What It's Like To Be A Working Mum With 4 Kids

Chances are, your morning routine is a bit of a process — but after reading about this mum's morning rituals, we're bowing down in admiration.

Liz Petrone, a working mum who has four children, took to Facebook last week to share all the things she has to do before 9 a.m. to shut down the idea that she can just "waltz" into work in the morning.

"This morning I woke four sleepy humans," she began. "I made five beds, one twice because someone snuck into it and tried to go back into sleep. It *may* have been me."

After taking a shower, flushing three toilets and retrieving a "very wet" pull-up from under her bed, she made coffee ("two very strong cups"), dressed her children, and reminded them to brush their teeth. And it doesn't stop there.

"I drove to school once to drop the bigs off and back again a little later to drop off the stuff the bigs forgot," she wrote. "I stood on the bus stop and waited for two more buses while trying in vain to fish the littles out of a neighbor's tree."

After that, she wrote, she "cleaned their breakfast out of my car and my kitchen and my hair," took down pillow forts, put the laundry in to wash, fed the dog, "wiped down the counter and turned off the TV and the coffee maker and a hundred lights and locked up and fielded 12 text messages and 2 phone calls and 384 red lights" — all before 9:00.

"By the time I sit in my chair at work and fire up my computer, my Fitbit says I have walked 2.5 miles," she wrote. "All just to get us ready and out of the house."

She didn't write the post because she's complaining or looking for sympathy, she said, but because she wants people to understand what it's like to be pulled in so many different directions. It doesn't mean that she shouldn't work, or that she shouldn't be devoted to caring for her children, but maintaining a balance can be difficult.

Petrone, who works in information systems, tells Refinery29, "even outside of work, the life of a mom to young children seems to be a life of always apologizing for being late, or being absent, or generally just being scattered and pulled in a hundred directions at once. And I'm tired of apologizing for something I don't think we should have to be sorry for."

She also says that while writing the post, it felt very specific to her own situation — but as more and more people began responding to it, she realized "how much we are all struggling with the same things."

"I've heard from working mums, stay at home mums, dads, grandparents, and although everyone's circumstances are different we are all being pulled in a thousand directions and just trying to get through our busy day," she wrote.

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