Mom Spelled Backwards: Patching Together Work and Motherhood ...

I can hardly write about what I?ve been up to this week without writing about Patch itself. I?ve been eager to reach out to readers and explain what?s happening in my life (and how it relates to yours), and I thought my Mom Column would be the best home for this ? since it?s my mom-ness which has most radically altered.

Up until last week, my relationship with the Patch was mostly on my own terms. Over two years ago when I just moved to town and soon after started freelancing for this site, creating the business blurbs that fill the listings section, I was a mother of one girl. She came with me through the winter as I trudged the streets, baby on my back.

I made the mistake a few times of giving her milk to drink out of those old-fashioned glass baby bottles, which she tossed, shattering them into shards all over pristine Main Street. We?ve never been very subtle. Let?s say she was a good ice breaker when I met business owners who might otherwise have misread me as an ad saleswoman. I liked always having a buddy with me at work.

Fast forward to this week. Mother of two girls now; my youngest is the age Kaia once was when first I was making my Patch rounds. Now I find myself as Guest Editor of this website that truly has helped me forge my home here, the reason why I?ve been able to attend so many events and meet so many great people. I had never envied Sean?s job, though, the ceaselessness of it, the expectations, the police scanner. And here I am.

Knowing that I would be trying on his very big shoes with own smaller, clumsier feet, I signed my eldest up for some last-minute nursery school. She regularly attends a few hours of Tot Drop and had one hard-core week of full-day Camp this summer which left us both broken, but I?ve been longing for some happy balance between the two. She took to ?school? like a champ, no trouble there, save for my tedium of lunch-preparation (already redundant after four days!), and dragging ourselves up and down that darn hill.

We are hoofing it because I am currently carless. I have often, usually, walked by choice through all kinds of weather all over this town, but lately I?m pressed for time and this big baby is getting heavy on me. The toddler wanders off to pick clover in every patch of grass en route. A 10-minute walk takes 30. So I find myself longing to drive, perhaps for the first time ever, yet I can?t.

You see, we just sold our old car and purchased a new, and it?s a stick shift?which I do not yet know how to drive, or really have much time to learn. (I?ll save the learning-to-drive-stick-with-two-kids-in-the-car saga for another column). At least it?s unseasonably warm now and not pouring for all the trudging.

With nursery school in place, I have, in effect, three hours a day to churn out some copy and still there?s this baby in the Ergo carrier, hanging on me. Mostly, we get along fine, Addie and I, but she blew raspberries during Mayor Fixell?s address at the RiverWalk ribbon-cutting and she screamed when Village Administrator Mike Blau called me back about the Trustees' Meeting. Consider it a fast learning curve for us all then, the whole family, my patient higher-uppers, the bemused interviewees, me.

This isn?t going to be your usual kind of journalism. And I?m no longer your usual stay-at-home mom. But I think both might be better for this wild experiment.?

Source: http://tarrytown.patch.com/articles/mom-spelled-backwards-patching-together-work-and-motherhood

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