Like a Bucket of Ice

I am an emergency responder. A attends day care at my place of work. These two facts don't seem, on the surface, to be at all related and in fact, I had neatly compartmentalized them into two separate bins myself...until a couple of weeks ago.

When I dropped A off, her teacher said, "Hey, big day tomorrow, Miss A!" and looked at me. "She doesn't do well with evacuations. It scares her."

Because I was currently rummaging about in the "Dropping of fat Daycare" bin in my brain, I gave her a blank look. "Um, and what's tomorrow?"

She looked at me funny in turn. "The active shooter exercise? You know? The whole base?"

Oh. Damn. I did know. I knew because my job puts me in the nerve center for response and command and control. But then, I didn't know because daycare is...well, not located in that mental compartment.

I knew when A was evacuated, twice the week prior, for smell of smoke in the facility. And I knew about what had happened during the first evacuation. But I wasn't part of that because it was small in scale and easily handled by first responders. I also knew that she, along with many other kids, didn't do well with it. So, we talked about it on the way home and now, she's walking us through fire drills. She doesn't like the alarms, but she's working through it.

What I never really considered though, was the simple fact that, if something does happen here that requires a full reponse, I'll be, well, responding. I suppose that some people might find that comforting, but the problem I see with it is that my job mandates that I know what's going on. Most other parents with children in day care don't know what's going on until a while after it's happened.

And then I did the unthinkable in this particular situation: I started to think, as I drove from daycare to my office, about high impact targets on the base. And if I were a gunman, I'd go for the heart and soul. And to me, that's the kids. It was like I'd been punched in the stomach.

What danger have I unthinkingly put my daughter in? It gnawed at me all day and most of that night. I also berated myself for not thinking about it before. What kind of parent am I?

The exercise, however, came and went. Instead of dwelling on my daughter, hunkering down in the designated safe room with the rest of the class, my focus was on command and control and what was happening out there and what we needed to do in here.

In the end, the kids, including my daughter, did well. They played games involving being quiet and actually had fun. They had no idea what was happening, or why. As it should have been. I try not to think too much about it either, but sometimes, it creeps up on me. I work on a potential target for bad people to do bad things, moreso than most other places of business. My daughter is growing up in many ways there too. The benefits outweigh the risk, but what sort of parent am I that I never before thought of that risk?

What do you think? Is civilian daycare safer than military daycare or are military parents inherently more at risk?

A New Way to Feel Bad

It's no secret that most working mothers feel some form of guilt over...well...the fact that they work. Of course, so do stay-at-home moms. Some speculate that, as mothers, we're pre-programmed to beat the hell out of ourselves for failing somehow (usually in our own minds).

I've been a little smug on this topic. I never felt it. Nope. Not a lick. Our family is the way it is, I do what I do, it's different from you, you're different from me which, by the way, is the stuff life's made of...soooo...

I pressed on.

Until now. Right now, I'm not sure if I actually feel guilty for wanting what I want or guilty for not actually feeling guilty, but there's certainly some element of "Bad Mommy!" playing out in my head. Why? Well...

Finding Another New Groove

I'll have to update my profile soon...but not tonight. Tonight, I'm running on pure adrenaline and the moment my body realizes what my brain already knows (that it [my body] is on E and the fumes aren't going to get it much further...), I'll be collapsing.

Today was the first day, since she was 5 weeks old, that A has had a dual-working parent family.

I get it now. I get all of it. I understand the pangs of regret that happen when you get home in a flurry of activity, cooking, cleaning, and suddenly - it's bedtime.

It took us a little bit to get into our groove when she started Play Skool. After all, I was suddenly getting home an hour and a half later (5 instead of 3:30), with toddler in tow no less. Now, with one car and the three of us car pooling, it's later still.

Did I mention that we get up between 5 and 5:30 in the morning? No? Well, we do. [falls down]

It'll work out of course. It always does. I found my groove after only a few days last time. It's just a shame that I have to leave for the field for almost a week just a few days into this new routine.

I keep reminding myself that when she starts elementary school, I can go back to my old schedule. Then again, she won't be a toddler anymore and, for all of the tantrums and messes and lumps, I really don't want to rush her out of this stage of development just for a schedule change. It's entirely too much fun. After all, having a 2-year old teach you a new dance just before bed absolutely cannot be beat.

Learning to Leave

When I first started reading other, so-called, “Mommy Blogs”, I was both amused and surprised by the types of questions the authors would pose to situations that I had previously considered nothing more than one of life’s “givens”. For instance, this question, did your mother work and if so, did that inspire you?, gave me pause – not for the deep or profound nature of the question (as it is neither deep nor profound), but because someone actually found it worth asking! In retrospect however, it is worth asking.


For the record, yes, my mother worked and works still and no, it didn’t inspire me. It was simply what parents did and still do. They work. I was raised to know that I would work too because, well, bills need paying, necessities (and niceties) need buying. In short, I do not come from an area or time when mothers stayed home. In fact, there was only one stay-at-home mother that I can remember in my group of schoolmates and friends. It was an anomaly.

