Working Mom Struggles

As I mentioned before, the end of our summer got a little crazy at work. For a few months I was working crazy hours. At least 6 weeks of it Jason was basically a single parent, when I never even left town! I easily thought about quiting my job daily. (OK not really since I knew it was only temporary and I love my job).

I've gone through busy periods in my career and had jobs that never seemed to not been in a busy time. Everytime that happened though, there was only one person I was leaving at home. When it was just Jason and me, he was very understanding when I had to work late. Sure I'd get the occasional complaint, but at the end of the day, he understood that I enjoyed my job and sometimes that required a lot of hours.

Ever since Brody was born, I've been in a job where we have busy times, but that really only amounted to 50 hours a week. And I've been very lucky where I can work at home at night instead of staying at the office late.

Then we had an unexpected thing come up at work (it was accounting related, so I won't bore you with the details), that not only did I have to work late and work weekends, it wasn't optional. For the first time in my career, I was told that I had to work all weekend. We were here for 15 hour days for over 10 days straight. Which = not seeing Brody for most of those days.

Things I learned:
1. There is a reason I work where I do...this was a rare situation, where other career paths I could have taken would expect this on a regular basis.

2. I'm not emotionally capable of handling being absent from my family for long periods of time. There were a lot of tears shed... (Also, working 90-100 hours in a week is exhausting)

3. I have the BEST HUSBAND IN THE WORLD! Ok, I already knew that, but, he's always been there for me when I needed it and this time was no exception. I normally take Brody to daycare every day. But in order for me to get home before 10pm at night, I had to start coming in earlier than daycare opened. So he had to go to work late a couple days a week, just so I could be in at 6am. His job is important to him too, so it wasn't easy to have to balance that as well as taking on Brody full-time.

On the weekends when I was at work, Jason didn't just sit at home with Brody staring at the TV, he actually took him out to do things. Our zoo passes were awesome because they would just head out to the zoo for a few hours and then head home when they got bored. He really is a great father.

4. We have a great family. Again, I already knew this, but we had a few people have to come and babysit last minute because I couldn't get out of work. It's a huge help having them around and knowing Jason wasn't in it alone.

5. I do really work for a great company. There were many people who had to go above and beyond this summer and they made sure to recognize everyone.