I don’t have to clean – Megan Noll Photography

My job is more flexible than Brian’s. Because I work from home, we have opted out of paying $190 A WEEK for daycare (seriously, who can afford that?), and I have, instead, signed up for a life of hectic attempts at work-life balance.

In my naive, pre-baby days, I thought “Eh! Can’t be that hard! Babies sleep a lot – I’ll just work around her schedule”.

Famous. Last. Words.

Let me just give you an idea of how that is working out. Yesterday, I quickly sat down to type out an email to a client with extra smiley-faces and exclamation points, with the hopes the email wouldn’t sound as tired as I felt. I realized in the few unattended seconds that I had set the baby down, she had crawled over to the dog’s water bowl, promptly flipped in onto herself, and had began crawling around the kitchen with a handful of dog food.

If I’m looking on the bright side – her wet clothes acted like a wonderful mop as she crawled around. If you all need your floors cleaned, I’ll gladly rent her out!

Let me tell you, being an entrepreneur adds a lot more mommy-guilt than I thought was possible. I didn’t realize all of the ugly feelings I was harboring about this new situation until last night, when I reached a breaking point. After a small incident, I found myself blubbering to Brian about how I didn’t feel like I was doing anything well.

I tried to explain to him that I feel like I have three major roles to play – Mom, Wife, and Entrepreneur.

If I am serving my clients well – promptly answering emails, and editing images quickly, then my child is flipping water bowls on herself, trying to eat dog food, and bumping her head on stuff.

If I keep her out of everything and cushion her falls, I’m stressing about my job, and how much work is piling up. This balance is on my mind so much that I am not even THINKING about cleaning, doing laundry, or anything else around the house, which means Brian has to pick up that slack.

I guilt myself so much when he gets home from work, and immediately starts putting dishes away that I’ve left out. I feel like he is going to think I’m lazy, that I expect him to do it, or worse, that I’m a bad wife.

As I was hashing all of these feelings out with him, he stopped me.

“Cleaning doesn’t make you a good wife and not doing laundry doesn’t make you a bad wife. Being a wife is more than what chores you do.”

He said a lot of sweet things after that, but the gist of it was this – Don’t let traditional social roles define how you feel about yourself. In our relationship, it works for Brian to be the one that does more of the housework. As much as I guilt myself about that, I know that I am serving our family by sacrificing traditional work hours to avoid the financial strain of daycare.

He reminded me that being a wife is so much more than the June Cleaver caricature of vacuuming in pearls. It’s about love, and treating each other with respect – not about how much I can get done while he is at his job. It was so freeing to hear him say that.

Life isn’t about being perfect, or having it all together. It’s about love. So on that note, I’m going to go fetch my wild child out of whatever mess she has gotten herself into, keep my chin up, and keep doing the best that I can – even if it means I don’t clean.