Moms don't have flexible jobs, they make their jobs flexible

Stop saying this to divorced moms (pt. 2)

Via Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels

Welcome! This is Part 2 of a series where I will dig into which comments irk me the most as a divorced mom…. and why.

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Two things happened this week.

The first is that I read The stress of time about maternal stress from

The Maternal Stress Project

.

The second is that it clicked into place another essay I’ve had sitting in my drafts that felt too scant to post on its own but that now makes sense in the context of time pressure, a main feature of the article.

What is time pressure, you ask? In short, it is the stress that stems from not having enough time to do what you need to do, which is something so familiar to me that I was surprised it had a name other than motherhood.

The problem is that in order to lower that stress, you need time, time that you don’t have because if you did, you wouldn’t be experiencing time pressure in the first place.

So the cycle continues and are we are left, as mothers, to flail around and do the best we can without things like quality, affordable, and accessible childcare, paid leave, or the myriad of other programs and services that could help address the issue. Then when we point out that we need help, we are chastised for not being grateful enough, and if we are lucky enough to have good therapy coverage to talk about all this, we have to navigate all of the above just to schedule it.

The question of accessing time is posited by

Molly Dickens, PhD

in The stress of time, and it’s damned good question, indeed:

How much does time pressure make stress relief inaccessible? Many of the stress buffers and recommended individual stress management strategies require time. Social support, community, exercise, sleep, mindfulness and meditation. When stress is an inevitable component of life as a modern human, accessing stress relief becomes key, but we still need the time.

Which brings me to how this all connects with that draft essay that I couldn’t quite get off the ground in a meaningful way, which was centered around a comment I and many other divorced moms have received:

You’re so lucky to have a flexible job!

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As a single mom with majority physical custody, I am responsible for all of the things, and more specifically, managing childcare while working a full-time 9-5.

Sick days, teacher work days, holidays, doctor’s appointments, parent-teacher conferences, school-day performances, etc. - they are all 100% on me. And I’m (mostly) happy to do it because it stems from a situation that best supports my son. Also, I’m a mom with quality childcare, which is a luxury not everyone can afford or has access to so I try to keep my complaints to a minimum.

It also means that I am required to be the one with the “flexible job”, a description I loathe because I don’t have a flexible job, I have a job in which I advocated for flexibilities and there is a very big difference.

A flexible job is one where you set your own schedule and manage your own workload.

A job where you have flexibilities is one resulting from a combination of self-advocacy and luck.

Self-advocacy because you both have to ask for it but also prove that you are still able to do the job even when you are multitasking <insert any disruption> or taking time off¹, something I’ve noticed moms ask for and take far more often than dads do, which goes to the notion of whose time and work is deemed more valuable.²

This probably means occasionally working at 6 am before the kids wake up or at 10 pm after they have gone to bed, which is definitely cutting into your ability to relieve the time pressure I discussed earlier. And it definitely means that you are carrying the mental load into other areas of your life, a mental load that also interferes with your ability to manage and relieve stress.

And, of course, luck, because not all employers are parent or family friendly and willing to support them. Before becoming a mom (and before COVID), I worked for a well-respected national organization where my boss quite literally asked why I left my desk for 20 minutes, telling me senior leadership on a different floor walked by and noticed I wasn’t there.

Given this butt-in-seat approach to “productivity”, I can only imagine how they treated parents who had sick kids or school events and had to actually leave their desk during the day. (I went to the store for tampons, in case you were wondering. He did not ask again.)

So when I think about time pressure in the context of the myth of the flexible job, I can’t help but wonder at the fact that we are not all burnt the eff out because this is just one piece of the puzzle. This doesn’t even touch the mental load of everything else (emotional regulation, groceries, clothes shopping, doctor’s appointments, morning routines, bath/bed routines, having friends, taking showers, etc.).

Or maybe we are and it’s so normal that we don’t even recognize it as such.

I’m also one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to worry about a partner. I don’t have to do all of this and then sit down exhausted only to hear that the reason I’m doing it all is because I’m better at it, that I’m a better multitasker, that my job is more flexible. (Okay, I do still hear this last one but the call is no longer coming from inside the house, which helps.)

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Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

The crazy thing about everything I just wrote, though, is that I don’t feel burnt out. I don’t feel overextended in an unmanageable way. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on the joys of motherhood.

I’m not quite sure whether this is delusion or resilience, but there it is. (It’s definitely privilege - that is not lost on me.)

Sure, I have my days and weeks when everything is hard, when I don’t know how I’ll make it through, when I yell more than I want to or rely on the iPad to get through it. But so rarely do I have time for me that I think I’ve forgotten what that’s like, and it’s hard to want something that is so out of reach that you’ve forgotten it’s a thing.

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s a super common thing for every mom of a young kid, one that’s old enough to keep themselves busy but not old enough to do it for long periods of time or completely unattended.

More likely, though, it’s because this is the natural byproduct of a society that expects mothers to sacrifice their entire beings in service to motherhood, a problematic narrative that is seeing a resurgence in popularity thanks to well-paid trad wives. (Oh, the irony.)

And that’s kind of the point: to keep us so consumed with the logistics of motherhood that we are forced to keep the rage at bay, to ensure we don’t have time to care for ourselves, to get the rest we need to properly reflect and formulate a plan of action, to fight back.

Because as ragey as I am about lots of things and systems and people and movements, and as much as I’ve spoken out and will continue to speak out, I, too, keep the rage about my personal experiences at bay.

Or at least I did, until I started writing this newsletter. (More to come on that.)

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And so here we are at the end but I’m not really sure how to close this out. It seems like there is still so much to say, so much I didn’t get to dive into, threads I haven’t tidied up.

I wish I had some advice for you, for how to carve out some me-time when you don’t have any free time, but it is late and I am tired, so I will save those for another day. (I do have some thoughts on holding your shit together when there’s no one else to tap in, though.)

For now, I will just say this: the best hack I’ve found so far is to create play situations for your kids that allow you to simultaneously engage in something you enjoy. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.

• Write while they are in the tub

• Grab a toy they like and take it to a local park so you can squeeze in some reading

• Don’t be afraid of the iPad

• Ask for help (I don’t, but you should)

As for me? I’m off to bed and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get a full night’s sleep.

(This post was written with the help of Hot Wheels ON the iPad).

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1. Oftentimes, this come at a cost. The motherhood penalty is very real.

2. If both advocated equally for flexibility, return to office mandates wouldn’t be so devastating to moms, in particular, which is why we need dads to advocate for and take things like paternity leave.