Actually, it’s all I’ve ever known. My mom was always the breadwinner of our family and the one who made all the financial decisions. Maybe on the exterior it appeared like my dad was the head of the family, but in truth, my mom quietly ruled the household behind the scenes. It made for an uncomfortable dynamic, a reversal of roles in a culture where traditionally, the man is seen as the patriarch. It became even more magnified when my mom started earning big money when she switched careers to real estate from nursing. Nobody was fooled after that into thinking my mom wasn’t the money maker. As a girl growing up, my parents’ relationship was confusing and difficult – a reversal of roles, yes, but in all other ways falling into the stereotypical gender roles of Asian families. It comes as no surprise to me then, that I would end up as the breadwinner and decision maker for our family. It’s not that I didn’t necessarily want this role, but I’ve always known since I was a teenager that I would want to support myself – man or no man – because I’ve seen how volatile relationships can be and I never wanted to rely on anyone else.

Meeting someone at 20 is a lot different from meeting someone in your 30s. You’re not thinking about the future or having babies and maybe not even thinking about careers at that point. You’re certainly not worrying about whether or not the person that you’re with will end up with a good paying job in 5 to 10 years. I know I wasn’t at that age. We didn’t care about that kind of stuff back then; we just cared about having fun and making art. As the roll of the dice would have it, I didn’t end up with someone who made a lot of money. Maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise seeing as we were both music majors in college, but it didn’t really matter back then because we were both making crappy salaries in our mid to late 20s. It wasn’t until I graduated from grad school that I would start out earning Mark by earning 3x his hourly rate, and it wasn’t until Mia was born that I started thinking about what it meant to be the breadwinner. Soon after we became parents we met other new parents in our neighborhood, and our circle of friends expanded for the first time to include people who weren’t artists or chefs, musicians or internet geeks. For the first time, we knew people who were homeowners, who wore suits to work, who had grown up things like mortgages, investments and cleaning ladies, and who lived in apartments that looked like it was inhabited by adults and not college students. I understood for the first time what it meant to “keep up with the Joneses” and we, by any definition of that phrase, could not keep up with the Joneses.

What I’m about to say is the honest truth and I realize that it might not win me any new friends, but…

I would be lying if I said I never wished Mark had chosen a different career that earned more money.

I would be lying if I said I never got jealous of all my stay-at-home mom friends because the choice to stay home or work was never mine to make.

I would be lying if I never said that sometimes I felt it was unfair that the burden of lifting our family out of a paycheck-to-paycheck existence always fell on me.

Jealousy is shameful, I know. Feeling resentful can be just as bad, which is why I have admitted this to only a few close people who get me, but I have felt all of these things when I felt pressured to earn more money. I felt it when I was stressed, depressed, crying and paralyzed with fear because I didn’t have jobs lined up, or when I crammed 16 hour days working on deadlines while scrubbing the bathtub during work breaks. Ugh. I am not proud (ok, I am editing this to say to the single parents out there that I have nothing but respect for you and I’m sorry if this comes off sounding so bratty). Being the breadwinner didn’t put much of a strain in our relationship, but it did make Mark keenly aware that I was having these feelings sometimes. It made him feel guilty that he couldn’t solely support our family through his career choice and so he overcompensated by doing everything else around the house. To be clear, I never believed that it was the man’s job to support the family. I have talked with some dads about feeling the same kind of pressure and stress as the main breadwinner so it’s not even specifically about gender roles. I didn’t grow up expecting to be taken care of, after all, my mom switched careers solely because she was faced with sending 2 kids to college soon and my dad’s business wasn’t earning the money that we needed. Like my mom, I felt a huge amount of pressure to be the one, self inflicted or not, because I had more earning potential than Mark did.

But you know what? Looking back from where I stand now, I don’t think I would have changed a thing. As stressful as it was and still is, I’m grateful that our situation pushed me in survival mode to work harder. I’m certainly happy that I kept my career. I realized early on, even in the baby years, that I needed to keep that part of my identity to stay sane. In the end, who was earning what didn’t matter. The money didn’t matter. What did matter was that we were both equal partners in parenting and home life.

I wrote this post because some of the comments and emails written by some readers expressing the uncertainty of their future with their partners sort of broke my heart. Marriage is a complex relationship. Throw in parenthood and it gets even more complicated. Mark and I don’t have a perfect relationship. Quite frankly, it’s far from perfect, but we’ve known each other long enough to know where to pick up the slack from the other person to make things work. Some aspects of our personalities have not changed from the time we met as kids in college. Other things, like our ability to problem solve and navigate through life as parents, wasn’t something that we could have known about each other until we found ourselves in that situation. And other things just came as a complete surprise. I guess this is what happens when you grow old with someone. But I will say this: last year was the first year that Mark, as the business, pulled in the same amount of money that I did. What was in the past isn’t always forever.

These photos were taken at the High Line Phase 2. This is the stretch of the old railroad tracks that my friend and I snuck up on 12 years ago before it was developed into a public park.

I still don’t even really know what Rainbow City is and we just went there.

School’s out. As predicted, Mia shed a lot of tears so Mark and I decided that she needed to go to a happy place. Bouncing around Rainbow City seemed like a happy idea. I’m relishing the fact that I don’t have to wake up early in the mornings for a few weeks until camp starts, despite whatever time the girls decide to wake up. It’s like I’m on summer vacation. I know. I’m pretty lucky that they are so self sufficient in the morning and don’t wake me up, ever. I’m also relishing this time of relative leisure which has started this week. Ok, the truth is I actually spent the day yesterday panicking on and off about my light work schedule. I think it was the first day since I decided that I wanted to take most of the summer off that I felt worried, irresponsible. No one is paying me to take a vacation. After all, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.

But let me explain the need for this break. I often feel like I’m stuck in a vicious cycle: I want to expand our business and work on a few personal projects, but there is never enough time because I need to work to support our family, but none of these things are going to happen unless I free up more of my time. I often think how backwards it is that the business often takes a backseat to any other work obligations that I have. We’re trying to build a future with the biz, so shouldn’t it be the other way around? So this isn’t about a break from work. It’s a break from paying work, but I’ve got a list a mile long of things I want to get done. There’s a personal project that I’m working on that requires a lot of time, time that I will never have unless I make the time, so I am deciding to make the time. Sometimes when I let fear and rational thoughts creep in like it did yesterday, the decision seems questionable. Other times it feels like it needs to happen if I ever want to take a step outside of this cycle and try to fulfill anything on my list of goals. It’s scary. But I think I’ve come to the realization that things won’t really fall into place unless you start investing in yourself.

Seems like nothing signals summer better than berry picking. And it hits you, the heavy sweet scent of strawberries as soon as you get out of the car. Claudine is always more interested in picking flowers than she is fruit and our baskets always inevitably get littered with small blossoms and the random wildflower or weed, you know, “for decoration”. These strawberries went into a strawberry rhubarb pie that we brought to a school picnic the next day. Speaking of, today is the official last day of school for NYC public schools. If last year was any indication, Mia will come home awash in mixed emotions. Seems like she takes after me.

I don’t know when it happened, but my past indifference to summer has turned into love, despite my intolerance to heat. I welcome the break from the early hustle to get the lunches made and the kids out the door by 8:20 am. Both girls will officially be done with school tomorrow, although it feels like we’ve already started summer with our weekly picnics and warm weather outings.

Summer also slows down for the business and although it means less income earned, we’ve come to expect it every late June. Seems like many things these days have a predictable rhythm. What I can’t predict, however, is my freelance schedule. I vowed at the end of last year after a very hectic year on the verge of burnout, that I wouldn’t work as much this year if I could help it. It didn’t seem like it would turn out that way when January turned the corner, but looking back at the last few months, I realized that there has been a better balance between work and life. This summer I am choosing to work even less. How? Did we suddenly win the lottery? Ha, no (I wish! No, really, I really do wish). Realizing that time can sometimes be more valuable than money is a powerful realization. I’ve needed time for awhile now.

Lastly, thank you to each and every one of you who left a comment to my last post and shared a bit of your own story. I appreciate all your comments so much.

This is a word that has been coming up a lot. I get asked every now and then if I mind sharing such personal details about my life on a public blog. The answer would be no. I wouldn’t write anything that I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing (I do have *some* secrets left, ha). The other question I might get asked is “why?”. I often say that this blog is more for me than for any audience, but the “why” part of it did become a little more clear when I sat down a few weeks ago with Joanne Wilson who interviewed me for her Woman Entrepreneur Mondays series. We talked, among many things that morning over coffee, about how we were both in agreement that there could be more sharing and honest discussion among women, particularly women who were also working mothers. This is happening more these days on the web via social media and blogs, but there still could be so much more – and I don’t mean fashion tips on what shape dress is the most flattering on your post-pregnancy body or what color wall will be the next trend in kid rooms. I love eye candy distractions as much as the next girl, but I do have a limit, and at the end of the day the most inspiring content on the web for me isn’t going to be a moodboard.

I totally get that blogging of this nature isn’t for everyone. You open yourself up and you’re also opening yourself up to haters, critics, and people who just can’t help themselves by telling you what they think of you. But that’s ok. It’s worth it to get a comment or an email from a reader who can relate to something I’m writing and who then doesn’t feel so lonely for feeling the same things, or from someone who might aspire to have children one day, but can’t quite figure out how to make it work with their career. Our life path isn’t for everyone and I’ve never aspired to be some kind of role model for “the working mother”, but if I’ve helped shed some light to anyone’s questions on balancing work and family by perhaps showing that parenthood and a career doesn’t have to be so black and white, that there are alternative lifestyles out there beyond a 9-5 existence, then I’m happy to have helped in that small way.

Things have changed since I first became a mom in 2004. Things are shifting and the economy isn’t the same. It seemed like most of the new mothers I was meeting back then decided to stay home. Some of the moms went back to work full time after their 3 month maternity leave and I didn’t see them very much after that. I rarely, if ever, met a mother who freelanced like I did and I often felt like I couldn’t relate to either the stay-at-home moms or the working moms because really, in one sense, I was both. I wish there were other people that I could have talked to back then who could relate to the kind of life that we were trying to build, but we just figured it out ourselves as we went along. Our situation was born because we couldn’t afford full time childcare, but we couldn’t live off of Mark’s salary either, so I needed to work. I was always the main breadwinner of the family and that wasn’t necessarily going to change just because we had kids. Somehow we made it happen in the past 7 years through juggling schedules, a PT nanny 2 days a week (up until last summer) and tag team childcare even if it meant that we were sleeping less or that Mark often went to my mother’s group playdates in place of me. If we were being really honest with ourselves, the juggling may have played a part in a few lost projects or jobs, so it’s not been without sacrifices. Often, it was stressful. But in the past few years, I have met more families like ours. I meet women all the time who are starting or running small businesses while raising their kids, or families where both the parents are freelancers or own a business together. Perhaps the change in economy has instigated this, or perhaps we’re all starting to think differently about what it means to be working parents since the traditional structure of corporate America doesn’t make it easy to be a working mom.

And this is why I choose to share (sharing is caring! bwahaha, sorry, couldn’t resist). It’s not because I think my life is better than yours (I assure you, it is probably not). It’s not because I want to be some kind of blog celebrity (that whole thing, you guys, is so weird and strange). It’s not because I have anything to teach anybody. What I do have, through age and experience for a lack of a better way to describe it, are stories and I genuinely believe that through sharing, we can help each other out. To tell each other that it’s ok to get angry, to be sad and frustrated, to be scared and lonely sometimes. That it’s ok to be all of these things even as mothers. Although I love my children dearly and I am proud of the little people that they are turning out to be, being a mother isn’t my greatest achievement in life. It may very well turn out to be in the end, but I don’t know this to be true yet because I haven’t finished living my life. Being a mother isn’t what defines me. It’s part of who I am, but it isn’t what defines me. I get to decide what does.

If you’re a longtime reader, then you might remember that 2nd photo from one of the earliest posts on this blog exactly 3 years ago. The years go by fast doesn’t it? And in that post about Coney Island I waxed nostalgic about the impending demise of Astroland, though every year the historic amusement park seemed to steal time by managing to stay open another year. But the park did close 4 months after that photo was taken and last year a new park opened in its place. I’m not a huge fan of amusement parks, but of course as a kid I thought they were the greatest things in the world. Growing up, our amusement park jam was the Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. Seemed like we’d go there every Spring for an end of the school year field trip. Great Adventure also had this promotion every opening day where you’d get in free if you presented a snowball at the ticket counter. And so, every year when there was a decent snow day, my friends and I would pack a couple of good, hard snowballs and store them in our freezers just for that occasion.

