Now that I’ve been a mom for a little over a year, you’d think I would have learned a lot.

And I have.

But the lesson I keep learning, that nails me in the face over and over and over?

This shit is hard!

I adore my son and love being his mommy, but I am having a hard time balancing being his mom with being all of the other people I am and want to be.

I feel like I can be supermom, or superwife, or superme, but I can’t be all three and rarely can I even overlap two successfully.

An example—for the holiday weekend I decided to forgo my to-do list and unplug somewhat and just focus on my two Rickys. We played, we went to story time and lunch with friends, we took walks, we napped together—it was an awesome weekend.

But now I have a to-do list that has been ignored and is now even longer. I have posts I want/need to write for this blog, for DuPage Mamas, for Chicagonista. I have ninety-five emails to wade through. Most of them are crap, but I still have to make my way through them. I have my Macaroni Kids newsletter to get out.

And all of this is stuff I want to do (well, maybe not the ninety-five emails!), but how do I do all of that and not take time away from the Rickys?

I’m making it work right now by focusing on my kiddo all day. When he naps, I do laundry, I answer a few emails, I quickly blog (this is when Wordless Wednesday and all those other short posts get done!). Once my husband gets home from work we usually take a walk, do dinner, give Little Ricky a bath, and put him to bed. And then I sit back down at the computer and get back to work on that to-do list.

So I’m managing it without neglecting my child, but I’m kind of neglecting my husband. I’m “lucky” (not sure if that’s the right word!) that he has a busy job so lots of times he is on his computer at night too. So at least he’s not sitting on the couch twiddling his thumbs while I ignore him. And he’s super supportive of all of the things on my plate.

But still.

This isn’t what I want our marriage to look like. This isn’t what I want my life to look like. Scrambling from one task to the next, never feeling caught up, dropping at least one ball a day.

And I know the advice many of you will give is to cut back on the writing or let the chores slide. And I do a little. But when I let that stuff go too much it wears on me. And then I feel like I’ve let myself slide. These are the things I do for me.

And I get that now that I’m a mom I can’t always do for me. But I also don’t think it’s good to completely lose myself in being a mom.

So where’s the answer? Is there an answer? Or should I just get used to being frazzled? To having a to-do list that never ends? To spending an hour or two a day with my husband before we both go back to our respective computers?

C’mon, moms! Help a girl out!