I found this video about a WAHM on my friend, Ilana’s, blog tonight. It was inspired by a young woman who quits her job via video dancing around the office she decidedly spent a year of slavery in to the tune of Gone by Kanye West. In the domesticated version (video above), a mom dances around the house she’s expected to clean, in addition to keeping up her work responsibilities. She dances in front of piles of dishes. Trash. Unmade beds.  Flotsam in the sink. And so, like her predecessor , she decides to leave. Only it’s to get milk. Oddly enough, in the comments on You Tube, she is called an irresponsible mother who walks out on her family. On the contrary, she’s going out to get a necessity!

I, on the other hand, usually ask my husband to get the milk.  I’m usually too tired to go myself.

Everyone seems to think  that working from home is the ideal situation for a mom: being home with the kids and making a living.  Sign me up!, they all say, thinking it’s the best of both worlds.

I’ve just returned to an office after a stint at home where I was expected to work and look after my house and family, and my days at work are like a mini vacation.  I actually wrote about this last week so I don’t want to bore you with a repeat, but really, do read my piece called A Return to the Land of the Living. The first day on the job a mere few weeks ago, I skipped out of my house to the train, leaving the daily disruptions behind.

For this mom, going back to work was important.  And I knew that.  Yes, my days are more chock full and I have a lot to manage, but I’m more organized now than I was then. I’m far more productive than I’ve been in a long time.  Go figure because I certainly don’t have as much time as I used to have.

Watch the video! I think I watched it 5-10 times and contributed to her You Tube numbers going up. I’m going to dance around the house now.

The clothes I need to fold? They can wait.

Once they were both breastfed and capable of sitting up, I realized I needed to get out of the house and into a setting where I could communicate with adults and share my skills and knowledge that I’d built up over the course of my career.  I re-entered quickly as a consultant into an office three days a week and have managed to keep up steady work over the years, working from home and company offices. The last time I went into an office was precisely 8 or 9 months. I’ve been working from home most of this year, with amazing clients and interesting work, no question.

But I’ve had a gnawing itch to return to an office and I managed to get myself back into one.  The walls in my house were starting to close in on me, and I was anxious to return to the land of the living. I just returned to a job in the city (as in NYC) two weeks ago. Here’s what is so cool about it:

1. The mornings are easier.  It may sound crazy but with me jumping out of bed at 6 or 6:30am to start my day, so are the kids, and we’re all in better moods and more focused on what we all have to do to get out of the house for the day.  There’s a synchronicity that we didn’t have before. When I first went back to work when they were very young, it wasn’t nearly this easy.  They can dress themselves, help with meal preparation, pack their own backpacks.  What a difference.

2. No more sitting around in my sweats. I used to work in my gym clothes, only sometimes I didn’t even make it to the gym because working from home gave me less time than I now get in an office.  There would be interruptions – whether they be phone calls, clothes to put in the dryer or most importantly and most often, deadlines that I had to work around school pick up time. Now I get dressed in clothes (there’s a no jeans policy in my office, I suspect) other than my sweats, and it feels really good.

3. Water cooler conversations. I missed the office chatter. I can’t wait to go to the office to talk about the Emmy’s.  Now I don’t have to do it only on Twitter. And I now love meetings. I love having to prepare for them, I love sitting in a room full of like-minded colleagues.  It’s a newly discovered pang that had to be satiated.

4. I’m back in the city, baby.  Yes, I missed the commute.  I missed having to get on a train. I missed going back and forth.  All the things people crave giving up, I wanted.  I love being back in NYC.  I work across the street from Bryant Park, two blocks from Times Square and it’s wonderful.  Too all of you who complain about commuting, stay home for a while with kids 10 and under.  You’ll want to go back. Oh, and I get to meet my working friends for lunch, many of whom work in the area which is so wonderful I can’t even describe it.

5. I no longer sweat the small stuff. At the end of the day, I am thrilled to be home. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated being home with my kids before, but the days were often long and I surrendered to a lack of patience often.  Now, after being gone all day, and replacing some of my domestic obligations with stimulation, I have my sole attention placed on my family.

There are plenty more reasons why I’m glad to be back.  This is just the beginning.

I’ve been quiet here lately, posting the odd theater ticket giveaway or twitter update.  There are several reasons for this but the main one being that I’ve been traveling with my family in the country where my husband was born.  All of my children’s first cousins are here in England and we’ve been visiting their uncles, aunts and grandmother. We also have family coming in from a great distance to spend the Jewish New Year with us. We spent a glorious week in Ireland before  coming here, which definitely gave me food for fodder, and I will be writing about my experiences on Family Vacation Critic, This Girl Travels and Go Girlfriend when I get home.