Of course, in the macrocosm, it isn’t an anomaly, it's a norm. Then again, no child thinks macrocosmically and frankly, if you grow up and remain in a larger version of your childhood microcosm, it’s tough even for adults to think that way (or acknowledge that a vast majority of others might).

So it was with this sort of thought in mind that I realized this weekend that the decision I make now will unwittingly and unknowingly impact my own daughter later and I wonder how she’ll reflect or even if she will, on the choices she’ll know that I had to make for the sake of my family.

At Work...But Barely

Over on the Work it Mom! blog, Nataly’s recent entry with respect to parents receiving special treatment at work caught my eye. It wasn’t something that I’d thought about, even after having A. My office is a mere handful – 5 folks – and each of us has such unique family situations that flexibility and covering for one another is simply part and parcel of the job and always has been. I mean, sure, I end up taking more time to ferry our daughter to appointments now and that can mean leaving early or coming in late, but with only one non-parent in the shop, it’s just understood as a given during the earlier years of parenthood.


Before I was a parent, Special Needs for Parents was never even a blip on my Work Radar. I knew that other people left early, came in late or stayed home with sick children but I was never asked to cover for them simply because I was childless at the time. And let’s face it, all of us young ‘uns back then certainly took our fair share of time when we needed it for personal things too. If I ever covered for a parent to go and do parently things, it was probably because they approached me directly and I had nothing pressing going on so was more than happy to oblige, regardless of why it was they were asking me.

In thinking about it though, being a parent has changed the way I view work. If I’m going to work overtime, I’ll take my laptop home and I won’t work until after A is in bed for the night. I used to just stay late and think nothing of it. Up until my recent return to my old Air Force reserve Flight, I never stayed overnight on drill weekends unless I had to after becoming a mom (now, I have to so it’s a moot point I suppose…) but before that, I looked forward to the weekend getaway.

But the real area in which my becoming a parent changed is the frequency with which I will willingly travel or go “TDY” (temporary tour of duty). Last Friday, I got an e-mail at work from my reserve unit asking if I could take a short-notice school tour for a course I do need to eventually attend. By short-notice, they wanted me to leave that Sunday (mind, this was Friday, almost noon) to be gone for two weeks. I responded with a simple “Are you EXPLETIVE kidding me?!”

On the way home that day, I realized that if the same opportunity had presented itself before I had my daughter, I probably would have been packing my bags that night and down at the unit bright and early to finalize paperwork. My, how things had changed!

In 2003 alone, I was gone for at least a week out of almost every month to a conference or a course. In 2002, I was deployed but even after my return, I would spend a month in Georgia working at Higher Headquarters and then a month at my reserve base – rarely did I see the light of home.

It got so bad between late 2002 and 2003 that the TSA agent at the airline I used most frequently (a small terminal in a mid-sized airport) knew me by name and commented if he hadn’t seen me in more than a few weeks. We chatted a lot, he and I. He was a nice guy.

2004 saw a lot of travel as well, as did 2005 and 2006. But then, sometime in 2007, I got pregnant and my willingness to go places started to wane. Now, we’re coming to the close of 2009 and, in the last two years, I have only been on 3 business trips for work and zero TDYs for my reserve unit.

Next year is going to be different. I already know that I have two 7-day trips for exercises, one 2-week course, one 3-week overseas trip, two 5-day conferences and…oh, one 5-day course I’ll have to attend. That’s as of now. Who knows what’ll be coming my way after the new year? But I’m dreading being away for every last one of those trips, even the overseas one (to Europe again). It means I’ll be away from my family. I’ll be away from my daughter who will still be growing and constantly changing before our eyes.

I feel like I miss out on enough of the fun stuff as it is. Just yesterdaymorning, M called me at work to tell me that he was making pancakes and she was on her step-stool at the counter, “helping”. He turned his back to get something, heard her declare, “PLOP! Stir stir stir” and turned around to see that she’d thrown her giant Nemo-beanbag fish in the pancake bowl and had taken up the whisk and was stirring it in.

I’m a “little things” type of person. Those are the “little things” that make me want to spring out of bed each day to witness. I’ve missed a lot of them just by working full time and being absent for 3 consecutive days of the month, each month now. Of course, this is our choice and I am by no means whining – but it’s funny how the thought of missing a week or two or more worth of the little things isn’t as appealing after you have a child.

It’s what comes of introducing yourself to someone new in your life who takes precedence over everyone and everything you ever knew before. THAT is what being a mother has done to me. And I think that it’s payback too…

It’s payback for all of those times when we were sitting in a bar somewhere while I was TDY, listening to the guys moan about how much they were coming to hate the travel because they missed their kids so much – and spritely dumbass me would pipe up, “Hey! Just look at it like it’s a vacation away from being a parent!” Right. Lesson learned. Being a parent isn’t the chore I used to imagine it was. It’s a life changing thing that softens your heart and makes you actually miss people, no matter how short and small those people may be.

In the end, it really means more opportunity for others around me to travel now that I’m not hogging all of the good trips and, given my druthers, would never go anywhere away from home again (at least, not without my family in tow). Well, that’s how I justify not taking up my fair share of the trips these days anyway.
What about you? Do you still look forward to business trips or special events or would you rather be home with S/O and offspring? Has being a parent changed how you work?