Let me introduce myself
Hi everyone,
My name is Kristi and I am a 46 year old married, working mom. I know there are a lot of us out there. I have two children, a 19 year old daughter and a 2 year old son. I have been married for almost 4 years and I am still in love with my husband. I work a full time job, I just finished a Master's Degree in Enterprise Software Architecture and I am about ready to begin the journey to earn my PhD in Information Technology, IT Education.
I raised my daughter as a single mom until I married my husband almost four years ago and that was an interesting journey and part of how I came up with the title to my blog. As a mom we can do it all but should we?. I had a lot of help from my parents along the way but still everything ultimately fell back to me as her mom to do.
My husband and I had a little boy 2 years ago and he is such a joy but at the same time he is a handful and causes my husband and I a lot of concern. He was diagnosed with T21 when he was one day old. That lead to many different emotions, especially when you consider how we were told. We did not know that the hospital would be testing him. The day after he was born a team of genetists came into my hospial room and annouced to us that they had done testing and determined that our son was T21. I had just gone through childbirth and a historectomy immediately after that, so I really wasn't prepared to deal with the information they were giving us. They continued to overload us with information and statistics that we did not have the ability to absorb at the time.
Three days later we all left the hospital and went back home. There was a lot of thinking and talking between my husband and I on who we should tell or if we should tell anyone outside of his doctor. The social opinions tied to T21 can be very negative and we did not want our son to be limited by his diagnosis. In the end we waited until he was 2 years old to share this with our families. During those two years we met with cardiologists, hearing specialists, and his primary care doctor. Thank God he has no phyiscal issues that many children with T21 have. Our angel struggles with developmental delays but other than that he seems to be a normal overactive 2 year old little boy.
During all this time I have been lucky to have my husband, daughter, and my parents to help with many of the day to day things that come up with raising a two year old. I still struggled with the guilt of being a working mom and not being there to do everything for my son, daughter, and husband. It always came back to I am the mom/wife and I should be doing all of this.
The last couple of months have been hard on my husband and I as we relocated to a new city for a better job for me. This meant my husband gave up his job so we could move. After 4 months he still is looking for a job. He is now the stay at home parent and the primary caregiver to our 2 year old. This also brings up the guilt that I am not doing everything.
So I will end my first posting with the question that made me start this blog, why as a mom/wife do we feel the need to be the one person responsible to do everything for our family?
Until my next posting
Kristi
