Mommy Needs a Raise (Because Quitting's Not an Option)

Parshall Perry Sarah

Description

Goodbye, Board Room and Legal Briefs--Hello, Dimples, Diapers, and DestructionWomen know that raising children will be different from climbing the corporate ladder. But nothing can truly prepare them for the mind-muddling world of motherhood. It doesn't take long for a new mom to question whether her tyrannical, diapered boss really understands her value to the organization. Because honestly? She's not always sure herself. With her signature wit, lawyer-turned-full-time-mommy Sarah Parshall Perry says what all new moms are thinking when they trade annual reports for homework help and yoga pants. Perry invites moms to laugh alongside her amidst the "Are you kidding me?!" moments that come with the job of raising humans. This book is story of every mother who gives up one thing to get something better--and ends up finding out what she's worth along the way.

Sujets

• Humour

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493404155
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2016 by Sarah Parshall Perry
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-0415-5
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations labeled ASV are from the American Standard Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2011
Scripture quotations labeled NLT are from the Holy Bible , New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Author is represented by Wordserve Literary, Inc., www.wordserveliterary.com
Dedication
For my mother
Contents
Cover 1
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Dedication 5
Acknowledgments 9
Prelude 11
1. Meet the Donners 13
2. A Job Is a Job 21
Free Range 29
3. Look What I Can Do 31
4. Buck Rogers 39
5. Res Ipsa . . . What’d You Say? 51
6. Madison Avenue Madness 61
7. The Teacher Is In 69
Do These Children Come with Dental? 77
8. The Weirdos Next Door 79
9. Play Nice 97
10. The Art of War 123
11. Survival Instinct 145
12. I Feel Bad about My Brain (And I’m Not Crazy about My Body, Either) 173
13. Other People(’s Children) 191
Geography 207
14. The Continental Divide 209
15. The River of Stars 229
16. Time Travel 235
Notes 245
About the Author 249
Other Books by Sarah Parshall Perry 251
Back Ads 253
Back Cover 257
Acknowledgments
I extend my deepest gratitude to my fabulous Revell team: Lonnie Hull DuPont, Lindsey Spoolstra, Twila Bennett, Lindsay Davis, and Claudia Marsh. I love them, and they love me back. They are the kind of people I would be friends with even if they weren’t being paid to like what I do.
I want to thank my dad, Craig Parshall, for his love of books and words and for being stellar with his use of both. Because of him, I only ever wanted to write. All the pieces were there. I simply put them together.
I want to thank my mother-in-law, Sue Perry, who was the right combination of tough and tender in raising three boys, one of whom still knows well enough to open doors for me.
I want to thank my mom, Janet Parshall. She showed me just how high a calling motherhood is. Greatest thanks go to my family: my husband, Matt, and my children, Noah, Grace, and Jesse. I am grateful to them for being so awesome and passionate and unique and funny that there is enough material to fill a book about it all. Every day with them is a treasure. Their “I love yous” give me butterflies. Until our reality show is developed, this book will have to do.
Finally, I thank the Lord for the courage, wisdom, and faith—despite my weaknesses and obvious failings—to thrive in this calling of motherhood.
It’s the best job I have ever had.
Prelude
This is what the L ORD says. . . . “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
Isaiah 43:16, 18–19
One Meet the Donners
The thing about having kids is not the stuff that you expect.
Certain things are predictable. You know to expect a certain level of sleep deprivation. You know the baby needs shots. You know that car seats are necessary, tantrums are inevitable, and baby teeth will fall out. Dr. Spock even wrote a how-to manual in the 1960s for every apprehensive parent who thought they needed a guidebook so that they’d remember the proper way to dry a baby after a bath. (For example, use a towel instead of the casual heat setting on your dryer.)
It’s the stuff you don’t expect about parenting that’s really going to blow your mind. It’s the way that, despite your best intentions, just about everything you’ve planned for yourself and this new band of little groupies is going to fly wildly off the rails—sparks flying, people screaming, engine on fire off the rails .
I was a parent who vowed my car would never look like the standard “kid taxi”—the one with the crushed Cheerios, the half-full juice box, the melted crayons on the floor. No, by George, I was going to use what I’m sure is my undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder to keep my car pristine. My kids were going to learn to clean up after themselves, and my things would not pay the price. Wouldn’t they naturally understand that I was the one making the car payment, and they had to respect someone else’s things?
