Ubermommy

It seems to me that even in the most egalitarian of two-working-parent households, it still falls to one parent to be the Manager of the Household. It's just more efficient, insofar as there's one person who is the repository of all procedural knowledge. And at least in my household, that Manager is Mommy.

Efficient though this system may be from a management perspective, it can be both exhausting and deeply time consuming for She Who Manages. See, for example, Diva's recitation of the events of her morning a couple of days ago. I go through that sort of thing at least once or twice a week, where an entire half day is entirely consumed by a variety of phone and Internet-based errands.

This week's particularly complicated and time-consuming crisis involved the arranging of substitute child care due to a sick nanny. Even after the child care was arranged, the complications -- only somewhat abated -- continued. Why? No one knows the System the way I know the System. So even though the Grandmother, who is both very capable and very enamoured of the Toddler, is substituting in for Leta this week, I still ended up being late for work today so that I could help the Grandmother out with the assorted shenanigans that are part of the Toddler's morning routine these days. The grandmother wanted to take the Toddler out for breakfast, but of course had no idea where the bibs, sippy cups, baby forks, and other restaurant distractions were located. And she decided to put the Toddler into the stroller while looking around for these various restaurant necessities. Seems logical, except that any full-time Metropolitan Household Manager knows that the Toddler hates sitting in the stroller by herself when it's not moving, so I had to rescue a very upset Toddler as well as finding all of the assorted paraphernalia for the Grandmother. And so on. It takes a long, long time to get out of the house in the morning when I have to get not only myself ready for the day, but also the Toddler and the Grandmother. (And let's not even get into the lectures I had to contend with in the midst of all this about how I should revise the System so that it more resembles the Grandmother's idea of what the System should look like.)

Mr. Metropolitan happens to be traveling on business this week, so that complicates matters a bit further, but even Mr. Metropolitan doesn't completely understand the System. He is very helpful and useful when presented with a particular task, but at the end of the day, he's not the Manager.

Looking back over this post, it seems to me that an obvious response would be: "Why not give up on the whole notion of a System and just let the chips falls where they may?" There are a couple of answers. First: is it not clear that the Urban Mommies are all Type A control freaks? Second: as I led off by saying, all households have a manager. And at least in my experience, that manager tends to be the wife, regardless of how busy she is in her non-household career. But when you add a third person -- a person in diapers -- to the husband-and-wife relationship, the number of household tasks increases exponentially, and the only way to get anything accomplished is to have a System.

I guess I could outsource the whole thing and hire a true household manager, but (a) it's not clear to me that I could afford such a luxurious concept, and (b) come on, where's the fun in that?