We’ve seen and done a lot and we’ve introduced my children to amazing new people, cuisine and experiences (fishing in Ireland! a boat ride on a canal in London! eating sushi off a conveyor belt in Manchester!). But I’ve treated this trip very differently than I have in the recent past, disconnecting most of the time when out in order to fully concentrate on our adventures as a family. I understand the power of travel and had every intention for this trip to impact my children in a different way.  They have come to the UK many times in their lives, but now that they are slightly older, I wanted them to value the experience even more.

I’ve taken notes, in a spiral notebook, just like the reporter I know how to be and have always been. I’ll have all the information that I need to make my dead lines.

But I admit that I haven’t been totally social media free. How does one completely disconnect when they are so connected on a daily basis?  At the end of each day, I pick up Wifi and post scenery images on Instagram and sometimes post a few updates on Facebook and check Twitter and email.

Yet I’ve been far more interested in spending time with the family that I see once a year in a country I once lived in and have a deep connection to and have tried to put the devices away. I’ve watched my children bond with their cousins and have turned my attention on the international sites and visions around us, hence leaving social media in the dust most of the time.

As a result, I think that my connection to the medium is going to change when I get home.  As I re-enter the work force and prepare for a few major life changes, I suspect that my relationship to social media is about to take a new direction.

There are changes I want to make, as related to social media, and here are a few:

- Have more personal contact with my friends and family.  Social media has removed me ever so slightly and I pledge to pick up the phone more often and have more personal contact.

- I have long talked about a need for a new brand identity and I will strive to make that change in the new year (as in 5774).

- Continue to focus on the topics and stories that I want to write about and stay true to who I am and continue to partner with the web sites who are in line with my areas of interest, ones that aim to make a difference.

- Organize my time on the computer early in the morning and after the kids have gone to bed in order to spend more time with them, particularly after a day at work. These years are passing by and I want to look up more often.

- Make sure that brands and publicists understand my identity and align myself with the ones who do.

- Strive to partner with more non-profits and organizations who support the causes I care the most about and educate the public about what they, too, can do to help. To launch this effort, I am sending a writer to Memphis with a team from Expedia to report on the research and treatment of blood disorders and infectious diseases in children that is conducted at St. Jude Hospital this weekend.

- Continue to enjoy blogging and remember why I started in the first place.  I’ve loved reconnecting with a very important part of me, and I don’t want to completely give it up but I also need to concentrate on other areas of my life which may require less time using the medium (unless it’s work-related).

There are a lot of changes taking place in the blogosphere and the industry is rapidly changing.  I’m taking stock of these changes and being on holiday has given me time to think about it.  Stay tuned and happy new year.

But the pull towards staying home with my daughter wouldn’t go away.  At work, sitting in the first office I’d ever had as a young adult, with my name on the door, I kept my newborn’s picture in front of me and glanced at it periodically.

Yet I leapt out of bed to go to work each day.  I still enjoyed my work, although traveling was proving difficult to be away for a week at a time.  As my husband and I talked about what to do, I felt swayed by many of the people around me telling me to leave my job and take time out.  We also decided that the cost of our babysitter and transportation (I was then traveling to another state for work) didn’t really make sense.  Now, looking back, I think perhaps money was an excuse.  Had I factored in my benefits, working was worth far more than just my salary, and you couldn’t put a price on the personal sense of satisfaction.  I had unintentionally opted out.

But having a baby changed me.  I wanted it all.  Traveling three hours a day, five days a week to work back and forth made me feel like “all” would never really be possible. Maybe I’d step out for a year and step back in? Let’s get one thing straight: going back to work after six weeks (12 weeks with Family Leave Act) was hard.  I was still breastfeeding and as an attached parent, I was attached.

I knew right away that being home and I were not a match made in heaven. While my company was looking to fill my position, I actually dreamt about contacting the head of my department to beg for my job back.  When they called me in to train my replacement,  I knew or felt immediately that I had made a mistake.  It was painful.  I was passing on work that I really didn’t want to leave.  

I was never good at staying home with the kids.  Two babies, 19 months apart. It was hard.  I realized I wasn’t really cut out for domestic life.  I started to look for a job right away, and there were interesting prospects, but the kids were young and all the jobs were full time.

But as time progressed, my confidence dropped and I felt like I was going to pull my hair out.  My husband and I both realized it, so I started to think about returning to the work force with kids ages 1 and 2.

