Working moms are sometimes misunderstood by those who don’t fully grasp just how much work goes into morning routines at home. New York-based mom Liz Petrone, 38, hopes to help change that in her own little way by sharing her daily routine in a refreshingly honest Facebook post.
Aside from being a mom to four young children–aged 12, 11, 7, and 3–Petrone works at an IT company, where she has to report to work at 9 a.m. on weekdays.
“I woke four sleepy humans,” she begins in the post. “Some I gently patted, some I prodded, and one I pulled the covers off and tried to roll onto the floor when the pat and the prod fell short. I’m not proud of that last one. I made five beds, one twice because someone snuck into it and tried to go back into sleep. It may have been me.”
She recounts how she then took a shower to make herself “look sort of human.” Then proceeded to cleaning up after her kids in the bathroom.
“I watched them drive away with a wave and a throat lump and I walked back to my empty house. I cleaned their breakfast out of my car and my kitchen and my hair…”
“I made two very strong cups of coffee,” she shared, adding how she struggled with dressing her kids appropriately and making sure they brushed their teeth.
“I yelled ‘stop screaming! You’ll wake the neighbors!’ loud enough to wake the neighbors. Many, many times,” she confesses.
After driving her bigger kids and dropping them off the school, she quickly made a return trip to bring them stuff they forgot at home. She then went to the bus stop where her younger kids, or her “littles”, were to be picked up, only to find out her little ones had made themselves comfortable in the branches of their neighbor’s tree.
“I watched them drive away with a wave and a throat lump and I walked back to my empty house. I cleaned their breakfast out of my car and my kitchen and my hair,” continues Petrone, recounting how she then squeezed in more tasks: dismantling pillow forts, throwing in a load of laundry, and retouching her makeup made sloppy by goodbye kisses.
“If one more person says to me ‘wow, it sure must be nice to be able to waltz into work at 9:00am,’ I am going LOSE IT.”
photo: Liz Petrone Facebook page
“I fed the dog and wiped down the counter and turned off the TV and the coffee maker and a hundred lights and locked up and fielded 12 text messages and 2 phone calls and 384 red lights,” she writes. “All before 9:00am.”
In closing, she clarifies that her post is not a cry for help nor is it motivated by the need to gain sympathy on social media.
“I am lucky to have a job that affords me flexibility. I am lucky to have a job. I am lucky to have four healthy kids,” she continues, “I am lucky to live in a culture where women can and do work freely outside of the home. I am lucky to be healthy enough myself to mostly manage all this.”
She does admit, however, that she’s had enough of comments from co-workers who don’t know what she has to go through just to make it to work at 9:00 am.
“If one more person says to me ‘wow, it sure must be nice to be able to waltz into work at 9:00am,’ I am going LOSE IT,” she writes.
A shoutout to all her fellow hardworking moms
“To the working mamas, I feel you. I feel you so hard right now. But more than that, to ALL the mamas, I’m raising my cup of (now cold) coffee. You keep on doing you, sister, whatever that looks like. Unless it looks like judgement. Ain’t nobody got time for that sh*t. Some of us have work to do.”
In an interview with Yahoo, the devoted mom shared that the response was surprising. Her post has been shared nearly 1,500 times and have earned hundreds on comments on Facebook in the first week since she uploaded it.
“It’s definitely surprising,” shared the candid mom. “When I sit down and write these things, it’s often from a place of loneliness.”
Her husband works as a teacher who has to leave the house at 6 a.m., leaving Petrone with the task of getting their kids ready each day.
With her honest post, she hopes to shed light on what’s truly important. For parents not to base their value solely on the money you earn.
“Some of the hardest work I know people are doing is outside of the office, at home and with their family,” she confided in the interview. “My message is not a justification of my life or others. It’s more to everyone who is fighting this battle, I feel you and I’m there with you.”
source: Liz Petrone Facebook page, Yahoo.com
READ: 5 Tips to having successful morning routines for working moms
