What stressful things do DU Moms have to deal with?

[obamanut2012]

After the discussion in Starry's thread, and after reading this article, I thought it would be interesting to hear from the moms here. I have furchildren, and that can be stressful enough, but at least they don't have to do their homework every night, or need cleats for soccer.

The article, btw:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/supermoms-should-tell-the-truth-about-their-perfect-lives/258903/?google_editors_picks=true

[Neoma]

1. I only have fur babies.

One's allergic to chicken.

[LiberalLoner]

11. I only have fur babies too. Had endometriosis really bad, no babies.

P.S. I really admire the mothers here, all mothers really, because I suspect it's harder now to raise children than it has been in a very long time.

[Neoma]

13. Same here.

Except my uterus is fine, it's just the fucked up Fallopian tubes and I was born with only one ovary. The ovary I do have, has the Fallopian tube wrapped around it, and had a six centimeter cyst on it.

If you want to talk about pain, I'd probably mention this first.

[LiberalLoner]

14. Oh that sounds excruciating :( You poor thing! I hope the doctors can help you!

Are they recommending surgery to correct the situation? I've had endoscopic surgeries before, for the endo, they really weren't bad at all and I'm thinking they would probably be able to do the surgery that way?

Pain is no fun I feel bad for you.

[Neoma]

15. I've already had surgery.

Just taking birth control to save my fertility at this point.

[LiberalLoner]

17. Keeping my fingers crossed it works!

[abelenkpe]

2. Everyday is stressful

I have two kids and work full time. I wake at 5:30 every morning, make and pack lunches, make breakfast, make the beds, tidy up, do about twenty minutes of light exercise, get everyone dressed, backpacks packed up and drive my two kids to school by 8:15. Then it's off to work, walk three miles at lunch, secretly text school to make sure kids are still OK if they had a field trip or I was worried about a special project, work through the afternoon, rush through traffic to pick kids up from aftercare at 6pm. Then it's swimming lessons at the Y or the park for some exercise, dinner, homework, baths, story time, bed (at 10pm for kids)....repeat. There is no day off. If I'm sick I still need to do everything for the kids. If they are sick I use a pto day. And YAY! my work just took away half of the pto days I earn each year cause y'know the economy. Ironically, that's the same reason the cost of aftercare has gone up. I have no relatives to help (They live far away and refuse to visit.)
Every once in a while I get a month off of work where I will pretend to be a stay at home mom picking my kids up early and getting the evening stuff done early. Y'know, dinner at a reasonable hour, bed before 10pm. That's a vacation for me and my family.
Not as glamorous as the celebrity mom experience is it?
My kids really want a pet. I think it'd be too much. What do you all think?

[obamanut2012]

3. Good God

I hope you eat a good breakfast everyday for energy.

How old are the kids? A dog can take a lot of work time wise, a kitty not as much, although they need to be loved and taken care of.

[abelenkpe]

7. Yeah I think a cat would be the way to go.

Hopefully we can train them to use the toilet. (The cats I mean...if we get pets....a big if!) The kiddos are five and seven. Thankfully they are very helpful and sweet. Hope that remains the same as they become teenagers.
Part of me is always aware of how precarious things are so healthy meals are a must as one bad accident or diagnosis can topple the entire thing. But life is good! Just busy.

[obamanut2012]

8. I know, and they can't do a lot of stuff for themselves yet

So, that should ease a bit as they get a little older.

Agreed that healthy food is important!!!

[Whisp]

6. I can sure relate to all that

my girl is grown up now but those years were incredibly hard looking back I don't know how I survived.

I worked in advertising and it gets really crazy sometimes with deadlines and stupid people, etc., its was go go go go as soon as one foot was in the door and like that till you got out.

Like Michelle Obama said in one of her speeches, you worry about the kid(s) when you are at work, then you worry about work when you are at home. Unending, relentless.

Fortunately I had a relative to care for her and that made a lot of difference in less stress and worry but still was very hard to take. Once in a while they had to be away and I had to leave my baby with someone else and it just broke my heart: ma, don't go, don't go. omg I am getting sick thinking of those times.

[abelenkpe]

19. Michelle Obama said that?

I think I love her even more! It's so true.

[Whisp]

20. yes, she did. I'll see if I can find that for you.

Last edited Tue Jun 26, 2012, 08:31 PM - Edit history (1)

no luck so far, but I know I heard her say that in one of her talks about women because it really struck home.

Will look again tomorrow.

[Whisp]

31. Interesting Hide in a reply to this post.

Last edited Sun Jul 8, 2012, 03:57 PM - Edit history (1)

Like yah, I'm really Ann Romney and had that choice.

what a pantload of poop

on edit:
I think I got fooled just as the jury did. I don't believe the poster was serious but was using sarcasm.

[LadyHawkAZ]

32. I guess "Fundie trolls" can now be added to the list

of things DU moms have to deal with.

[obamanut2012]

33. rofl

[maddezmom]

4. compared to my working mom friends

my stress is nil. My stressors are co-parenting, impending exes marriage etc. I've never been a working mom but my mom was a single working mom with sometimes 2 jobs. I had an excellent caretaker that was my god mom. She then went back to work when my sisters(new marriage) were in elementary. I know it was hard but she tried her best to make it look easy. Probably for the sake of all the other sahm's that questioned her choice and for us.

I keep thinking about re-entering the work force sometime in the future but worry if I can pull it off with my son's special needs, etc.

[LiberalEsto]

5. Mine won't grow up and leave

My 25-year-old daughter has been living at home, trying (but not very hard) to finish an associate degree from community college. She keeps dropping courses or failing them, despite being an honor roll student in high school. She has dropped out of five colleges, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. All she needs is 3 credits in nutrition or some similar course to get her AA.

