Parenting Post on Motherwell
I've been taking a small break from writing romantic suspense as my characters aren't cooperating with me. In the interim, I've turned to another subject in which I sometimes get poor cooperation: parenting a toddler!
This essay was originally published at https://motherwellmag.com. You can read the rest of the piece here:
https://motherwellmag.com/2017/02/28/...
I hope you enjoy it.
My three-year-old daughter M had been playing with her dolls for over an hour, giving them bottles, changing their clothes, gently patting them as she laid them down for afternoon naps. She asked if I could help pack their diaper bag. “Maybe you’ll be a mom when you grow up,” I said, tucking a plastic bottle into the side pocket.
Disappointment immediately flashed across her face. “No,” she said. “I want to be a surgeon.” And there was a bite to the way she said it.
“Well, actually, I’m a psychologist and a mom,” I shot back, unreasonably stung by her response. I admired her ambition, but at the same time I was saddened by her belief that motherhood and a career could not co-exist.
Because I was a psychologist, in practice for ten years before my partner’s job moved him to Puerto Rico and we embarked on a family adventure that had no place for both careers. For the first few months, it was a giddy ride of mother-daughter finger-painting projects, art creations with box tops and seashells, and ridiculously one-sided competitions with veteran mom bloggers (“I’ll see you your fake snow project and raise you an ice castle nestled in it”).
But within three months we became hampered by the practical realities of our living situation, in which our one car went off to work in the morning and my daughter and I did our daily errands on foot. My partner’s hours were a lot longer than either of us had expected, and so we wound up with a gender-stereotypical division of labor. And, as it turned out, there were just so many times I could walk down to the cleaners carrying a pile of men’s dress shirts in the rain before I started to feel diminished......
This essay was originally published at https://motherwellmag.com. You can read the rest of the piece here:
https://motherwellmag.com/2017/02/28/...
I hope you enjoy it.
My three-year-old daughter M had been playing with her dolls for over an hour, giving them bottles, changing their clothes, gently patting them as she laid them down for afternoon naps. She asked if I could help pack their diaper bag. “Maybe you’ll be a mom when you grow up,” I said, tucking a plastic bottle into the side pocket.
Disappointment immediately flashed across her face. “No,” she said. “I want to be a surgeon.” And there was a bite to the way she said it.
“Well, actually, I’m a psychologist and a mom,” I shot back, unreasonably stung by her response. I admired her ambition, but at the same time I was saddened by her belief that motherhood and a career could not co-exist.
Because I was a psychologist, in practice for ten years before my partner’s job moved him to Puerto Rico and we embarked on a family adventure that had no place for both careers. For the first few months, it was a giddy ride of mother-daughter finger-painting projects, art creations with box tops and seashells, and ridiculously one-sided competitions with veteran mom bloggers (“I’ll see you your fake snow project and raise you an ice castle nestled in it”).
But within three months we became hampered by the practical realities of our living situation, in which our one car went off to work in the morning and my daughter and I did our daily errands on foot. My partner’s hours were a lot longer than either of us had expected, and so we wound up with a gender-stereotypical division of labor. And, as it turned out, there were just so many times I could walk down to the cleaners carrying a pile of men’s dress shirts in the rain before I started to feel diminished......
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