Thoughts from a Part-time Working/Stay-at-home Mom

It's been a while since I've discussed work on this blog. I tend to use this forum as a baby book of sorts for my kids (since Lord knows I am not with it enough to actually record things in a REAL baby book). But sometimes I want to talk about non-mommy sorts of things, too, so here goes.

If you all remember, I started this job at Tabbedout when I was five months pregnant with Evelyn (and apparently I was a little CRAZY at that time, too--who starts a new job while pregnant? Oh, yeah. Me.) It was hellacious at first since I was the only marketing person. But, when I came back from maternity leave, I got a new boss and a new team and it has been awesome since then. I get to work part-time (love that they allow me this flexibility) and do work that I enjoy (PR, marketing, branding). This is a tough job. We are a small, scrappy start-up with so much opportunity (and challenges) facing us that sometimes it's hard to catch your breath. But my marketing team rocks, ya'll. They are some of the brightest, most hard-working people I've had the pleasure of working with. Getting to market a consumer product is much more fun than trying to make something like network management B2B software sound exciting. Because it's really not.

So, I really do love where I work. But it is an interesting thing to be a mom who works part-time (see? It always comes back to the kids.) I feel like I have the best of both worlds--working in a field that I enjoy AND getting a couple of days to stay home with the kids. I sort of have my foot in two worlds: the stay-at-home mommy world and the working mom world. But only part-time in both. So sometimes I feel like I don't fit in on either side. I'm not home enough to join mommy groups and really get involved in those types of activities (there's a moms' group I used to meet at the park in our neighborhood, but they changed their meeting days to Thursdays and I work on Thursdays. So, no longer a part of that one). I probably feel more like a working mom than a stay-at-home one because my job does consume more of my time than just the hours I'm in the office (evenings and nap times are taken up with returning work emails and finishing projects I couldn't get to in the office). But it is an interesting thing to see both sides of the coin and experience both sides of the coin. I'm not sure I could do either side of the coin full-time, so for me, this is my ideal situation.

Not to say there aren't challenges. I have work events I sometimes have to attend in the evenings, and with SXSW Interactive coming up (and with my company planning many events around that), things will be even more crazy. Bill travels quite a bit for work so I'm often left scrambling for a sitter when I have to be out at night. But it's fun. And I like the juggle (most of the time). Would things be easier if I stayed home full time or worked full time? Sure. Because then I could focus my attention a little better than my current ADD style. But would I find it to be as fun and fulfilling? Probably not.

So I feel fortunate to be where I'm at--crazy as it is at times--bouncing back and forth between my two, sweet worlds.