Being a working Mother is hard. I don’t know what the percentage of working mothers is anymore, and I don’t know if the numbers are increasing or decreasing. I have heard more and more about working mothers making the switch back to staying at home with their kids (I think that is supercool, by the way). I am a working Mom and given that I am single, I probably always will be. But, as my kids get older (and I get wiser!) I realize how nice it would be to not have to fight to balance raising a family with my career. I constantly feel out of balance to tell you the truth. It seems like a continuous battle because if I’m focusing on one, then I automatically feel that I am not giving the other the attention it requires for true success.

My day entails nothing less than an hour of driving to deliver my kids to their appropriate destinations, work, swimming lessons and soccer, dinner, a walk at the park for the dog, the gym and then HOPEFULLY some downtime. If I stop for a moment to think about it all, I realize that my focus should always be on my children. Always. This means not working more than 40 hours a week when most of the other people at my office work 50; it means using up all my vacation time to stay home with my kids when they’re sick; it means missing important meetings sometimes because my kid’s Halloween parade at school is more important (How can a blue poster board Monster Truck NOT be better than a meeting?). In the end, this translates into missed opportunities for advancement, bonuses and other perks at work. Now, I’ve clearly made my choices and I accept them, but it is hard to be at work some days and know that I can’t necessarily always reap the same rewards that other employees do.

Then there’s the reverse. A huge project is on my plate and so I start bringing work home at night and on the weekends. I may complete the project on-time and I may feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that I contributed to my company, but there’s this underlying feeling of knowing that because of that project I have not spent as much time with my kids as I could have, or that I’ve been particularly grumpy because of too many late nights. I never feel as though I have proper balance. It seems to be one or the other. In doing some research for this post, I realized that I am not alone in this feeling. There are a lot of resources out there about this very subject. I hope in the future to provide posts about finding this balance, or at least happily accepting the unbalance! But for now, I thought I would provide some links of places that I have found helpful.

• Working Mother has a lot of contributing bloggers serving up their best information and advice.
• Job-Mom is all about the balancing act.
• DotMoms promises “Better Babies through Blogging”.
• Self-Made Mom serves up a ton of info and lots of links to other Mom-friendly places on the blogosphere.

These are just a few of my favorite places to go. The balancing act is a fact of life if you’re a working Mom. I suppose its more about attitude than achieving balance. By looking at it that way, we can just consider this “extra” challenge as a daily character-building exercise.

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