On "leaning-in" and dreaming







I have been so on edge lately.  My work is very stressful and I've had to go into the office every day.  Lane has been on and off fussy and extremely hard to put down, sometimes getting so tired at night that he starts sticking out his tongue and making funny faces we've never seen before just to prevent his body from falling asleep.  The stresses that come with buying a home and having a seven month old and trying to be a working mother are just really piling up on me right now and I find myself with tension headaches and tight shoulders and on the verge of tears over the stupidest things.  Am I pregnant?  Oh, I am so kidding.  I am working.  Hard.

On NPR today, that woman....that lean-in woman...you know the one...the facebook COO or something who says women need to "lean-in" to their jobs and stop putting careers on hold for families they don't have yet, or some BS, gave an entire speech.  She said women don't step up in the workforce because they are worried about balancing work and their potential future families.  What women is she talking to?  Almost ALL of the women I know in my age group are the money makers in the family.  They make significantly more than their male counterpart, they support them financially, they keep up the home and pay the bills and cook dinner in the evenings and some of them are even mothers and come home to their second job of parenting their children, but are men asked to "lean-in" to their opposite stereotypical gender role and clean the damn house or plan a function?

This sounds like I have resentment, but I truly don't.  I just worked an entire day at my job and exclusively breastfed my baby and cooked dinner and negotiated house repairs and then heard this COO talking about how ladies don't do enough to jump the corporate ladder or demand the pay they're worth when that's all I've been doing for 12 months (besides having a baby, thank you very much).  It's a dated discussion.  I hope that woman "leans-in" a little too far and get's eaten by the groundhog we saw pop out of this hole.

As for the bigger picture, I've been falling asleep at 10pm and having vivid dreams.  I'm in the center of a tornado, I'm jumping/falling off the bridges in portugal, I'm eating bony fish straight off the string.  When I wake, Lane is curled under my arm, his toes kicking my legs and I remember for a moment how I woke with his toes kicking the inner lining of my body just a few months ago.  Every morning I start by whispering how I love him to his forehead, right above his ear.  He can't understand the words, but I know he can understand the feeling already.

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