In Which Owl and Kanga Assess the Progress of Things

I've spent much of the last three weeks focused on finding a system that works. What I mean is...I love systems. I love discerning them, observing them, creating them and improving them. I would have been a good Operations person. Oh wait, I am an Operations person. Though not always a good one.

Anyway, I have been trying to find the System That Works for balancing actually achieving something at work with being home with J and my husband with respect to both quality and quantity.

As always, I should have just realized it wasn't possible. Thousands of women writing books, giving talks and posting on blogs about the challenges inherent to this should have clued me in that I was rather unlikely to find the silver bullet.

So now, it's about compromise, cutting corners and letting go what other people think. I am not great at any of these three things. I have gotten MUCH better at compromise since getting married, but skimping, letting things slide and not being highly successful at what I do...makes me feel ooky.

I do find that I'm more willing to let work slide -- in terms of initiatives I'm promoting -- than home. This, at least, is a good sign. There is no compromise when it comes to the time I spend with J at this early stage. I am so fortunate to share caregiving with my VERY dialed-in husband.

But boy, it's weird to feel the brakes get put on your career (for the moment) and realize that you're essentially the one doing it. And to also realize that you don't mind all that much.

When we decide to not have children, we women have to then decide to be OK with our decision. Similarly, when we do have children and decide to stay home - or to work - or to go part-time - we have to not only decide these things, but decide to be OK with the decision, and move forward.

And, since analysis paralysis and second-guessing are both my middle names, I can't seem to let this go. I keep turning it over in my mind. I keep understanding, bit by bit, what it's like to not be the focus of my own life.

Naturally, having decided not to hear the woes of the generations of women before me, I absorb the problem all on my own, as if it were the very first time it had happened to any woman.

But it seems fitting somehow, since in a very real way J feels to me like the first baby ever born into the world. And I know that other women feel that deeply with their own children.