I’m living the dream. I quit my full-time job at a Fortune 100 company to stay at home with my first baby. Since then, I’ve been working part-time, contract, and freelance positions as a marketing consultant. When I tell people what I’m doing, the response is usually something like, “That’s great! You really have the best of both worlds.”
“Oh yes,” I say, smiling. “It’s just the best.”
Let’s talk about conference calls… the thorn in the side
of every work-at-home mother without a nanny. Do they always have to be
scheduled at 9 am, the one time during the day when my baby will never, ever be
asleep?
Conference calls fall into two camps: the ones where you
can stay on mute the entire time and pretend to listen, or the ones where you
actually have to participate.
For the stay-on-mute version, I pick a floor of the house
to trap us on and then get out every toy/item-that-could-potentially-be-a-toy,
hoping that these will provide enough distraction to get us through the next
hour of living hell. It never is.
The first few minutes are trickiest because you might be
forced to make small talk while everyone’s getting on the call and a toddler
screaming, “Nurse! Nurse!” while Bobby from sales starts sharing his newest
monetization strategy might as well be screaming, “my mommy’s completely
unprofessional and disengaged from her career!”
Then there’s the actual call…those 60 minutes where you
let your child run completely loose around said floor of the house while you
struggle to focus enough that a) you hear your name when someone asks you a
question and b) you can respond with something better than “Um, yeah, I think,
sure, yes.”
I’ve let my son tear apart every drawer in my bathroom
and spread the contents of my make-up bag across the floor (sparkly eye shadow
is so crumbly). I’ve drawn dozens of animal stick figures on sticky notes as a
distraction technique. I’ve whipped out my boob and shoved it in his mouth as a
“calming” technique, hoping he doesn’t suck too loud if I’m forced to say
something. I’ve let him bang (with hands and feet) on my husband’s keyboard.
I’ve given him a head start on the art of teenage TP’ing by letting him unfurl
rolls of the stuff around my bedroom.
And those are the easy calls. The ones where you actually
have to participate the whole time…those are brutal. It’s literally impossible
to keep an 18 month old quiet for an hour, even a half hour. They just can’t do
it—nor should they. But the point is, if you’re going to not look like a
complete idiot, you just can’t have your baby babbling while you brainstorm
about business models. Which leaves only one choice: crib prison.
Now to me as an adult, the idea of being put in a soft,
quiet place with nice books, warm blankies, and lovely classical music and
being told I have to chill there for an hour sounds like a sweet deal.
Apparently not so much to a toddler. By the way my son reacts, you’d think I’d
stuck him in a Gitmo cell. He screams, cries, throws himself on the mattress, and
hurls those warm blankies and nice books on the floor. I lock myself in the far
corner of my bedroom and hope the microphone on my phone is too weak to pick up
the prisoner pleading for release in the background.
Just as a comparison, here’s how conference calls work in
the “real” world. You sit in your quiet office by yourself or with a couple
(adult) co-workers and listen intently while you stalk old high school friends
on Facebook and buy a new pair of shoes (for yourself) on Gilt. Yeah, that’s
definitely worse.
