Made in Richmond

(Look! A post! With real words!)

I’ve been wanting to write about this for several days, ever since the hooplah over Ann Romney and Hillary Rosen all exploded in everyone’s faces and that horrible term “Mommy Wars” started popping up everywhere…again. I even agonized over whether I should share my thoughts in the parenting column I do over at RVANews because maybe it would be a welcome departure from me being all gooey about JR.

But when it came down to actually putting pen to paper (which I actually do when writing those columns…at least before putting fingers to keyboard)…I realized I didn’t really have anything to say. Nothing particularly inspiring or provocative at least. Because here’s the thing: I’ve been pretty much every working/not working while mothering scenario since JR made his arrival. And they are all hard. That’s it. End of story. They are hard.

I spent the first few weeks of JR’s life as a stay-at-home mom. It was hard.

I spent the remainder of JR’s first year as a work-at-home mom three days a week and a work-outside-of-the-home-mom the rest of the week. It was hard.

I spent almost 18 months as a full-time, work-outside-of-the-home-mom. It was hard.

I now work outside of the home two days a week and spend the remainder of the week as a stay-at-home-mom (but sometimes a work-at-home-mom, depending on how well my days in the office go). It IS hard.

IT IS ALL HARD.

Don’t get me wrong, each scenario has some wonderful parts, some fantastic “perks”, if you will, but each also comes with struggle, guilt, stress, and (as always) exhaustion.

Mothering is hard. Parenting is hard. But I wonder if we could maybe make it less hard by fighting the urge to judge one another on how we go about it?