A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: Part-Time, Work-at-Home Attorney
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For this week’s installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader Mindy B., who lives in a suburb of Detroit and is a work-at-home attorney mom with a teenage daughter. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, cold-hearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat
If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.
First, Some Basics about this Working Mom…
Name: Mindy B.
Lives: A Detroit suburb
Job: Work at home (part time) for a boutique law firm
Age: 49
Home Situation: I live in a Tudor home in a community-oriented small town with my husband who travels frequently for work, our 14-year-old daughter who’s in all honors classes (plus band) in 8th grade and swims competitively 20+ hours per week, and two 2-year-old CRAZY pups.
Childcare Situation: Because I work from home, I only need babysitters when we will be out past the time our daughter goes to sleep (i.e., theater, etc.) but I do need “chauffeurs” to drive our daughter to/from activities when I have afternoon or evening commitments and my husband is traveling/working late.
Mindy pointed out how her schedule may be different from other Week in the Life moms we feature:
(1) we only have one child (I have NO idea how parents juggle more than one child!), (2) she’s more responsible than most adults I know, and (3) my husband’s office is an hour away from home and he also travels out of town 1–2 nights a week, 2–3 weeks per month.
A Week in My Life
Monday
5:30 a.m. Wake up.
5:45 a.m. Make hot chocolate and get Clif Bar for 14-year-old daughter (Hayden).
5:50 a.m. Wake up Hayden, drive her to swimming. I clean up the house (housekeeper comes today).
8:00 a.m. Pick up Hayden and drive home.
8:00–8:50 a.m. Make Hayden’s lunch and shower/dress while she is showering/dressing/packing backpack. Sit and talk with her while she’s eating breakfast.
8:50 a.m. Hayden leaves to walk (five minutes) to middle school. (School starts at 9:00 on Mondays, 8:05 Tuesday–Friday.)
9:15 a.m. Leave for annual physical appt.
10:30 a.m. Home to start working (lawyer, mostly work at home).
3:30 p.m. Hayden comes home from school, has snack, does homework. I’m continuing to work.
5:15 p.m. Drive carpool (Hayden and friend) to swimming.
5:45–7:00 p.m. Continue working.
7:00 p.m. Make dinner, eat with husband.
8:40 p.m. Carpool drives Hayden home from swimming, I feed her dinner, do dishes/clean up kitchen.
9:30 p.m. I sit with Hayden in her room and talk, then kiss her goodnight.
10:30 p.m Fall asleep!
When we asked Mindy about her part-time schedule, she wrote:
My hours really vary. Since I work for a litigation practice, it can be as little as one or two (just to review incoming discovery, for example, if nothing is on the calendar for a week) or as many as 80 (witness prep, pre-trial motions, etc., for the week before a trial). However, since I usually am the third in the line of attorneys assigned to a case (behind a partner and senior associate who work full time and in the firm’s office), my hours generally are less regular than if I worked at the firm. This working relationship has pros (I am able to see my daughter much more and am able to drive her to her activities) and cons (it’s harder to know when I’ll be busy) but, at this stage in our lives, it fits my needs and my family’s needs better than if I worked full time in an office.
Tuesday
6:15 a.m. Wake up, shower/dress, make Hayden’s lunch.
7:00 a.m. Wake up Hayden. She gets ready and has breakfast on her own.
7:10 a.m. Leave for mentoring at inner city high school.
7:50 a.m. Hayden leaves for school on her own.
8:50 a.m. Leave mentoring, drive to client site.
9:15–11:00 a.m. Work at client site.
11:00–11:15 a.m. Drive home, change into yoga clothes.
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Attend yoga class.
12:30 p.m. Grocery shop.
1:00 p.m. Shower/dress.
1:30 p.m. Put dinner in slow cooker.
1:45–2:30 work
2:30 p.m. Conduct phone interview of new university president and prepare introductory remarks to deliver at Friday fundraiser.
3:30 p.m. Hayden comes home from school, has snack while we chat. She does homework. I pack her bag for swimming.
4:00 p.m. I leave for pool (I coach 4:15–8:15 p.m. tonight).
5:15 p.m. Carpool picks up Hayden to drive her to swim (5:30 p.m.–8:00).
8:15 p.m. Since I am already at the pool, I drive Hayden and carpool home.
8:30 p.m. Husband, Hayden, and I eat dinner. (I say Hayden’s late swimming has turned us into Europeans in that we now eat dinner much later than most Americans. Lol.)
9:00 p.m. I do dishes / clean up kitchen.
9:30 p.m. I sit with Hayden in her room and talk, then kiss her goodnight.
10:30 p.m. Fall asleep!
Wednesday
6:15 a.m. Wake up, shower/dress, make Hayden’s lunch.
7:00 a.m. Wake up Hayden. Sit and talk with her while she’s eating breakfast.
7:50 a.m. Hayden leaves for school, I leave for client site for dep prep.
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. Dep prep.
3:30 p.m. Hayden comes home from school by herself, has snack, does homework. Packs her bag for swimming.
