I Don't Know How I Do It

I have a friend at work, about my age, who has no kids and has been going back and forth for a while on whether she wants them. She likes kids, but she can't imagine how she'll manage. Just about every time I see her, whether we're having dinner with her and her husband, or I'm running into her at the coffee shop, she says "I don't know how you do it" (and she's not the chick lit type at all, so she really means it).

I always tell her "I just do it." And I really mean it. I don't think that much about juggling work and kids and house and husband and everything else I might want to do in the remaining time I have left, because it's just my life and it doesn't seem like that big a deal.

Except when it does.

Last night I got home from an endless meeting at 10:30, and then stayed up till 2:30 finishing some work that needed to be done by this morning. At 4:30 M woke me up, burning hot and whimpering "Mama, it hurts." Since S had been in bed when I got home, I felt absolutely justified in making him get up to get the Advil, but then she wanted only to snuggle with me, but at least she went back to sleep pretty quickly, though I lay there fitfully dreaming, too tired to fall into any kind of real sleep.

At 6:30, S woke me up to tell me that his car wouldn't start. I told him to take mine. He forgot to set the alarm, so I woke up again at 8, late, to feverish kid, no car, work in an hour, and E to get to sitter and school, and I really did think, "I don't know how I do it."

But I'm a resourceful kind of working mom who has built up her support systems and thinks quick on her feet. And Red State Capital City Suburb is the kind of place where people help you out. So I called my college student sitter who could handle things till 12:30. Then I called my friends K and S who live around the corner with two cars and a truck, and K told me he'd take the truck so I could drive his car. I stuck E in front of Dragontales with a waffle. I showered, dressed, dressed E, dressed M, gave the sitter instructions, got K's car, took E to the sitter, went to work, organized myself for the morning, cancelled the afternoon which required its own organizing, got through the morning, took E to preschool while on the phone with M who had 15 minutes by herself between sitter and mommy, and came home to devote my full attention to my poor flu-ridden child--and maybe just a bit of attention to the work I brought home with me.