And I did.  I was offered a full time job, which I negotiated to part-time.  It paid well and I had a nice balance of work and family life.  I went in several days a week – got my mojo back, was a part of a team. It ended three years later and led to other part-time jobs.  I’ve always had a foot in the industry, have never stopped working. Along the way, I started this blog, worked several years for a start-up, took some graduate school classes, took on a ton of volunteer work including interviewing Holocaust survivors, became a freelance travel writer, produced a few plays, took a theater producing class, took on a leadership role at my synagogue and started my own marketing consulting company. Most importantly, I took care of a special needs child who needed me in more ways than I ever anticipated. I’m actually still doing all of these things.

It’s been nearly ten years since I unintentionally opted out. Yes, I read the article in the New York Times Magazine and I remember reading the story that preceded it, written in October 2003, the year I was contemplating leaving the full time work force.  What can I say? Do I wish this piece had been written about opting back in back then so I knew the realities then that I know now? Yes. The stories are daunting, about three women who opted out and have varying difficulties getting back in.  I can’t say I can relate to all of them.  One made 500K in her peak, and when she went back to work, she was making 1/5 of her salary, but was forced to return when her marriage dissolved.  Another woman in the article really liked staying home but decided it was time to contribute to her family income and lucked into a job that evolved out of volunteer work, making her career more satisfying than ever before.  The last woman is a journalist, with an impressive resume, who has had an extremely hard time breaking back in. Like me, they’ve all dealt with financial pressures (the upcoming braces my kids both need, Bar Mitzvah’s, college tuition), lack of intellectual stimulation and desire to be more well rounded as a woman.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this subject and my situation. My post on whether to work or not on Scary Mommy garnered nearly 100 comments; my post called What About Me? on PHDinParenting also created an interesting conversation and I mentioned being ready to opt fully back in on The Broad Side early this summer. One of the commentators there mentioned how she had a full blown career and stepped down when her daughter hit the teenage years.  When is truly the best time to opt out? According to the article, never.

One of my closest friends had a baby last year and her job dissolved by default (relocation).  I am the first to tell her not to wait, to explore her options now, to opt back in.

The only thing I will say about the flexibility that I’ve had over the past 10 years is that I’ve done things I never would have done had I worked full time. I’ve had amazing opportunities as a result of having time to spread my wings and I’ve met some wonderful people on this side of the pond.

But to be told that I opted out after all the work I’ve done over these years – both in my home and out – and to have trouble opting back in.  That is something I wasn’t expecting back then.  I’m going to try not to let the NYT piece get to me.  I’m going to keep my chin up and march into my dream job.  All it takes is finding that one interviewer who can look at my resume and say wow, look what YOU have done.

P.S. I met that woman and she just offered me a job.

I’m honored to call myself a sometimes contributor to two sites that I personally love reading very much, Women & Hollywood and The Broad Side.  Both offer feminist perspectives on everything I care about most – film, politics, media, healthcare and human rights issues.  My latest on both deals with my latest obsession, OITNB.  I interviewed Alysia Reiner, a star of OITNB, over at Women & Hollywood, which ran today. Over at The Broad Side last week, I talked about why I think Netflix is the New Feminist Hollywood Leader.  I’d love your comments over at either post.

I’ve also been traveling. A LOT. If you follow me on Instagam (@theculturemom), you can follow my adventures.  Currently, I’m in Vail, Colorado for the Vail International Dance Festival.  I’ve also been to Cape Cod, Wildwood, NJ, Mohonk Mountain House and Buttermilk Falls Inn & Spa in the Hudson Valley.  I’ve documented my travels and you can read about them at Go Girlfriend, This Girl Travels, Family Vacation Critic and I have upcoming stories on Ciao Bambino.  My family will soon be visiting Ireland and England and I’m busy planning that trip, too.

I also met with the folks at Google recently  where I learned about how to better utilize their tools to make parenting, writing and even life easier.  I will have more details on that visit soon.

And most of all, I’ve been looking to return to work full time.  That is what has been taking up most of my time on a daily basis and that is why I haven’t been blogging quite as much here.  Getting resumes out, interviews, networking, following up..it all takes time.  I’ve come close to a few job offers but I wasn’t exactly the right fit. I’m not giving up, though, and I have a few VERY exciting consulting jobs starting up that resulted from these very interviews.  My consulting firm, Culture Mom Media, also has a lot coming up in way of new clients.  And I’ll be filling you in on them soon.

