Everyone will be confronted with their finiteness, their limitations, at some point. Mine has come in the form of three children ages three and under. So I’m going to wave my white flag of surrender as a testimony to the fact that I cannot do it all, I am not super mom, and I need help. There. I said it.

Do you have help?”

It’s a question I have been asked frequently these last three years. In fact, as I neared the end of my pregnancy with the twins I was asked repeatedly how I was going to do it. Is your mom coming? You will need help caring for two babies.

Now that I have three kids ages three and under, I get asked the same question.  You really should consider putting them in a Mother’s Day Out program, well-meaning people say to me. Usually I smile and nod, saying something about the fact that I like having them all home with me, or that they seem so young to be sending away for a few hours a week. But something else is going on in my response. For a long time, I didn’t want to admit the pride in my own heart.

The truth is I liked being able to say that I had it all together. I liked being able to say that I didn’t put them in any program, that they were with me all of the time. I liked being able to say that I could handle all the little people in my life.

Until I couldn’t.

As I’ve been working on a book about the work of the home, the common theme that keeps coming up in my research is that this work is not meant to be done in isolation. But in the West, especially America, it is. We are a nation of independent, self-sufficient people. I mean, we talk about whether or not women can “have it all” all of the time. It seems so elusive, yet it is so longed for.

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