5:15 p.m. Carpool picks up Hayden to drive her to swim (5:30–8:00 p.m.).
6:00 p.m. I drive from client site to committee dinner meeting, meet husband there.
8:00 p.m. Leave husband at committee meeting, drive to pool to pick up daughter and carpool.
8:30 p.m. Feed dinner to Hayden (leftovers — poor girl). Husband arrives home.
9:00 p.m. I do dishes / clean up kitchen.
9:15–11:00 p.m. I work.
9:30 p.m. I put Hayden to sleep.
11:15 p.m. Fall asleep!
Thursday
6:15 a.m. Wake up, dress, make Hayden’s lunch.
7:00 a.m. Wake up Hayden. Sit and talk with her while she’s eating breakfast.
7:50 a.m. Hayden leaves for school.
8:00–10:45 a.m. Work.
10:45 a.m. Leave for tennis.
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Tennis clinic
12:15 p.m. Shower / dress.
12:45 p.m. Work
3:30 p.m. Hayden comes home from school, has snack, changes into tennis clothes. I pack her swim bag, tennis bag, and make a sandwich and fruit for her to eat between tennis and swimming.
3:45 p.m. Drive Hayden to tennis lesson.
4:00–5:00 p.m. Work in car during Hayden’s tennis lesson.
5:00–5:15 p.m. Drive Hayden from tennis lesson to swimming.
5:30–11:00 p.m. Work.
8:30 p.m. Husband picks up takeout.
8:40 p.m. Carpool drives Hayden home from swimming.
8:45 p.m. Husband, Hayden, and I eat dinner, husband does dishes / cleans up kitchen so I can get right back to work.
9:30 p.m. Husband puts Hayden to sleep.
11:30 p.m. Fall asleep!
Mindy explained how things have changed as her daughter has gotten older:
My whole life has gotten easier. … Partly, I think, it is attributable to her needing less hands-on parenting (i.e., she can dress herself, etc.) and partly the ease is attributable to me feeling more comfortable as a working mom. The luxury of working at home has helped to ease traditional working-mom guilt, because I actually am available to participate in many of the events other parents cannot. It also helps because Hayden is able to witness what I do, she asks real-time questions, and so my career doesn’t seem totally independent of her (if that makes sense), which also reduces working-mom guilt. Because Hayden sees me working, she is very sensitive to when I can’t make the dinner I promised, for example, when something pops up that I have to prepare or edit. This is a great benefit I could never have anticipated. Having Hayden see me working as she’s grown up almost has taken away the mystique of a career, in a good way.
Friday
5:00 a.m. Wake up.
5:15 a.m. Make hot chocolate and get Clif Bar for Hayden.
5:20 a.m. Wake up Hayden and drive her to swimming.
5:30–7:00 a.m. Work at pool while Hayden swims. (Practice starts at 5:30 but she always arrives 10 minutes late on Friday mornings.)
7:00 a.m. Drive home
7:15 a.m. Make Hayden’s lunch, write permission slip for her to be picked up early from school by friend’s mom.
7:50 a.m. Hayden leaves for school.
8:00–10:30 a.m. Work.
10:30 a.m. Prepare food for Hayden to eat at afternoon/evening swim meet, pack Hayden’s swim bag.
11:00 a.m. Drive Hayden’s swim bag, Border Patrol authorization letter to friend’s house, drive to yoga.
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Yoga.
12:45 p.m. Shower / dress.
1:30–4:30 p.m. Work.
3:00 p.m. Friend’s mom picks Hayden up from school to drive the girls to swim meet in Canada. (Not including border-crossing process, meet is only about 15 minutes from where we live in MI.)
4:30 p.m. Get dressed.
5:00 p.m. Friends pick me up to drive me to a fundraiser I’m chairing.
6:00 p.m. Meet husband at fundraiser. (He drove directly from his office.)
7:00 p.m. Introduce new university president.
8:30 p.m. Leave fundraiser with husband for home so we can be home when Hayden returns from meet (arranged different friend’s dad to drive her home, including authorization for him to transport her back across the border).
9:30 p.m. I sit with Hayden in her room and talk about school, the meet, etc., then kiss her goodnight.
10:30 p.m. Fall asleep!
We asked Mindy about her thoughts about having her daughter during her 3L year in law school:
If I could do it again, knowing what I know now, I would not have created the circumstances so I could get pregnant during my 3L (or, actually, during law school). … The coalescing of events in the three months between my daughter’s birth and taking the bar exam created craziness in my life that, under other circumstances, could have been disastrous. Hayden was born at 6:20 a.m. on Saturday, March 29. It was awful and ended in a near medical emergency. Yet I was so scared I wouldn’t be offered a permanent job (I was interning for the Committee in the House of Representatives where I did end up working) that I returned to work on Tuesday, April 1. My mother-in-law and my mom both were able to come to D.C. for extended periods of time to help my husband with the baby at night. If they hadn’t been there, my professional and educational life could have been wiped out! I half feel guilty for this, but both moms and my husband let me sleep as much as I could every night because I was back to work (interning 2–3 days per week), studying for full-time law school finals (mid-April), and then would be taking the bar exam (July). Without the help I had, I could not have finished school, secured permanent employment, and passed the bar exam. On the other hand, Hayden was born during a natural transition (between law school and my legal career) so I didn’t have to worry about the possible messages my pregnancy could be sending to my superiors about my career intentions (and other fears experienced by professional women trying to advance their careers while starting/expanding a family).
