There Are No Snow Days For the WAHM

Since the magazine I worked for in Manhattan folded last January, I’ve been cobbling gigs together, oftentimes working from home.

When I worked in the city, the snow didn’t affect me. Not the way it does when I’m working from my home, which is in a resort town by the bay on Long Island. Snow piles up in my driveway and the nearby village literally shuts down. The kid seems to wake up particularly early on these days, crackling with manic energy–although I woke up to the same assignments and deadlines. Moms who work from home can tell you that it isn’t always a cakewalk, even when you tell the kiddo that you’ve gotta hold off on checking out his maze drawings because you’ve got a book review due tomorrow, and he actually doesn’t latch on to your neck and try to kill you.

I love my son, but he’s definitely in a phase of non-stop chatter. I’ll leave the room and hear him calling out, “Boogers! Boogers!” in a gleeful incantation that believe me, seems adorable at first but gets old fast.

“No more snow,” I’ll groan at the night news, to which the boy-child will cock his head and say, “But when it snows, we can make snowmen!”

Snowmen to him, but to me, endless shoveling, using four-wheel drive to just make it out of the driveway, nowhere to go really when I finally turn the corner.

I hope I don’t look back on these days with regret, remorse that I was irritable when I could have savored the company of my tiny son. I feel a pinch of it too when I glance out the window and see him rolling snow into a ball.

“Mommy,” I can see him mouth, though I can’t hear him, “wanna make a snowman?”

Alex Sanidad is a Hybrid Mom blogger. Read more of her posts here.

Pages:
1. 1