#SorryNotSorry I Can't Subscribe to your Mommy Blog

**I posted the piece below on this blog a long time ago. It was then accepted for professional publishing elsewhere, but I withdrew it out of concern that it would miss its mark on that particular site. It's back! Not because I feel this way all day, every day (although I still do, sometimes)—but because when I'd originally posted it on this blog, it received the following positive, supportive commentary—making me think that it might reach its intended audience again, somehow:

"I was a contributor to this post! Not really. But coulda been"

"I loved this so much. Thank you for giving voice to the thoughts that have plagued every working moment since I had children. Preach. You're on to something."

Without further ado:

**

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#SorryNotSorry I can't subscribe to your blog.

I can't subscribe to feeding my soul when I can barely feed my kids.

I can't subscribe to pursuing my passion when the only passion my husband's money helps pay for is his own.

I can't subscribe to healthy, delicious, beautifully photographed recipes because I'm scrambling to get all the food my family needs for the week during my lunch break and trying to prepare it all after work, in time that they can eat it before they fall asleep on the living room carpet.

Softly-lit, thoughtfully-styled homemade snacks. AmIDoinItRite?

I can't subscribe to positive thinking, prayer, your love of Jesus and the presence of God because almost everything I've ever thought for myself, prayed for, and trusted God to take care of has slipped through my fingers.

Talk to me about your children learning, exploring, and expanding as people and about you having almost nothing to do with it.

Talk to me about spending years of your life with each entire day's highlight (outside of getting home to finally be with your children) being the trip to the office candy jar, and about wishing away the hours until 5 o'clock...only to realize that you've also wished time away and spent another day away from your children. Time and days that add up to years...years, which you will never have back.

Tell me about your income mattering—your income mattering so much to your family that you were back at work soon enough after having your child, that you were still bleeding from having had him.

Tell me about marrying for love and for all the right reasons, only to find that you are operating in the financial survival mode of a single mother.

Tell me about going to look for that next better job—the one that's going to make the absence from your children's lives, the literally unceasing stress, the never having the time or the focus for either of your two full-time jobs—worth it, only to conclude that no new job is going to be the one that you really want anyway—because no new job is the one where you get to stay at home for your family, earning you a moment to breathe that isn't when you are also finally asleep, only to have to get up too early to throw it all away again the next day.

Tell me about simply wanting to enjoy breakfast with your very young child instead of having to shove food into his mouth while you also shove shoes onto his feet because if you don't, you'll be late to the job that pays for both.

Tell me about being fully surrounded by your parents dying and your children growing into who they will be, and about missing it all.

Tell me about being tired through to your marrow from making lunches, making dinner, doing laundry, cleaning house, somebody being sick (maybe it's you), and about having to go work anyway—on something other than posting pictures and writing something inspirational.

Then, maybe, I'll subscribe to your blog.