By Cheryl Scheir
As I manage these days of balancing my work life with my family commitments, I am reminded of when my children were younger, and I was trying to care for them, shuttle them around, make dinner, and clean house, all while working a part- to full-time at-home freelancing job.
Bottom line: it wasn’t easy.
If you’re a working mother or father, the pandemic has taught you, probably painfully, that you can only spin so many plates at one time. You’ve may have learned to embrace, reluctantly, technology as a babysitter. And you may have realized, as I did early on, that my worst side, as far as my kids are concerned, is my back.
So here I am now, back to it. I packed this morning for another stint at my parents’ house (length: undetermined), where I’ll be juggling work commitments with caregiving, meal prep, house clean-out, and generally trying to get my parents’ health, financial, and home situation under control. I am sitting right now in a home that my husband and I are preparing for my parents to live in, one that is minutes from our home instead of the hours away of their current home. I wonder if this is my life now, and I hope that I’ll get used to it.
There are lots of unknowns, surely, but the power of freelancing is that you find a way to make a way, and I hope this situation will be no different. I talked to a freelancer friend a few years ago about how every freelancer responds when asked, “Can you do this-new-thing-you’ve-never-done-before?” The answer, of course, is YES.
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