…and some days you’re the rock star. Most days, I’m the rock. I don’t do much but weigh things down. Or break windows. Or knock people unconscious. You get the drift.
Calling a mother a “working mother” is kind of like calling a vodka martini “an alcohol infused vodka martini.” It goes without saying that it’s redundant. A mother is always working. A vodka martini is always alcohol infused. That’s why the working mother loves the vodka martini. I digress. However, when you love your job and feel a responsibility to it, being a mother and being a worker become more or less synonymous.
Teaching and parenting are rather similar. Both are incredible responsibilities. Both require that the individual care less about herself than about those to whom she owes the responsibility. The best educators are those who put their own wants – be they time or interest – behind the needs of their students. Most of the time, being an educator is part teaching and part den mother. I would say parent, but I don’t go quite that far. You have to understand when to give the tough love and when to give the leeway. Educating well requires the same attempt at making a connection that parents of teens work on day in and day out through the high school years. As an educator, some days are pound your head on a wall depressing. The days where the students ask you a question you’ve repeated the answer to for weeks. The days where only 5 students out of 20 hand in an assignment that’s been on the syllabus since day one because, “you didn’t remind us!” The days where you try to walk the student through something for forty-five minutes only to realize that the student will never understand, even if you contort your explanation like a Cirque du Soleil member to show all manners of understanding.
Being a parent requires much of the same. It requires that kind of unconditional love not just of the person, but of the job. Parenting is a job. It’s unpaid, kind of like a volunteer position. Only, you get to go home after a day at the soup kitchen. When you’re a parent, you’re always home. You’re always working. There are the days when you want to scream, run, hide. You want to find a beach and sit on it with frosty frozen drinks and little umbrellas. Only, you’re afraid that if you do that, you’ll use the little umbrella to poke your brain out slowly through your eyes. There is the incessant crying. There is the feeding and the sleeplessness. There are the days where you leave the house to run an errand because you just can’t be in that tiny little box anymore with the ear splitting screaming, only to lock your keys in your car. You contort yourself and sense of self the way you would contort an explanation to a student.
Those are the days where I feel like the rock. The days where I feel useless and pointless. Those are the days where, no matter how hard I try, I can barely find the road most taken, forget about the one less taken. I start to wonder why I care about either job. I start to wonder if the students or child will even care. There’s a hopelessness that goes along with both.
Then, there are the days where you’re the rock star. You read through papers and find that the students did understand you. You see the light bulbs go off on their faces. They ask questions, and your answer makes enough sense that they say, “That’s why an outline is important!” You see a paper that a few weeks earlier you felt was hopeless and realize that you made a difference. You read a paper and have an uncontrollable urge to email the student to congratulate him/her. Those are the moments when you are more than a den mother, more than a coraller of cats. You are an educator. An honest-to-goodness, life changing educator.
Motherhood is the same. There are the days when the baby wakes up smiling. There are moments wherein he gazes at you as though you are the most important person in the world. There are the days when he snuggles into your shoulder, and you realize that even if he doesn’t know what love is, he does love you. You get to watch him learn and get frustrated and problem solve. You get to watch him hold up his arms for you because even though he’s been with you all day, he just wants you to hold him. You get laundry done and get dinner made and have playtime and make a baby happy.
At the outset, both of these jobs feel overwhelming. They feel in conflict. You don’t want to ignore one for the other. You don’t want to trade off. You don’t want one to feel abandoned or feel underappreciated or feel unimportant. The two jobs seem so all-consuming that it is difficult to find the time in one day to be able to do both. Those are the times when it becomes frighteningly overwhelming and questioning, “What did I DO?!” becomes the mantra. How can I love both of these jobs so overwhelmingly much and yet so differently?
That is when the rock star days make everything worthwhile. A day like today, where I can read nine student papers including making comments on them, play with the baby, and take care of the household. There are the days like today where I feel in control – of my work, my life, my everything. There are days where I feel like Superwoman. Those are the days that I blog about. I blog them so that I can look back and say, “Yes, that day was real. That day was not a dream. It is possible to be the me that I want to be, even if it’s not all the time.” I don’t have to meet my self-expectations every day. I just have to meet them one day. I have to be able to look back on that day and know that it is possible to be educator, mother, and self.
Because, you know, then there are the days when the Diaper Genie eats your hand and leaves a bruise. True story.



