As I was gearing up this morning to look over the past year’s blog posts, I found myself being pulled down by that feeling that I was “late again”.
It seems as though I missed another key seasonal window … while other bloggers spent the time between Cristmas and New Year’s crafting recaps of the past year and making plans for 2011, I was putting snowsuits and mittens in the dryer. Over and over.
As working moms go, I know I’m not alone in this feeling that I’m often behind. But I am starting to see that it’s not the management of work, but rather the management of family, that explains my experience of being behind schedule.
When you are the primary child-caring, working parent (as I am) your first responsibility is to make sure that things flow smoothly for your children. When holidays and ‘breaks’ arrive, these are almost never down time.
Sure, I had my ‘out of office’ auto-reply set so that colleagues wouldn’t expect prompt email replies from me, but it wasn’t because I was vacationing. Instead of being “at work” doing work work, I was at home doing family work — hosting relatives, wrapping gifts, cooking, packing, unpacking, driving, shoveling, and doing all that extra stuff that needs to be done when kids are off school and families are celebrating. I was the person working to make the holidays happen for the rest of my family.
And while I genuinely loved the holidays for the family time that they are, the holidays just aren’t a time off. They aren’t time to catch up on work. They aren’t time to step back. The holidays are a time for me to be fully there, in the family, so that there is a family.
For me, the holiday break actually began yesterday, with my kids’ first day back at school, and my own first day back at work work. What I’ll have is not really a break in my work so much as a comparative reduction in work-life chaos.
I will go to my office, and it will be quiet. I will spread papers out on my desk, and they will not get mixed up with receipts from Amazon. I will organize ideas on my notepads without the second running column of a grocery list. I will look at my computer screen, and it will not show me my progress on Pokemon Platinum.
There will be reflection, there will be a consulting proposal, there will be a fun conference. And there will be peace. Briefly.
I will aim to nurture that peace by hushing the nagging voice in my head that says I’m late, that tells me I’ve missed the window, that suggests that by the second week of January no one will care to look back on 2010. 
I aim to nurture that peace by embracing (okay, maybe just adjusting to) the fact that my own work schedule is lagged two weeks behind most everyone else’s for a reason that has nothing to do with my desire to get my work work done. When my break arrives two weeks after most other peoples’, it won’t be because I am late, but rather because I have been there, the whole time, with and for my family.
As I read this over, it sounds a little like an apology, or some kind of over-emotive ratiocination of a variant of procrastination. But it isn’t.
It’s just work and life, and finding ways to understand how they fit me.
See also:
Why Walking The Talk Can Be Harder Than We Plan, by Chrysula Winegar at Work. Life. Balance.
Another World From Which We Came, by Julie Daley at unabashedly female
Images: The ‘Let It Snowman’ recording snowfall in our yard, the Joy-Peace-Love banner my girls made for me this year.