A Half-A$$ Mom.

I was at the Richmond Kids Expo, talking to a friend of mine who is also a mom-of-three and business owner.

We had both worked a full week  and were putting in our time meeting new clients, I met a lot of faithful, fun readers of the site and there was lots of excitement and fun. And kids. And noise.

And we were both exhausted.

As we both felt the guilt being away from our kids yet another day of the week, she said to me:  I don’t want to feel like a half-a$$ (hey this is a family-friendly site), you know?

I do know.

And I don’t believe our guilty feelings of trying to do too much professionally are relegated to working moms. Stay-at-home moms are super-stretched too, trying to keep the household together, in many cases when spouses are traveling for days on end and even one night out with the girls is a luxury. . .followed by the guilt.

Then the guilt of feeling like perhaps they could provide more materially for their kids if they were working (more, at all, etc)–I have been there too. There are plenty of articles out there about working moms guilt. I’ve read many of them.

And now, I am going to try and make myself lose some of that guilt and uplift the people reading this post about the strength of women, and I encourage your clients.

March is National Women’s History Month and in reading that site it reminded me of the thousands of American women at war who are forced to leave their children and families for months, even years at a time. I wonder if they feel like half-a$$ moms, too, as they put their lives on the line for all of us.

Virginia Woolf wrote that Anonymous was a woman.  Really? Not today, Virginia.

The National Women’s History Project has proclaimed 2011 Women’s History Month’s theme as “Our History is Our Strength.” With our strength, we’ll all need to continue to fight for equal rights for those women who are working outside the home, as moving into leadership roles will help all women (because we all work in some fashion). According to President Obama’s proclamation in 2010:

Women comprise over 50 percent of our population but hold fewer than 17 percent of our congressional seats. More than half our college students are female, yet when they graduate, their male classmates still receive higher pay on average for the same work.

Let’s continue to lift each other up, not ever think of ourselves as half of anything, but as part of a whole family–our own families, our American families, and a universe of families who need strong women to lead in business, government, medicine, technology, and in our households.

We’ll never get anywhere if we think of ourselves as giving less than 100% to everything we do, whatever we do.