Meanwhile, I hope everyone is having a GREAT summer. Please let me know what you’re up to these days in the comments.

Now I’m on the last leg of the tour, and I can’t say that it hasn’t been challenging for my husband. He’s been quite stoic, trying not to complain, letting me do what I have needed to do, but I know it hasn’t been easy. Yesterday morning when I called, he couldn’t find any clean underwear for my son.  For other kids, they’d probably be glad to wear dirty ones.  Not mine. My son is a neat freak and hygiene is everything to him.

As a mom, you try not to feel guilty for missing things, but it’s hard.  Last week I missed my daughter’s clarinet concert.  This trip she lost a tooth. My son graduated from cub scouts.  After I left for the 2nd or 3rd time, my daughter asked my husband why I go away so much.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the the nasty article in The Wall Street Journal on the Mommy Business Trip.  It focused primarily on conferences as a way for moms to escape their daily lives but it was antagonizing enough to make any mom feel guilty about having a balanced work/family life.

But you know what?  I don’t feel guilty for being away. Dads travel for work, and moms are no less than they are.  I do miss my kids and I will be a better mom for it it when I get home. But I won’t lie, it hasn’t been easy.  I got sick for a day on a leg of my trip and wanted to lie in bed all day.  It wore me down and I had to march on despite of feeling lousy. But even then, I checked in at home to make sure all was well.

Here are a few ways I’ve made this easier on my family while I’ve been away:

- I created a schedule for my husband and sitter so nothing would be forgotten.  Did it work?  It never all goes according to plan, but you hope for the best.

- I checked in often and spoke to my kids daily.  Last night my son couldn’t sleep and we spoke for a while. When my daughter’s tooth came out, she called me immediately to let me know.  It may be tooth #14 but it’s still exciting. I really hope that the tooth fairy came, but I can’t blame anyone if she didn’t.

- I gave the babysitter extra money for ice-cream and cabs when necessary. She doesn’t drive so I wanted to make it easy for them when they ventured far from home.  I also planned play dates and made sure their week was fun in my absence.

- I’ve let go of thinking that everything can go according to plan.  How can it when my husband works as hard as he does?  Things will slip, the house will be a mess when I get home, but knowing that everyone was safe and sound and happy is all I need.

I won’t lie – there is no perfect recipe for the success of a mom being away for days at a time.  We do our best. I know there are benefits to being away, too. Being a role model and having a career, and knowing they will one day my own daughter will enter the work force and have the same decisions to make.  That’s what I know.

And now it’s time to go home.

How do you feel about intuition? Do you hear a bell go off in your head when the world wants you to go in a specific direction and do you make your decisions based on what your gut feeling is telling you?

Intuition can be very powerful, particularly when you don’t even know it’s standing right in front of you, trying to tell you something.

I’m the kind of person whose life is led with my heart. I tend to lean toward projects and jobs I am hopeful will plug into my passion.  This can be both an asset and a flaw.  I’m hoping my kids are more rational than I am.

Recently I started my own business and I’ve been able to go after passion projects.  The rewards and outcome of the work and the level of appreciation from the people I work with can run very deep and I’m choosing my projects carefully. It’s been an interesting mix of new types of clients to date, ones that fit in with the mission of my brand.

So recently, along came one of these projects that looked promising. I saw their product as a perfect blend of my skills and background.  It had elements of some of my main interests: education, art and kids.

The client and I seemed to agree on the direction and scope of our work together.  We met in person and had one last phone call to tie up loose ends and begin our work together.  It seemed like a good fit. I know I was what they needed, to be honest.

But then it happened.  Somewhere during the call, I lost focus.  My husband interrupted me and my thoughts veered away from the conversation. Didn’t I want the job?

Sure enough, my contact called me back to tell me his “intuition” was telling him not to hire me.  He couldn’t gage my level of excitement about joining his team.

My feelings were hurt but I was diplomatic, sending them an email with my best wishes for a successful launch.  I don’t like leaving things in a pile and wanted to end on good terms.

But deep down, maybe I didn’t want the role? I can choose my projects now and at the end of the day, this wasn’t a project I was truly crazy about.

The word “intuition” rang in my brain for days. I was hurt, but ultimately, I realized that the decision was a blessing. Something bigger is coming, and this job would have gotten in the way.

Oh, and also, I wasn’t really going ball busters about the project.

Why do we make decisions with no plan to get a clear destination?  It wasn’t my intention to become a permanent member of their team. Their intuition taught me a lot about myself and I’m grateful to him for it, though it was not their intention.

