On more than one occasion, I've considered touching base with some of my former bosses to thank them for their patience with my consistent ability to just barely know how to get to work on time (or, be slightly late) on a regular basis. Now that I'm a mom, the idea of getting myself — only myself — out of bed, dressed, and to work by 9:00 a.m. sounds downright luxurious. But for some reason, it was practically impossible for me a couple years ago, which, if you think about it, is kind of a big deal since one of the most important parts about going to an office is, you know, actually being there when you're supposed to be. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose. Anyway, my point is that becoming a mom has required me to pretty much attack my mornings. It's one of many in a whole new set of skills that I barely imagined someday possessing in my pre-kid days. And that's really the big, ultimate joke of parenthood: You never realize how relatively simple and effortless your life before kids was until you are no longer living it.
Now that I'm a working mom, I have a whole bag of tricks that childless me would've killed to know.
Before we dive in and acknowledge/celebrate/bemoan the skills that working moms have the opportunity ("opportunity" hahaha — OK, more like "no choice but") to master, I want to make sure to acknowledge that these skills, while greatly honed by the experience of being a working mom, are not exclusively possessed by working mom. Stay-at-home moms have just as many, if not more, awesome abilities developed by their own routines. I mean, I tried being a full-time, stay-at-home mom, so I saw firsthand that it is really damn hard to keep the boat afloat (or the train chugging, or the pages turning, or whatever your kiddo is asking for in that particular moment). So, I'm not trying to say that working moms are the only ones who develop a specific set of skills; far from it, in fact. Just that we develop a slightly different set of skills. Without further ado, here's what I'm talking about: