When I dreamt of being a stay-at-home mom, I envisioned having a clean house...FINALLY. I knew that I had wasted 10 hours per week commuting to a job that I didn't like very much and I just KNEW that if I could use all of that time to clean my house, it would be spotless. The only reason I stayed at that job was because I LOVED the people that I worked with. LOVED them! My boss, on the other hand, was a different story. I had respect for the guy, but he was the micro-managing type and I didn't have the courage to tell him to back off. I wasn't getting paid very much--at all--but again, I take responsibility for this too. I never negotiated on my pay, I never asked for more to start off with. I just took the job.
The job itself was, for the most part, un-challenging and un-fulfilling. I filed files, made copies and ran errands; and then, I cut staples out of paper. For 6 months that was all I ever did. If I was caught talking to my co-workers, actually socializing or laughing, it was quickly thwarted. I was to sit in silence, by myself and cut staples. Then my boss would fly by a few times a day and chastise me because I hadn't cut enough staples since the last time he flew by and chastised me. A few months later, he began getting onto me about the manner in which I was cutting the staples out of the paper because obviously, I was doing it wrong because I wasn't doing it fast enough for him.
My boss had boxes and boxes and then he had boxes on top of boxes of old files that he didn't really want to get rid of but he realized that they were filling up his office and his employees couldn't move about. His plan was to put all these documents through a scanner and file them digitally and then shred them and get rid of the paperwork altogether. Most of these first files I had dealt with were 15+ year old files. I was instructed just to "get them in the computer." Sometimes they were filed by a name, sometimes by a case number. We were in the very infant stages of this process so a lot of mix ups were made and thank God it had been on files that were closed.
But then when I had finally gotten into the files that were still open, he wanted each document to have a file number and a name. I was to scan and name each document as quickly as possible. Sometimes the pages would get curled up though and two or three documents would go through at the same time, thus, only scanning the first page of the group. I had begun checking the scanned files and comparing them with the paper files before storing them away to make sure I hadn't missed anything. If I missed something, I would scan them in and then file it away. This process was taking far too long for my boss and he told me about it. He just wanted it DONE. I was not to worry about the documents that did not get scanned in, I was just to cram the papers into the scanner and let it GO! Later down the line though, he would be looking for an electronic page of some file I had scanned in and when it wasn't there guess who's responsibility that was?
Needless to say, I stayed there a little over a year and left. My co-workers were surprised I had stayed past the second month. I said I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom being as I had just had another baby, my first baby girl, and I wanted to focus on my home business, (personalized candy bars). It was true, but it was even truer that I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
I had envisioned working on my business in the morning while my oldest child was at school, and then stopping by all the small businesses in my town and presenting my product and getting sales. 3 weeks into my quitting my job, my husband's car also quit. He had to use my minivan to get to work now and I was now trapped. A prisoner in my own home. At first, I actually thought to myself, "That's okay, I'll get some housework done I guess and maybe do some sales visits in the evenings after my husband gets home." That was laughable.
My mornings were spent hurriedly getting my kids ready for their buses so they could get to school. My oldest son's school was a half hour drive away and I had no vehicle anyway. He's autistic so having him home with me all day long was like trying to herd cats. Getting him on the bus was like trying to give a cat a bath. (insert vision of cat trying to scratch the crap out of you here.) He fought me tooth and nail and would scream from across the house "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL! NO, BRANDON IS NOT GOING TO SCHOOL! BRANDON WANT'S THE WEEKEND!" I would argue back with him that he was indeed going to school and I wasn't going to hear otherwise. All while getting his lunch ready, locating his clothes, shoes, backpack, lunch bag and harness, getting him dressed while chasing him around the house and trying to avoid my other three children who had just woken up, were grumpy, hungry and tired. Once I got him out the door--and at times I almost had to physically pick this kid up and carry him to the bus--it was time for me to get Alex on his bus.