She doesn't work, having asked us to subsidize her while she was in school. She has anxiety disorder and depression, and takes medications for them. Failing her nutrition class was the last straw -- we required her to see a counselor weekly. After stalling for several weeks, she has finally seen one twice and likes the counselor. However if the Supreme Idiots shoot down the healthcare law, it is likely she will be kicked off my husband's health insurance. If not, her coverage expires when she turns 26 this fall.

If that weren't enough, she got arrested last month for DUI. Because she doesn't have any income or savings, we now have to foot the bills.

The older one has also dropped out of 5 colleges, giving up one full-tuition scholarship, and racking up tens of thousands in loans. She is just 3 credits short of a BA but refuses to finish for some inexplicable reason. Instead of acting like an adult and helping us pay the loans, she says she feels "entitled" to have us pay them. My feeling is that she was entitled to a scholarship, and a 4-year degree, no more. We will not give her another cent for college.

She works as a nanny, hates being "the help" but refuses to do anything about deciding on a career or setting goals. Now she is splitting up with the guy she has lived with for more than six years, and her nanny contract ends in 3 weeks. She plans on moving home next month, doing an extended road trip to the west coast on her savings, and then coming back to write her book. Or possibly visiting a friend in Africa for who knows how long.

I've been looking for nearly 4 years after having been laid off, and we have zero savings. We pay $630 a month on their student loans and support the younger one. If's not easy.

I honestly believed they would move out after college, but they neither finished college nor permanently moved out.

[obamanut2012]

9. My sister had something very similar happen with one of my nieces

And she gave her three months to get a job and save money and find a roommate, and to realize she had to start paying her own bills. She did and does, and also finished her degree after moving out.

I don't know if that will work for you or not. All of that is really stressful -- you need a break, too.

[zazen]

10. have you tried an Al-Anon meeting?

There are parents as well as adult children and partners/friends. It's so hard to maintain one's sanity when living with someone else's self-destructive behavior, especially a grown child, and to get perspective about setting healthy boundaries and enforcing them without caving into guilt and despair. From what I understand, the Program has turned a lot of lives around. Just FYI

[LiberalLoner]

12. LiberalEsto I hope things get better for you and your family.

I am almost afraid to mention this, I don't mean to insult you, but I wonder if your daughter would find AA meetings helpful? I was raised in a family with a lot of alcoholism and know that a DUI almost always means a serious drinking problem. I've seen AA save lives and I love Al-Anon and ACOA meetings, they keep me sane. Or kind of sane, LOL!

[maddezmom]

16. so sorry you're going through all this with your children

[Starry Messenger]

18. ((hugs)) that is rough.

Vibes to your family.

[yardwork]

21. Wow. I am sorry that you are going through that.

[barbtries]

30. i'm pretty sure

she'll be covered until her 27th birthday. check me on that, but when the law first passed and i put my middle son on my policy they did not drop him until his 27th birthday.

[yardwork]

22. It's not just being a working mom. It's being a working mom and a daughter and a partner and a...

I know how lucky I am to HAVE a job and children and a mom and a partner and a home. And I am very fortunate to be in good health. It's a balancing act, though. My kids are older now and don't require the exhausting physical day to day care that others have described here. I'd say that a lot of my stresses are emotional now. I'm handling a lot of responsibilities, but I struggle with anxiety. That's why I post on DU. It helps me relax.

I can't figure out what just happened to my kitchen ceiling light. It was fine this morning. This evening it is missing three of its five lightbulbs, each of which seem to have been broken off in their sockets. Some of the missing pieces are in a bowl on the dining room table, a mute message from younger son, who is staying with me. He is nowhere to be found - at work, I assume. The light fixture was a little too low and younger son is very tall, so I suspect that there was a collision, but that doesn't explain why the lightbulbs were broken off in their sockets. An effort to replace broken ones that failed?

These are the sorts of mysteries associated with having teenage sons. Fortunately I love boys and this kind of thing usually makes me laugh.

[maddezmom]

23. you're right

it's mom, daughter, sister, neice, cousin, etc.

[yardwork]

24. ...HOA president, etc. Argh.

[noamnety]

26. I used to have a ceiling fan with lightbulbs

I was sitting home one day and watched a bulb float lazily through the air.

It heated up enough that it snapped off the socket, and was hot enough to be like a hot air balloon, so instead of crashing down, it went on a little slo-mo tour of the living room. So surreal!

It happened a few other times, I think it was something to do with watts or bad bulbs, I'm not sure. I learned to use a potato to get the socket parts out when it happened.

[yardwork]

27. A potato! That's a great idea.

I learned from Younger Son that he was snapping open a plastic trash bag, and since he's well over six feet tall and the chandelier-type fixture was already a little too low, well, there you go. At least it wasn't his head that hit it.

I got an inexpensive but attractive flush-mount fixture at the big box store and I'll have my favorite electrician buddy come over this week to install it. Problem solved.

I'll remember that about the potato.

[noamnety]

25. I don't know how I made it through those years

I had no family in this part of the country to help with daycare, I was living illegally in housing I wasn't eligible for and praying nobody would report me, and for a while was working full time plus got an unwanted recall notice back into the army reserves. The ex for a time dropped off the face of the earth, and I lived in fear of being thrown in jail for being AWOL if I couldn't find someone to watch my kid at 6am on weekends. The M-F job was an hour commute each way, and I had to leave home before any daycares opened, so she ended up having to commute with me. And I couldn't put her in a public school because it was before schools of choice were available, so she couldn't attend a public school near my work - and couldn't attend one in our neighborhood because of latch key hours not being long enough to account for that commute issue.

For me it wasn't homework or soccer cleats; the whole day-to-day survival thing is what sucked.

[yardwork]

28. ....