I’m tired about 95% of the time. I remember asking new mom co-workers, how are you holding up with no sleep? And they would glare at me. After multiple nights of baby deciding to play from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., I feel like I am in the middle of a Vision Quest, complete with hallucinations but no profound insight. When I have complained about being tired, I have been told (by my brother-in-law), that “of course! Because you have a full-time job!” But I’m not so sure that staying full-time at home would be much easier, at least for me!
Enter phenomenally successful and famous mom, Tina Fey. Her show 30 Rock employs 200 people. Two hundred people, people! Is that not remarkable? In the New York Times article I linked above, she talks about her 14-hour days followed by a few more hours with the writers camping out at her house. She talks about the weekend she shot her show all day Saturday with Oprah, filmed SNL that night for her Sarah Palin debut, then threw her kid a three-year-old birthday party on Sunday. Oy vey!
What makes me feel better about everything is that she mentions her triannual sobfests in her office, which makes me feel entirely normal and makes me think (without any specificity) about the pressure of being a girl nowadays. You have a career, maybe if you’re lucky you have babies, and you keep on trucking. You are both a man and a woman, in the societal sense, and somewhere, in between all that, you feel a lot of pressure. I don’t see anyone having the perfect solution as of yet. Working full-time and staying at home full-time seem like imperfect approaches.
Funny, with the weather being so nice, I am dying to go out after the sun goes down! What a concept! I seem to be the only one who doesn’t understand that life has changed, 180’d in a the span of a year, and the rituals of my old life are no longer doable, like a ghost who doesn’t understand that she has died and keeps showing up at restaurants to eat. I had coffee with Baby and a single g-friend, who told me, “Tina, are you kidding me? I’m putting on mascara and a miniskirt every Saturday night so that I can meet someone and stay home and wear sweat pants!”
See? Nothing’s perfect.
As a total outsider (no baby, no partner), I read/hear about these tired working mothers and what they have to juggle, and I wonder what the husband/fathers are doing? Is Tina Fey’s husband having triannual sobfests?
I don’t know if Tina Fey’s husband is having triannual sobfests, nnk, but Sachsy’s husband? Definitely a nervous breakdown once a month or so.
Tina, let’s make a reservation at some awesome restaurant for, say, 10 years from now. We should be able to get away for a few hours by then, right?
Oh my god, I hope so. Ten years! You got it, dinner!