Yes.

Of course being a Mother is the hardest job in the world.

There is no pay, no vacation, once a year you are treated to a nightmare brunch scenario with mimosas, and it is my understanding that eventually we all get to be lectured on our complete ignorance of ANYTHING and EVERYTHING by someone half our height who wasn’t even a twinkle in our eyes at the turn of the millennium.

So mark your calendars for that one, folks.

And if I’m being completely honest, it was the exhaustion from that lack of Mom vacation that really pushed me to consider going back* to work (you know, for the KIDS) and served as the catalyst for this blog post.

Good Intentions
To be clear, I’ve always held a job since having children. I joined the gig economy (which was originally just called freelancing) in 2013 because I thought it might be important to lay a flexible work foundation for when I might need it down the road. I imagined taking all the maternity leave I wanted. Attending mid-morning band concerts. Four o’clock soccer games. Having dinner on the table at 5 p.m. As a young creative in the agency world, there certainly didn’t appear to be an alternative.

Smash Cut To
I eventually ended up taking six weeks of maternity leave because, as a remote contract worker, I was too nervous to take more; I became obsessed with the idea that I’d be replaced before I could get back to my job. And then I did things like saying YES to weekend freelance projects, sometimes with my sleeping infant in tow (to the delight of freelancers around me) who cooed that they, too, had launched their businesses or continued their careers with children under their desks or sleeping within arms’ reach while they typed away on a computer.

I thought I was part of a club that was making things better for our kids. In theory, I was “there.” In my head, I was more accessible. And more flexible with my schedule. All while still demonstrating something like strength, ambition, and leadership, though, to a two-year-old, I suspect I might have simply gotten away with the latter by strong-arming his Dad into pizza for the second night in a row.

Best Laid Plans
In any case, it eventually came to a head as all tenuous situations do.

I wasn’t there. In fact, I was almost always late to pick our kids up from daycare and my parents’ home. Always wrapping up one last Google Chat, responding to feedback on a manuscript, taking an unscheduled check-in. And as someone who billed hourly, I was happy to be needed. But it almost always resulted in late dinners and even later bedtimes.

I wasn’t flexible. Surprise trips to the zoo? Nope. What if I was needed on a call? Lunch with my parents? Yeah, right. I sometimes had clients on opposite coasts and lunch in Minnesota routinely collided with afternoon work sessions.

And I certainly wasn’t radiating strength or leadership. Despite my best intentions, to a toddler, I looked the exact same as when he left the house, unless I happened to have a video conference—then there was lipstick—but even at that point, I was often more surly than any one of those heroic traits I mentioned above. And for no apparent reason to my family.

So why did it fail? Why give up the gig life, the one with the flexible schedule, where everyone always looks like they’re hustling in a fancy coffee shop as part of some kind of monochrome Instagram dream world?

*Back = back to an office. With a commute. And co-workers who can peep over your cubicle wall and ask if you’ve seen the latest episode of Pretty Little Liars. You know. BACK.

Illustration by Libby VanderPloeg

Kate Smith

Kate Smith is a content producer for a beloved Minnesota retailer, wife to Fred and mother to Samson (7) and Naomi (5). With her allotted 30 seconds of daily free time, Kate likes to make a frozen Tom Collins, grab her new Romance Writer’s Phrase Book and pretend she can’t hear her family knocking on the other side of the bathroom door.