When you’re a mom, from the moment your kids wake you up, you can tell if it’s going to be one of those days…today is one of those days. I’m not the kind of mom that pretends her kids are perfect, life is perfect, husband is perfect, and life is a big ball of sunshine and puppy dogs, because it’s not. From the second I woke up, my kids were fighting and yelling at eachother, whining at me because they wanted scrambled eggs and I made them hard-boiled eggs, beating the crap out of eachother because one was moving the other’s marker on their Candyland game, and I just thought, “Did I make the right decision to be a stay-home mom?”

So, the rest of the morning, I tried to tune out my kids fighting with eachother, and thought about my life before I had kids: I used to be a Sales Manager for Nordstrom, I wore beautiful suits, expensive shoes, had a manicure every week, ate every meal out, had a lot of other single professional women friends- I was living the quintissential “Sex and the City” lifestyle. And I gave it all up to be a Mom. Most of the time, I feel like it was a worthwhile trade- I get to see my kids’ every milestone, I get to spend quality time with them every day, I get to teach them and instill good manners and characteristics, but is it bad to wonder what it would be like to have the best of both worlds?

I can’t imagine what my life would be like as a working mom, much like a working mom probably has a hard time imagining what my life is like. I do have a lot of friends that work, and a lot of friends who are also at home moms, and both have their plusses and minuses. Often there is a battle between the two types of moms- one thinks the other sits home and watches soaps and Oprah all day, and one thinks that the other has a lavish life of lunching with friends, working in a beautiful office amongst professional people. My viewpoint is that being a Mom is a hard-ass job no matter what kind of mom that you are!

Being a mom gets especially hard once your kids have their own opinions- for example, my daughter, who is five, will throw a knock-down, drag-out fight once in a while because I won’t let her wear her Cinderella halloween costume to the doctor’s office. Or my son, who is three, will have a complete meltdown and cry his eyes out for an hour, because I he wants to watch “Yo Gabba Gabba”, and I can’t put it on for him because I erased it off the Tivo so that I could make space to record the most recent episode of “Rock of Love Bus”.

I think that I sort of have the best of both worlds, because I am a stay-home mom and a working mom (that’s the glass is half-full version of my theory- the truth is that I pretty much just work my ass off all the time, almost around the clock). I stay home with my kids, I am the author of a blog for moms and women, and I’m a waitress in a restaurant, oh, and I occasionally moonlight as a bellydancer to top it all off!

So, today, as my kids drive me to the brink of insanity with their fighting and yelling, I just remember that I’m a mom- yes, it’s thankless, yes, it’s not glamorous, yes it makes me drink too much wine on occasion, but someday, in a land far away, when my kids are grown, I can look at them, and smile, and lovingly say, “Just wait until you have kids of your own…”