I didn’t experience this at all. I think it depends on your community. Mine is full of corporate burnouts and telecommuters.
I’m reading everything and appreciate the feedback.
Many of you have pointed out that H’s career should not be somehow fenced off from the challenge of raising a special needs child. H is still in ‘get tenure’ mode (despite getting it this year).
But I would put forth that asking him to scale back is not so simple a matter. Right now H is on day two of a 17-dayer (three back-to-back trips, one in South Africa). Is it tough on me? Yes. But is really, really wonderful for him. Work travel enables networking, collaborator-making, reputation-development, etc… And yes, he enjoys pampering himself (club lounges at airports, platinum-status flight upgrades, good hotels, good meals out with colleagues and birds of a feather). Moreover, it gives him a full break from our challenging son. He comes back refreshed. Drawing him closer into the family drama might double backfire. What if he became more burned out by our son and also resented me/us for holding back his career (real or perceived)? Then we would have two burned out parents plus spousal resentment. Again, I’m just being self-aware asking H to scale back his work-life might have complex effects.
This thinking prompts an evolution in my thinking. I’m wondering if I need to rethink what I need out of non-motherhood part of my life. Maybe my consulting business idea is the totally wrong way to go. Mothering is extraordinarily demanding and draining. Maybe I need my work to counterbalance that. Maybe I need to demand “of work” that it be spiritually uplifting. I currently work at a for-profit company and am well-compensated. But since I’m flexible on what the income needs to be, I do not need to restrict what I do based upon compensation (with apologies to Sheryl Sandburg). Could the right kind of work give me back some sanity and restore me? I have never thought along these lines before. Am I making sense?
@Aspieration I do hope that you and H have sat down and worked through your plans explicitly. I dropped out of the professional race when our first was born, in part because we moved for H’s career. I got lucky after almost 20 years out and have a position now that uses some of my skills and pays reasonably well, but my H hasn’t really gotten over the idea that I had a very long vacation and left him to cover most of our income. He would tell you that I made the decision without consulting him (I thought we decided together, and I thought he recognized that I was making a sacrifice as well.) There are days when I seriously wish I had put the whole thing in writing. Good luck to you!
@Aspieration, would your husband be willing to give you a full break sometimes? It sounds like you need it.
I forgot to mention I am reading Anne Marie Slaughter’s book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family She is a high-powered academic who worked in the State Department but quit when her son needed her attention. It is very relevant to this discussion! If you don’t want to read the whole book there are a lot of interviews with her on-line because the book just came out not too long ago.
How nice for him. What I don’t hear though, is when he comes back refreshed, you get a break.
An excellent question. This seems to work for your husband. To help you answer the question, a leave of absence would be useful. I would also consider counseling as getting to the answer is not a simple thing. As to my husband, who did most of the child care, working part time in his field did maintain his sanity. But, I had to work pretty hard to make sure I was there so he could work. I’m not sure your husband is able/willing to do that.
In other threads you said your DH had a job offer in Stockholm. Will you and your family be going? If so, this will be a non-issue, yes? Go, and take care of yourself and your kids.
Lots of planning ahead! Your kids are so young for you to be thinking ahead to college!
I have friends who were expats and came back to the US for college. It should not be an issue, and who knows in 10 or so years when yours are in the college planning. Focus on today, your health and your kids.
Hired help looks like an answer to me 
Plus maybe some days on a trip by yourself. Think, rest, have fun.
Decided against pursuing the Stockholm option at least for now. Main reason was the risk associated with disrupting the Good Thing we have going on with school. S1 was a student in three different schools in three years so we are very reluctant to leave something that is working for him and well as S2. Secondary reason was fear of unplugging our support system (my father, S1’s CBT therapist, my therapist, and the fuzzy but real ‘I know how to be a NY mom’).
H wants me happy. We talked this morning about my ‘passion project plan’ and he suggests asking for a leave of absence from work this spring to give passion project a real go while kids are still in school. If work agrees to the leave, come summer I’d have at least three options: get sitter for kids and return to old job, get sitter for kids and keep going with passion project, leave job and stop passion project and be mom FT for the summer. But he suggested the passion project could open new doors/connections and parlay into some 4th option that I can’t anticipate. “Just do it.” was the bottom line.
Passion project is a children’s literacy intervention (think UChicago’s TMW initiative) which would draw from my professional expertise on how interventions are developed, funded, implemented, published (main expertise) and scaled as well as my graduate training in neuroscience. [Yes, I did fundamental neuroscience research (electrophysiology of neural networks, for the aficionados: homeostatic plasticity / synaptic scaling) but getting up to speed on the neuroscience of human learning is amply doable]. H’s point is that my passion project could take me into many new paths, including my current stomping grounds (publishing/media) but also potentially academia, government (edu), foundations and tech. “Go for it and be open” is the main idea.
Meanwhile some good news on the home front.
School is pursuing getting S1 a para (paraprofessional who provides 1:1 support in school) will take weeks/months to sort paperwork but wheels have been set into motion. He aced his CTY midterm and is doing well beyond my expectations in his class (literacy). Comparatively speaking this sounds trivial but I just found out this morning that S2 made the school’s competitive soccer team. (I wrote a post about this… long story short S2 is playing in a Euro-style academy 4x week/crazy logistics. Schools team is excellent and has a gentler schedule and zero commute! Well, he officially got a spot on the school team this morning. This will make our afternoons A LOT less hectic.