My intuition grounds me.  It empowers me.  But it was my intuition, no one else’s, that guided the turn of events.  Only I didn’t understand at that moment.  Now I do and as events unfold in the upcoming weeks, the reason will become even more clear.

How about you – are you led with your passion or rationality?

It started with a true high when the play I’ve been working on, THE BEST OF EVERYTHING based on the book by Rona Jaffe, got a 4 star rating and was the “critic’s pick” in the New York Times and my name was mentioned.  I’m not kidding, scroll down to the bottom of the piece and there is my name in lights!  This play is so deserving and I can’t tell you how honored I am to have my name attached. The writing, the casting, the direction, the set, the costumes and the fact that the story is utterly timeless make the experience absolutely delicious.  As a woman involved in a women led production, I am kvelling.  Tickets have sold so fast and furious that we’ve had to add two additional performances — Monday, Oct. 15 at 8:30pm & Saturday, Oct. 20 at 4pm.  Order your tickets today.

Then it was time to make some tough decisions.  I have officially left my single consulting job of nearly 2-1/2 years and am joining the team of a very interesting start-up on Monday.  Letting go of the client I was working for was a tough decision, but a necessary one.  As I finalized my work there today, it all felt good.  Really good. This is the new company, and I’ll talk more about it in the upcoming month or two.

And MamaDrama, the social media boutique that my partner, Erin Leigh Peck, and I created turned one!  We are one year old and we are headed to the New Victory Theater tomorrow for a wonderful event with 20 members of our network.  I’ll write more about that on Sunday. I can’t believe that in one year we have worked with the likes of Playwright Horizons, the Public Theatre, Godspell, Annie, Avenue Q, Save the Children, Rosacea Facts with Cynthia Nixon as the spokesperson and more.  We’re hoping to announce a fantastic new client next week.

And now it’s the weekend. Sigh.  Deep breath.

How was your week?

This is the Tenth entry in “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” a series of guest posts about the working mom/stay-at-home dilemma.  It’s written by Sara R. Fisher, co-founder of Moms 2 Media.  

I obviously didn’t start the debate, but I had hoped that by starting my blog I could add productive and (sometimes) funny conversation to it. So when my friend Jean posted a link to my Facebook wall about this widely-read post by Glennon Melton on the topic I had to read, and of course, chime in. And then Monica chimed in and we all had a “we hate the old mommy wars debate party” and called it a night. Yes, our lives are THAT exciting.

I REALLY don’t care that much about the mommy wars anymore. I really don’t care if the SAHMs hate me or if I’m stuck on a phone call dealing with a client crisis during my son’s mommy and me class (who, me?) or about the moms that go to the office every day and have nannies or day cares or a fairy godmother taking care of their kids. I don’t care.

But what got me to actually writing a blog post 5+ years after I wrote my first one on the topic is that I am getting a bit irked with the theme of blog posts that trend towards teaching invaluable lessons to their daughters and how as either a stay-at-home mom or working mom or if we’re debating our choices, that we should be professional and productive because we are trying to raise our daughters to be strong women.

I’m all for raising strong women and the best daughters in the world, but when I look and think back over the years about this tired topic the conversation always trends towards the mother/ daughter dynamic.

What, then, for the moms of boys?

Because as a mom, working or not working, I’m trying to raise my sons to be all that you all with daughters are trying to as well. And let me tell you, the working/ non-working debate certainly shapes a young man as it would a young woman.

There are plenty of times where my eldest complains because I can’t pick him up from school, or I have to drop him early to head to a meeting and “he doesn’t get enough alone time with me.” I sometimes think those times make him stronger even though I feel badly that I couldn’t go chaperone the class field trip or volunteer for lunchroom duty for the umpteenth time. When he’s older and his brother is older, they’re going to see the ugly debate too and it could shape the kind of women they meet, date and potentially marry. Because I’ll be damned if he marries a sanctimommy hoe bag. Just saying.

The working mom debate is not a female-only issue.

My sons see in me the possibilities that they too, could implement in their lives down the line. That the definition of woman and wife and mother don’t have to be black and white, just as Glennon’s daughter doesn’t have to grow up in some antiquated mold of soccer mom vs. corporate mom.

I’d just like to say that moms of boys have just as much at stake in the debate.

(BTW – This whole conversation also says nothing of the husbands who are often off working their tails off just so moms like me can enjoy flexibility and some stay-at-home-ness. I know the guilt of missing events and the like wrack my husband constantly, but we’ve made our choices for now.)