When I wasn’t at work physically, my office morphed into my cell phone – which worked fine. I had to be accessible 24/7 to my kids, so why not throw in round-the-clock accessibility to several dozen clients, sales reps and production assistants who could (and did) call me at all hours of the day and night?
During this time I also had a home office. From 9 pm to midnight, after the kids were asleep, I wrote a book that turned into Mommy Wars from a makeshift desk in a corner of our kitchen. After the book came out, I left my office-building-office and worked from home full-time from my new “corner office.”
I wrote, consulted, and blogged while also changing diapers, cooking breakfast-lunch-dinner-snacks, helping with homework and jumping up to get another glass of milk for yet another child. I fantasized about my tiny, messy little office being spoofed in the Wall Street Journal’s glam column about executive offices, which usually featured a proud executive with folded arms in front of a picture window overlooking Park Avenue. My photo would feature me in my pajamas bent over a keyboard next to our dishwasher with a child hanging off my back.
But an office in my kitchen was the only way I could realistically get any work done and still see my children, both critical needs. For me the only way to juggle work and family was to merge both into the same room. Working in brief spurts throughout the day, I was amazed at how much I got done.
I was surprised also at how the arrangement benefitted the kids. The children learned patience by facing my held up index finger. They discovered they weren’t the center of the universe through my daily incantation of “Mommy has a deadline in XX minutes.” They trained themselves to stay quiet while I was on conference calls. They saw firsthand how important work was to me.
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Leslie Morgan Steiner authors Two Cents on Working Motherhood on MommyTrack'd. She is the editor of the best-selling anthology Mommy Wars and the brand new memoir Crazy Love. Steiner is a frequent guest on the Today Show, MSNBC, and regularly contributes to The New York Times, Newsweek and Vanity Fair. She lives with her husband and 3 kids in Washington, DC.
