By Angela Williams Glenn 
In the early days of motherhood, I came across this article about whether women of today could “have it all.” The argument at the end was we could only have it all at different times, but never at the same time. For years, I think I tried to prove that argument wrong. I could have the career, motherhood, marriage, the house—all at the same time, and be great and successful with everything.
I was on a chase of superwoman, so sure I could master the impossible balancing act. However, after mishap after mishap—from losing the family Christmas tree down the interstate to dropping my toddler under the table as the waitress approached to checking out at the grocery store with a cart full of $300 worth of groceries only to leave in tears because I forgot to move the money from a different account from miscarriages and postpartum breakdowns to calling out of work at the last minute to deal with everything from vomit to pink eye to yes, even that dreaded childhood lice outbreak—there was no way I was catching up to superwoman and going to have it all.
No matter what angle I worked things from over the years, more times than not, I found myself standing in the middle of the storm where the chaos of my working-mom life whirled around me like an F5 tornado.
When I was doing my best at work, I was cutting out doing things with my own kids. I wasn’t showing up at school for lunch dates or field trips or parent visits. When I was dedicating myself to being on the sidelines at their practices and games in the evenings, I was never getting the work I was behind on finished.
Whether I was throwing myself into my kids or my career, the house was tumbling around me with laundry crawling up the walls and science experiments growing on the dirty dishes in the sink. No matter where I threw my focus, I was always coming up short.
I’d see the messes surrounding me, and the list of everything that needed to be done glared at me. I didn’t necessarily throw in the flag of surrender on the debate of whether the modern woman can indeed have it all, but as the years have passed me by on this journey, I’m seeing the truth (like so many things in life) has so many shades of gray.
When I’m my best at one, I’m usually not my best at the other. Yet, despite the chaos that erupts from too much sometimes, I love doing it all. I love my kids; I love my career. I love pursuing my passions and interests. At different times, different things get cut. But I understand now that motherhood was never going to be all rainbows and unicorns. I’m learning to see it all a little differently.
Our lives as mothers are a splattered canvas painted with the sporadic chubby hands of young babes. There is no rhyme or reason half the time to the way our days unfold, but the final product somehow turns out to be a beautiful picture with all the bright and dull colors that make up our days.
One day life will slow down, and I won’t feel like I’m trying to run an impossible race. Though I never reached my goal of being a superwoman or having it all at the same time, I learned to see that beauty was always in the chaos and to just stand in the mess and appreciate it.
by Kendra Perley 
by Kate Kulicke 
