusively breastfeeding the baby the closest I get to alone time is to watch TV or read while she is asleep in the sling when my eldest is at preschool. It is overwhelming, and as an introvert I do need some down time but I know it won’t be forever.
It won’t be forever is a good mantra. I remind myself of this too.
I was shocked too by that statistic but the culture was so different in the 1950s. Children had a much looser reign, they walked to school alone at a younger age, had fewer after school activities and were really left to their own devices. Don’t have the link handy but I read an interesting article on how parenting has changed with our perceived, not actual, risk to our children being higher. Today’s parents are too scared to let their children be alone or do things on their own. Just one of the many reasons parents have fewer hours to themselves each week.
I am overwhelmed. My work at the moment involves irregular, and very unsocial hours. Therefore, to recharge our batteries, my kids would miss some extracurricular activities, and I even kept them home from school once and did nothing all day but snuggled, talked and cooked together! 🙂
That sounds like a wonderful day! For you and for the boys.
I didn’t quite grasp that when my husband signed up to do his MBA it meant we all signed up. It’s not a long window, and I know the rewards, but it is tasking. After being solo with the kids for most of Sunday I’ve been a day ahead all week thinking it was Wednesday when it was Tuesday.
Hang in there Apple and thank you for your words of encouragement for overwhelmed parents.
Ah I know someone who could complete that ParishWalk! My previous neighbor, 88 years old. He walked a third of his every day around the trails through parks and our entire neighborhood. He’s the reason I had to get up at 6am on snow days- or else he would have my drive way shoveled all up after he’d completed his and the nice older lady next door!
But as for the overwhelm, I have not found my balance yet. Usually, my husband sees the tension in my face and the panic in my eyes and calls me to take a time-out. I do this for him also. It would be nice if I could remember to see the signs in myself before I get to that point, a better example of self-care for my children.
Also, strangely, I do not multi-task well at all and people accept this of me, mostly. My children know my mantra well, “I’ll do it all, just not all at once”. And I love using the TV as a clutch distraction. We don’t watch tons (we cut cable) but it’s okay to grab a quick show or two a day and even better if you can discuss it with them. Everything can be a teaching moment and valuable if you attach meaning to it. “Ash didn’t win the tournament? Was he upset?.. How cool, he was proud of his friend’s accomplishment, right? That’s good sportsmanship!” Books are always better though. =)
Thumbs up for Pokemon! The Butterfree episode actually really helped my little girl work through some emotions about leaving day care to start kindergarten.