Like a lot of parents, I work a traditional Monday – Friday job. This is good and bad. Having weekends and holidays off is a definite boon, but being stuck at work for the majority of the day is not. I consider myself lucky to have an understanding boss and a fairly flexible schedule. But even with a flexible schedule, there are only so many hours in one day, an endless amount of things that need to be fit into any given day, and at the end of the week, I need to have racked up 40 hours (not including an imposed lunch time or the commute). Also, and most importantly, this flexibility is limited by the inflexible hours of my son’s daycare. This puts a lot of strain on me as the sole breadwinner and primary caregiver to my child.
Having to work isn’t the problem. Not being able to do ALL the other things that I have to do as a human being and a mother because I’m at work all day is the problem! Just recently I’ve had to cram into my already packed weeks: an eye exam for W, a dentist appointment for us both, and a doctor’s appointment for us both. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but consider the fact that all of this needs to be worked in during regular “business hours,” which are the same as my work day and part of W’s school day. When I miss three hours of work to take him to the eye doctor, I have to make that time up on other days by going in early or staying late — and don’t forget that his daycare hours are NOT flexible.
Usually, I can only plan one “extra” in each week and I try to get the earliest spot. One of many things that trip me up are the businesses that consider 10:00 to be early. Are they kidding?! By time I show up for a 10:00 appointment, I’ve already missed 2-3 hours of work!
Then there are the things that I have coming up soon: the preschool home visit, the preschool spring field trip, and getting my oil changed. (I get my oil changed at the dealership that has traditional business hours.) I can work around the home visit as long as I get an early spot and it doesn’t fall in a week where I’m already working around something else. The field trip requires me to just take a vacation day off, and it is well worth it to get to spend some time with my son and his classmates. The oil change is usually something that I have to work around as well, but this time I lucked out and was able to schedule it on Good Friday, a day I was forced to take off work because my son’s daycare is closed. Don’t get me wrong, I do not mind having to take vacation days off here and there to spend time with my son and/or to fit things in, but I do have a job and my employer does expect me to be there a majority of the time.
Then, just when I think I have everything under control, the curve balls get thrown: the snow days/delays, kindergarten registration and a tour of the school building, school “Family Nights” that start at 5:00, or having anything to do earlier than 6:30 on a week night. Snow days aren’t really an issue for me yet because my son is still in half-day daycare, but the traffic issues do pose a problem. As for the kindergarten registration, there was an evening time offered, which worked out perfectly. However, I did sign up for a 10:00 (earliest time offered) school tour, which was already pushing my limits, and I later had to cancel due to the preschool “Family Night” event scheduled the same week that required me to leave work early because it started at 5:00.
Trying to fit all the required pieces of my day into any given day and make them all fit into one week is liking playing a game of Tetris. I’m, by nature, a woman who loves to organize, so part of me really likes figuring it all out. But sometimes I feel like I’m on a level that is too difficult and I just want to put the game down for a while. Sometimes, I want things to run smoothly without so much effort on my part. Sometimes, I would like someone else to pick the game up and help get us to the next level.
