Doing It All

January 13, 2009

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Monica Salazar and I have been engaging in a cross blog conversation. I recently asked her about the challenges of natural parenting as a single mom. Previously we talked about raising kids around the world

Monica’s question for me is:

“You have four kids that you homeschool while being a single work at home mother. I’ve heard from you that you’re providing full income for your family, and that’s amazing. Sure, you were already internet marketing savvy, but guess you still had to increase your daily working hours since you had to assume this responsibility.

Did your kids complain about mom having to work more hours a day and how do you manage so they get enough attention and homeschooling coaching from you?”

This is a big question and incidentally today (or rather, for the last few days) I’ve felt a little overwhelmed by it all. My confidence with this life that I have tends to wax and wane, probably due to several factors that I try to control but that aren’t completely under my control. I’ll talk more about that later.

First I’ll address her question.

Yes, I did have to increase the amount of time I spend working once I became a single mom. But mostly I’ve tried to work smarter. Last year I sold a few of my sites so I could focus on the ones that were really producing for me. I also dropped a couple of projects that weren’t particularly targeted.

There has really only been one time that my kids expressed resentment at the time I spend working - and it was a comment made by my oldest son.

It really upset me and I’ll admit that I didn’t respond to him in a way that I’m proud of. I became offended by his comment instead of listening to the needs and feelings underneath the words.

Basically my oldest said that I’m “Always” on the computer. :-)

Of course this is far from true.

I spend about 4 hours a day working, but some of that time is after the kids are in bed or before they wake up, or when they are with their Father or grandparents. My oldest has a knack for saying things that push my guilty buttons. (One of the reasons parenting grows you so much as a person is because you have these little scientists who not only know the location of all your buttons but become experts at pushing them!)

My other kids have never expressed any resentment at the time I spend working. Perhaps it’s their personalities. My oldest is very gregarious and seems to need more face time with me. He also tends to say things without thinking and often gets himself in a bit of trouble for being a bit harsh with his tongue.

When it happened, I reached out to some single moms I knew who worked from home, and their words were quite reassuring. They encouraged me to try to listen to the real concern… I think for my oldest, its boredom that brings out the worst in him. He has to have something different and out of the routine to look forward to or his behavior takes a downturn. Now me - I thrive on routine, so there’s a disconnect there!

As far as meeting the kids needs while also making a living, that’s a constant balancing act and I never feel that I’ve quite nabbed it.

But I suppose that’s the life of a mom in general - struggling with feelings of guilt or fear that you’ve not done enough at the end of the day.

One of the things I do is rely on help from my parents, who like having the kids come around and visit and spend the night regularly. It’s important to me that my kids have a close relationship with their Grandparents, and they love to spend time at their home. My parents help me with child care so that I can have focus on work for a few hours, and they also expose my kids to new experiences.

With homeschooling, flexibility has been the key.

We school year round, and sometimes even on the weekends. For us learning is a natural part of everyday life, and I try not to do “school at home”. I’ve adopted an eclectic style that fits into my life. Not that we don’t use textbooks because we do, but we keep flexible hours.

I snapped a picture of the kids the other day, reading a book about volcanoes together one morning before breakfast. They’re always doing things like this. The younger ones were asking their big brother questions about the book and he was reading portions of it to them, and they were discussing it together.

After the incident mentioned above, I know I’ll handle things differently if one of the kids does express the same feeling of resentment. I have reminded them from time to time that most kids don’t have access to their moms all day, and have to wait until after school to talk to their Mom.

It’s not easy, because the internet can be a huge time sucking chasm, but I’ve disciplined myself to focus on the things that work, and do those over and over again.

In  my business, I rarely learn or do anything new.

Unless it’s a really easy learning curve  - something like Twitter comes to mind. That is something I adopted, but other than that, I really didn’t do anything new in 2008 to grow my business.

Posted by carrie | Filed Under Work at Home 

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