Thanks so much to Mindy for sharing a bit of her life as a working mom! Readers, what’s your biggest takeaway from her week as a work-at-home attorney mom, a part-time lawyer, and her general work/life balance?
Picture via Stencil.
I notice that you wake your daughter up. I wake up my almost-15-year-old son, too, but now that he’s starting high school, I feel that he should be able to get himself up. But he can’t. Even with setting 6 alarms and going to bed at a decent time, he just doesn’t wake up on his own. My mother handled it this way: if we didn’t make the bus, we had to find our own way or miss school (and face consequences). It was so stressful and I’d have nightmares about missing the bus. I don’t want to inflict that stress on my kid, but I also want to prepare him for being an adult. Any tips ?
Thanks for sharing your experience Mindy! Hayden sounds like a great teen.
With hubby traveling a lot, how did you make the adjustment in terms of chores/household responsibilities? Or did it just happen organically?
Genuinely curious, is it standard to have nighttime baby-sitters for middle schoolers now? I started babysitting when I was 11 and by 14 my parents would have only had someone stay with me if they were going away overnight. Have norms changed?
Thank you Mindy for sharing! And thank you Kat for starting this series! Don’t have kids yet but the planner in me is always concerned about how to make it work as a working mom, and these series have been the best explanations and examples of how to do it.
Thank you for sharing Mindy!
I’m curious to hear from other moms with older children about how they instill responsibility and independence in their children. My stepdaughter (who lives with us full-time) is 12 and has been packing her own lunch since she was 10, is responsible for her breakfast on weekdays, wakes up on her own (alarm clock) and is responsible for various chores (setting table, folding laundry etc.). She is also on a competitive dance team, though the schedule is not nearly as grueling as a competitive swim team.
I’m curious to hear what other people do because she has said that her peers do not have chores. When I was her age, I had many chores including preparing a simple family dinner once a week. My husband had even more responsibilities because he was the oldest child of a single mother and has three younger siblings.
I absolutely love this series. Hayden seems so responsible! I appreciate that you highlighted how your working from home presents real-time opportunities to talk with her about your work. That’s something I definitely hadn’t considered about WFH. Great post!
Mindy B. –
I’m curious at what age Hayden was when you started working from home? I’m an attorney who has recently gone in house and I have the ability to work from home occasionally. I do nanny care, and my children are young (under 6). I had not considered the beneficial side effects of them seeing me work during the day. However, I feel like working from home while they are this age would be counterproductive for me. What age did you think it became manageable with Hayden?
Thanks for sharing your story, Mindy! Can I just say how heart-wrenching your birth story is? Going back to work after two days! You are amazing! I don’t think I could sit comfortably after two days, let alone be functional at work/school.
I think it makes total sense to downshift when your kids are older. If you have high-quality day care, the preschool years are actually much easier than the school years. My kid needs me much more now than she did as a preschooler–not just to drive her to all her activities, but to help with homework and academic enrichment, and to be there for her through all the typical tween stuff.
How did you make the transition from full-time to part-time? And how old was your daughter when you did it? I have one toddler and one in elementary school. We’re making it work for now, but I’m actually interested in downshifting when the kids get older — which is the opposite of how most people do it!
Sometimes I try to bribe Hayden into scaling back swimming with Hallmark Mystery Movies, but she hasn’t taken the bait yet. Ha. I actually am very proud of her motivation and I can see how, on her own, she prioritizes homework so she doesn’t have to worry about it while she’s swimming. But her swimming does impact our family. One of the major benefits we realized when I stopped working full-time in an office is that I am able to accomplish during the week a lot of the tasks that used to consume our weekends (dry cleaner, grocery shopping, laundry, etc). So we do spend some weekends at swim meets, but most of the other weekends are available for fun family activities instead of chores. (We play with our dogs, we watch movies, Hayden and I cook together, Hayden rides her bike with friends, etc.).
Man, it almost seems like Hayden’s schedule is worse than Mindy B’s!
This makes me yearn for the future when my child(ren) are grown enough to do the things that Hayden does — being self sufficient, etc, although I didn’t think much about how one child can spend so much time outside of school doing something like sports.
Thanks, Mindy.
Any comment on your weekend life? Does kiddo have more meets on weekends?
Sometimes I forget about this series, and then it feels like Christmas morning when I see one pop up.
I really appreciate the insight on older kid + sports “chauffeurs” logistics, Mindy! I see this in my future and I’m dreading it. You seem to have a really great work-life balance. Are the mentoring and the fundraiser chairing through work, or are these what I would call “professional hobbies?”
Just want to say how much I love reading these.