Alex's bus ladies were two little old ladies that had very strict ways. The second they would pull up in front of my house I heard "HONK, HONK, HONNNNK!" That always ticked me off. The bus drivers can wait up to 2 minutes for a child to get on the bus but these ladies never waited for more than 30 seconds. Granted, I should have had my child ready by then, I take responsibility for that, but with the mornings I had, I just didn't care what those little old bus ladies thought! They "allowed" me to let Alex get on the bus himself but I was to wait at the front door until he was safely on. When they came back to drop him off at home two-and-a-half hours later, I was to come out to the bus and get him and bring him back with me, holding his hand. I could understand their logic. Really, I could. You never know what a 4-year old kid is going to do when he is supposed to be getting on the bus but I had two other kids that were nagging me for food, screaming, fighting each other and just otherwise being grumpy and annoying and they would start crying if I went outside without them for any amount of time and it was very difficult for me to focus on Alex getting on and off the bus.
Alex's bus would leave and I would feed the kids and put a movie on for them. I honestly thought that I would have two and a half hours of relative peace and quiet until I had to get Alex off the bus with which to work on my business somehow. I thought I could at least come up with a plan of attack to visit local businesses and hoc my product idea to them. Maybe work on my website? Write some articles? Something. That never really happened. I mostly got my work done sometime after Phillip got home because the kids would finally leave me alone and go downstairs with HIM. But when I would sit up in our room working even on the weekends, my husband got sick of it and moved my desk back downstairs into the dining room. I got even less work done this way. My kids were right there in the next room, watching their movies or playing their video games or whatever it was I was using to distract them and the noise was more than annoying. Not to mention the fact that every 5-10 minutes a kid would want to sit on my lap or have a snack or need a diaper change or want to go outside.
As soon as Alex got home, it would be lunchtime. That was a mess too. I was not the kind of mom who planned ANYTHING! I would finally manage to get some food on the table, check on the baby and go back to "work." After lunch, the boys wanted to go outside. It was usually about 1 o'clock by then and I would get sick of staring at a computer screen. I would go outside with them and play for a little bit. Sometimes I would beg my mom to take them for an hour or two and get them off my back for a while. I would use that time for "training calls" or sometimes just ME time. By the time my mom was done with them it was 3 or 4 o'clock. Brandon's bus came at around 4 o'clock to drop him off. Then I might have one more hour before Phillip got home and I would have to start thinking about dinner.
I would groan at that point in time because I would realize that I had spent the entire day on the computer and there were dishes all over the house. I would have to wash them before I could even get started with dinner. But first, I would have to figure out what to fix. In the beginning of my stay-at-home-mom experience, my evenings would go something like this: Generally, Phillip would get home between 5 and 5:30. About an 30 minutes to an hour later, I would FINALLY decide what to fix for dinner. Then I would have to do some dishes--usually the minimum amount possible--put half of them away and leave the other half in the drain rack because I HAD to get started with dinner. I would then fix the dinner, serve the dinner, serve the drinks and finally, MAYBE get to sit down myself for a while. Phillip would want to spend some time with me too, he had missed me while he was at work, and would want me to come sit in the living room with him and watch T.V.--usually his choice of show--while we ate. After Phillip ate, he went straight to bed. He had to get up early in the morning and hated being tired or late to work.
I got to actually spend maybe 30 minutes with my husband before he went to bed. (sigh) Now it was back to kid duty agian. (sigh, sigh) The bath time and bed time shenanigans would commence. I generally threw the three boys in the tub together, scrubbed them, hushed them when they go too loud because daddy was in the next room trying to sleep, and scolded them when they splashed water all over the place. The younger boys might finally be in bed by 10, Brandon, being autistic and never needing much sleep, would be asleep maybe by midnight. Sometimes I would have to give him some Melatonin to MAKE him go to sleep. After the kids were in bed and finally passed out. I guessed I could have a little time to myself. I usually spent my time on the computer. Myspace was my favorite. Lots of little time-wasting games to play on there that I would indulge myself in. 1:30 to 2 o'clock in the morning, I would look at the clock and be like "Oh crap, I'd better get to bed." I'd finally fall asleep at some point during the early morning hours and get up at 7 a.m.-ish to start this all over again.
I really had envisioned so much more for my life as a stay-at-home-mom.
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