The girls haven’t really been to any other amusement parks other than the ones at Coney Island and the rides at Seattle Center, so I’m guessing that a trip to a proper, big amusement park is in our future at some point. The thought of going on any rides just makes Mark and I gag at this point, but I remember what it was like when I was a kid. I wanted to go on every rollercoaster and every twisty, upside down, ride thingy out there. Judging by the extreme squealing and uncontrollable laughter on the faces of the girls as they are whisked away in teacups and mermaid boats, it won’t be long before they will too.

I think one of the best things about the girls getting older is that they are becoming true companions and I can take them places on my own that I wouldn’t have been able to even just a year ago when we were still dealing with a stroller. Like the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mean this looks fun, right? Shilo was even nice enough to whip up the girls some sparkly mermaid wear which the girls were thrilled about. Can’t even remember the last time I went to the Mermaid Parade, but it was definitely pre-baby years. All I had to say to the girls were “mermaid” and “Coney Island” and they were all over it, as any sequin and sparkly loving girl would be. I warned them that they might see “a lot of boobs”, but they just giggled and said “boobies” about 5 times. They even informed our parade watching neighbors that some of the drag-mermaids they were taking photos of were guys (“that’s actually a man, you know”). Oh, to be 4 and 7 and see the spectacle of it all. Now, if only Wigstock, one of my favorite events back in the day, would come back.

Seriously…I thought the hormonal, emotional crying days were over when I weaned the last kid off diapers, but nobody told me that it doesn’t end there. And I wonder why I felt so off kilter all last week. I don’t do well with goodbyes. Like at all. Especially when it signals something significant, like the end of some kind of era. But it’s been in the air lately and with it, the tendency to drop tears at any random moment. For example, at Mia’s end of the year ballet recital, it wasn’t the sight of my child prancing diagonally across the studio floor with toes pointed and arms bent in a circle that made me emotional. No, it was witnessing one of the dance teachers present flowers and saying goodbye to her 2 long-time students who were moving out of the country that turned on the waterworks. The goodbye lasted all of 20 seconds and involved 3 people who I didn’t even know, who I’d never even seen before, wtf?

I thought my weepy, hormonal baby days were over. It’s probably been a good 2 years since I cried watching a sappy Mastercard “priceless” commercial. Guess not, because apparently, parenthood is ripe full of opportunities for emotional moments. It sort of never ends. Last week I was overwhelmed with the ending of preschool for Claudine. It’s a program that both she and Mia attended since they were babies. We spent the last 6 years walking up the hill from our house to the park, climbing up those heavy stone stairs guarded by a pair of regal lion sculptures to the entrance of the school. It’ll be weird not to take that walk every day come Fall and be greeted by some of the teachers who have taught both girls over the years.

Kids Claudine’s age don’t seem to quite understand the heaviness of goodbyes. She ended her last day of preschool today like any other. The sadness and significance of this ending is all on me (I may or may not have had to fight back tears on the walk home from school the last 2 days). Mia, on the other hand, wraps up another school year in a week and she’s already exhibiting some anxiety over having to say goodbye to her teacher. (Actually, I think all the parents this year are too as Mia’s 1s grade teacher was really quite exceptional). So I think to myself…every June is going to be emotional like this? *faceplant*

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there! Not much else to say except that Mark is enjoying a full day off today and we are contemplating going strawberry picking. Here is a Father’s Day post from last year, and a post about our favorite dad here. Hope your day is great!

What a strange week. Lots going on in the way of good byes, end of the year activities for the girls and meetings for me. Sounds busy, right? It was, but I felt so out of sorts much of the time, unmotivated. Trying to make some decisions about summer and wasn’t really successful coming to any clear plan. Met with my biz ladies group last night and maybe that’s what I needed – to be among friends. I guess it had been awhile since I’ve hung out with friends. I felt a bit like my old self again. Oh, and one last thing? Forgot how much of a fidgeter I am. See all that candle wax up there? Totally a fidgeter’s paradise.