Now What?

Voices from the Blogosphere – Blogger Spotlight

Welcome to Blogger Spotlight, where we showcase the voices of Mamapedia community moms through their authentic and wonderfully diverse blog posts. Sometimes humorous, sometimes informative, sometimes bittersweet—always engaging. Enjoy!

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Now What?

“How do you do it all?”

I used to get that a lot. From other moms at my son’s preschool. From parents at the Y where my daughter took swim lessons. From coworkers at the web consulting agency where I managed a team of designers. From the editor at the publishing company that offered me a contract to write a design book. Even from my husband.

I was a 37-year-old mom with two kids and a stepdaughter, and somehow, my family, my marriage, and my career were all thriving.

Then, one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2009, while driving to Target to buy diapers, I broke down. Not my car. Me.

I pulled over to the side of the road, my hands shaking, barely able to breathe. I called my husband and sobbed, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Thus ended my career, and thus began a journey into crippling depression, anxiety, and insomnia; medication, meditation, and therapy. As I learned to heal my body and my mind, I searched for answers to one question: What the hell happened to me?

At first, I thought there was something wrong with me. After all, I had a loving husband, a supportive boss, healthy kids, a good income. If I couldn’t manage a career and a family then how were other women doing it, women who didn’t have all those advantages?

I started talking to my friends, my relatives, my housekeeper, my doctor, my babysitter. I wanted to know how were they managing it. Guess what? They weren’t.

They suffered from panic attacks and depression, heart palpitations and hives, migraines and mysterious coughs that wouldn’t go away. Some of them took anti-depressants. Others took anti-anxiety medications. Most of them fantasized about quitting their jobs. They were barely getting by.

I had no idea. Like me, they had been putting a brave face on their suffering. Like me, they all assumed there was something wrong with them.

I started researching the issue in earnest and found out there was a lot more to the story. Americans work longer hours and report higher levels of work-family conflict than workers in any other developed nation in the world. We are one of the few countries with no comprehensive right to paid maternity leave or paid sick days. Save the Children ranked us a pathetic #31 out of 43 countries in the index of “Best and Worst Places to Be a Mother.” And Human Rights Watch recently issued a scathing report saying the U.S. is failing its families, citing a lack of support for breastfeeding and flexible schedules, and workplace discrimination against families.

What is going on with us?

There are dozens of self-help books telling women they can do it all—succeed in demanding careers and still be good parents, good partners, and even happy, fulfilled people. But my experience and that of the women I know tells a different story.

I decided to start writing about my experience as a way to organize my thoughts and connect with others who are thinking deeply about this issue. And so, dear reader, we find ourselves here, on an auspicious day, International Women’s Day (March 8). What better time to ask the question: How can we make the U.S. a better place to raise our families?

Katrina Alcorn is a former journalist turned design consultant. She’s also a mom and step-mom who lives with her husband and three kids in Oakland, CA. She writes about the perils of working and raising children on her blog, Working Moms Break. Find her on twitter: @kalcorn.