H is set and happy.
S1 is getting more support in areas of challenge and developing his talents.
S2 just got a bit win for his passion - competitive soccer - while family catches a logistics break.
I think I’m starting to get somewhere too with My Big Picture.
Your input has been so helpful. Thanks for all the feedback.
Aspieration, good luck with all these challenges.
LBowie wrote:
I started a thread on that book last week but it didn’t get any traction. Just in case there is any interest:
Small world. I’m at a conference today hearing the founder of TMW speak!
I’m guessing while your passion project might allow you to work at home largely (yes?), it would also be time consuming but perhaps very satisfying. Would you be doing this with your project funded or on your own? It can a struggle to do all that work gratis when you are used to a paycheck coming for your efforts.
@abasket that is insanely coincidental! What conference? (I checked Suskind’s twitter feed but no luck.)
I would be open to where the project takes me, and that might include transferring to a different group (open access publishing) within my own company (one of the “big four” publishing giants). I have to spend some time conducting research to get up to speed on the evidence base, key thought leaders and to synch how I frame the intervention with the lingo of the field.
Non-drug interventions rarely make it into top scientific journals largely owing to concerns about reproducibility. Put another way, they are not considered ‘real science.’ Is a successful intervention the product of the personal touch of the person / group who piloted the program? Is there something unique about the population that limits scalability? And most importantly: does the intervention advance theory? Put another way, is there a mechanism of action (this is scholarship) or is the intervention ‘black box’ (harder sell to journals)?
Interventions are my passion and I’ve been working in the interventions space from a publishing perspective for all of 2015. I’m interested in getting my hands dirty implementing one. I have one literary intervention and one math intervention in my head. Very different from an outsider’s perspective, but sharing a fundamental underlying theory. I could pitch as any of the following: ed tech start-up (lit one is database heavy), publisher, foundation, academics. Or I could very well find out on say day three of my research that someone else had this idea already and I could figure out how to partner with them. I’m open.
I’d explore getting help with your kids. Autism can be overwhelming and it sounds like what you need is a break. I’d look into freelancing, plus a nanny.
I worry how you’ll make it from now until march/april. Is it possible to do fmla Dec 1 through February to give you some down time without working and without your kids home all day?
@Aspieration Oh I love the TMW project! (The director, Dr. Dana Susskind, is a cochlear implant surgeon so have heard of her and her work through the hearing loss world) I hope you get to do it.
It’s over now, but the conference was the LENA conference in Denver. Dr. Suskind was a wonderful keynote - wish she could have talked to us all day long. Be sure to read her recently released book!
Now back to the original thread topic…
Mini update. I took three days off. I feel much more rested and still lost.
I don’t know much about what “life coaches” do, but am wondering if a session or two with one might be good for you? Someone to talk things out with in person, someone who won’t judge you (like family might), someone who has skill in making a plan, organizing life???
Agreed. In the greater New York area it might even be possible to find a trained life coach who has themselves raised a twice exceptional child.
Thanks @abasket. My mom, who died in May, was my built-in life coach. I’m really feeling lost without her. I miss HER her but I also miss her guidance. As my sister brilliantly put it, our mom was ‘a close reader of our lives.’
All of the sudden there is no one to help me make sense of it all, who also loves me and is looking out for me. She lost a long, hilly battle with addiction so I’m also working through feelings about being abandoned by her.
- S1. Asperger's kids are hard kids to parent. Every day I'm hit with feeling pity, anger, exhaustion, protectiveness, ambition (for him), dread (when the phone rings and it is school), and a dozen other feelings. Every day is different. I sometimes feel like he's part toddler, part teenager. Moody. Tantrum-prone. Wildly selfish. But also profound. And passionate. I MUST absorb/ignore the outer layers and grow that inner flame. But it is just unrelenting.
- S2. Gets what parenting crumbs are left. Guilty. Guilty, Guilty. I feel like I need to work harder for this child up and make sure he knows he is loved. Trying.
- Career. Worked for in the ballpark of 20 years (including grad school) to have this career and yet it brings me no more joy. I feel different now that I'm a parent to a special needs child. I'm still ambitious but work feels to abstract now. I deeply feel like I should do something that 'gives back' in a more tangible way (interventions). But realistically I have no time/energy to throw at something new and completely different.
- My relationship with H is complex. Some days I'm glad he's the pillar. He's the happy, sane one. Some days I resent how happy and sane he gets to be. And yet I couldn't just 'carry on' with my career now. And we can't both drop the career ball. We have a mortgage and lord knows we need the excellent health insurance we have (therapy runs into the thousands monthly). So how else (practically) could our set-up work but the way it is working? He is 'life goes on' whereas I'm lost.
And it could be worse on so many counts so I feel like I shouldn’t complain. Just open the newspaper. So I want to issue myself Cher’s famous slap in Moonstruck, “Snap out of it!”
The fact that other people have more difficult challenges doesn’t mean that yours aren’t real and important.