No, they would not understand that.
The tires on my car recently had to be rotated. We were in the middle of winter, and when rounding the corner one afternoon I’d hit a puddle of slush and road salt that left a rainbow of grey sludge on the entire right side of my car. Plus, it looked like the Rolling Stones had been on a bender in the backseat. There was a hair bow near Grace’s seat with no clip attached. There were also the covers for a set of headphones that she’d inexplicably removed, two broken pencils, and a travel mug whose contents had frozen solid. On Jesse’s side, there were pieces of a LEGO set, a dog-eared book with pages stuck together by something unknown, and some crushed Cheez-Its. As for Noah’s side, he makes it appear clean by kicking everything under the seat in front of him. So I have to regularly get behind the bench and pull out things like wrappers, art projects, sports balls, and writing utensils he swears to me he can’t find. He once lost an iPad somewhere between the car and a store. A store ten feet away from where our car was parked.
On this day, I’d dropped my car off to have the tire work done, and when I returned to my car a few hours later, I gasped.
The shop had washed the car. I opened the door and saw the interior had been vacuumed as well. Do you know what I did? I screamed. Screamed . That is how happy I was. That is how happy you will be, too, when someone surprises you with the taste of something you once swore you’d have and, somewhere along the line, were totally surprised by the loss of. Childrearing is one of those things that looks commonplace yet its components are anything but. I have ended the previous two sentences with prepositions. That is also something I swore I would never do. But there, I have done it so that you may further realize how incredibly surprising everything is about this mothering business.
At some point in the future, you will find yourself with a dish towel in your hand after you have cleaned up from dinner. After you have taken a kitchen from nice and clean to food-smattered and dirty and back to clean again (which is the same thing you have done every day for an innumerable sum of days), you will think to yourself, What am I doing? What’s happened to me? The very nature of this repetition will surprise you, because you will at some point believe that every day with these small people will be a miracle. And yes, it is. Because they are alive, and you have had a part in that. And they have not yet burned you in effigy because they are too young to know how, and they don’t yet get that you aren’t a perfect mother. Things will seem very right and very wonderful.
And very, very repetitive.
So you will wonder exactly what your particular value is to them, and to yourself, and to the world at large.
It may, just for a moment or even for a longer period of time (I will not judge you, even if it is a period of years and you struggle with telling people what it is you do for a living), feel just the tiniest bit like a wasteland. A long, flat, unchanging wasteland with the landscape altered only by the occasional punctuation of laundry mountains or bathwater rivers.
There is a point at which you may start to feel like you are a member of the ill-fated Donner party.

The Donner Party was a group of eighty-seven American pioneers who set out from Illinois in 1846 on a 2,500-mile journey to California. In a lengthy wagon train of families and friends, husbands laughed as they guided the oxen and little ones sang in the back and held their belongings under the snapping bonnet. Mothers clutched babies—all eager to begin the adventure before them.
However, the party made the unfortunate decision to follow a new route called the Hastings Cutoff, which traversed Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and added 150 miles to their journey. The virtually impassable terrain resulted in the loss of cattle and wagons, and caused infighting and an eventual split within the party. A series of mishaps delayed the party further. By the beginning of November 1846, already delayed by nearly three weeks, the travelers reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains where they became trapped by an early and unexpected snowfall. The party became snowbound, locked in the mountains with both food stores and spirits rapidly dwindling. In December 1846, some of the men set out on foot to get help but most perished on the way. The first rescuers from California did not reach the party until February 1847, some four months after the party had become trapped. With the oxen dead and food supplies