Well, THIS is new.

I’m new to this work-at-home thing.

Eyes on my computer monitor, I reach over for my coffee and my hand comes back holding a bottle, a pacifier, a bottle of Mylicon.

That almost never happened at the office.

Alex started kindergarten last week, and now it’s just me and my little turkey, 9-week-old Katherine. She’s still sleeping a lot, as newborns are wont to do, and I usually set her up to nap next to me on the couch while I tap away at my laptop and listen to her gentle coos and rhythmic sucking sleep sounds.

One thing hasn’t changed from the days when she was in me instead of beside me: She still kicks me while I’m working.

I expected to feel a little shaken up at first, a little chicken-with-its-head-cut-off, and I do. I’ve never had a job under the same roof as my bed, my refrigerator … my underwear drawer. At first I worked feverishly to make up for the feeling that I was doing something wrong.

I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing hooky. I was in pajamas and sock feet in the middle of the day; how could I not feel that way?!

To outrun the guilt I threw myself into work. I wrote, I edited, I revised, I read, I repeated. I cleaned the house. I did the laundry. One day, I kid you not, I scrubbed the baseboards. I came back to write some more. Oh yes, and there was a tiny baby and a bored 5-year-old who both needed attention in diametrically opposed ways. People, I did it all.

But my work suffered; I noticed the quality slipping, and even though I’m one of my toughest critics, I maintain that when I’m mixing up “there,” “their,” and “they’re” and failing to make even a hint of a point in 500 words, there’s a problem.

And my mothering suffered, too. “Go outside and play,” I said to Alex one day when he was pestering me with his ballooning and absolutely valid boredom. “Mommy’s working.”

“It’s too hot,” he argued.

“Go get a snack, then,” I said, irritably. And as he ran off to the kitchen to get a brownie (I hadn’t specified, in my horrific display of lazy parenting, what kind of snack he should choose to relieve his boredom) I realized what I’d just said.

“Wait a minute, we don’t eat just because we’re bored!” I called after him. That child looked me straight in the eye and then, pointedly, at the open bag of potato chips on the table next to me.

Katherine woke to eat every three hours like a hungry little clock with a bloodcurdling wail to chime the hour, and I found myself rushing impatiently through whatever I was doing before tending to her.

I would type with one hand and feed with the other.

Even my dogs were being neglected. One of them adopted a stuffed animal "baby" of her own and the other developed an Eeyore complex and moped around the house sighing … wait, he’s always done that.



Slowing down wasn’t an option; I had to prove to the world that I wasn’t sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah.

Or, because I was sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah, I had to prove that wasn’t all I was doing.

I’d just taken on twenty times more work than I ever tackled at the office and I wanted everyone to know it.

“How was your day?” from my husband translated to, “Did you manage to drag yourself out of bed today while I was out in the real world breaking my back to keep our kids from starving?”

No, he doesn’t talk like that.

But because it’s what I feared, it’s what I heard, and my answer, a rattled-off list of every single solitary thing I had done since opening my eyes (very, very early) that morning, reflected that fear.

I’m getting over that fear slowly, coming to realize that working from home can truly be the best of both worlds. I can wipe noses and elicit toothless grins and not miss a beat writing daily posts for Corporate Wellness Advisor (shameless plug) or one of my other regular clients.

I’m learning that it’s all about time management and priorities. When the baby is spitting up and gargling on it, I am going to suction her out before I finish the sentence I was writing. Even if I’d had the perfect conclusion in mind and those few moments of oh-my-God-she’s-drowning panic blew it right out of my head.

If I don’t get enough done during the day because she won’t abide not being held (with both arms, the demanding little thing), I toss dinner duty my husband’s way and stomp on the little voice that tries to tell me he’s been working all day because so have I.

I can work while he does the parenting sometimes, and when that doesn’t cut it, well, that’s what wee hours and weekends are for.

I’ve realized it helps to get dressed … besides making me feel like less of a slob, I can’t very well walk Alex to and from school in my torn 15-year-old Victoria’s Secret nightgown. Even though it is the softest thing I've ever known.

Which reminds me that it’s almost time to get Katherine fed and Zantac’ed up (moms are all nurses, too; add that to the list) so we can walk down the street to meet him without her doing her “errngh, errrngh, errrrngh” thing the whole way. (It’s a sound of distress or annoyance, sometimes both, and I blame many a typo on it because it gets right down in the middle of your middle ear and vibrates your whole head until you want to jam a pencil into your eardrum.)

So here we go.

Keep the work coming, I say. I got the balancing act down.