Welcome to “the Confessional” ala Real World (MTV) circa 1995. Except it’s not the story of 7 strangers picked to live in a house; it’s just me, living my life as a white middle class millennial mom living in the northeastern United States.
I’m Kelley. I’m approaching 40 and dealing with all the fun medical stuff that comes with getting old: hormone changes, chronic acne, an undiagnosed sleeping disorder, and GI issues. These ‘confessions’ are primarily a journal – to get my thoughts, observations, and daily running commentary out of my head. I don’t intend to be giving anyone any kind of advice, or listing out recipes, or telling you about great activities to do with your kids. There’s enough places you can find those things written by people better at it than I am. I’m mostly here to commiserate, share stories, and laugh at myself. And probably ramble a lot.
So why do I label myself a Type-A Millennial Mom?
Type A- I am the oldest child in my family, and the consummate planner and caretaker. That is until I met my husband who is actually even more Type-A than I am. In middle school I distinctly remember proudly wearing a tee with ‘Perfectionist’ screen printed on it. It was a white shirt with purple and teal letters. Very aughts. That meme about being in class and matching the people ahead of you to the paragraphs in the book to figure out which one the teacher was going to make you read, that was me all the way. I haven’t mellowed much in my adulthood [insert example here]
Millennial – I’m on the older end of the millennial spectrum and I used to hate the association. Until recently ‘Millennial’ was always synonymous with ‘lazy’ ‘ungrateful’ and ‘entitled’, but in the past few years I think we’ve been turning it around. I feel like we started the ‘work life balance’ trend and mental health focus, that Gen-Z has also embraced. We might be lazy, ungrateful, and entitled, but that’s when viewed against the backdrop of a world where we were told to pay out the nose for our college degrees, and then graduated into an economy where there weren’t jobs for those graduates, a world where the cost of living grew exponentially while we were growing up, but salaries never changed to match, a world where everyone was now so connected, always reachable, that our JOBS also expected us to always be connected and always be reachable. So we’re lazy, if you define lazy as not wanting to work away our weekends. We’re ungrateful, if you define ungrateful as not being happy with salaries that don’t buy nearly as much as they used to. We’re entitled, if you define entitled as expecting the results our parents conditioned us to expect, working our asses off for 4 years in college and expecting there to be jobs available so we could pay off the student debt. So now I wear my ‘millennial’ label as a badge of honor. Almost.
Mom – I have 2 elementary school aged kids, my daughter B and my son S. I have the benefit of having a very healthy division of responsibilities with my husband, but we’re both just out here trying our hardest to raise these kids as best we can, while we make sure we enjoy our own lives too.
We don’t subscribe to any one parenting style. We aren’t really extreme about anything. We’re trying to find some balance of the old school values and experiences we were raised with while mixing in some of the ‘new age’ stuff that resonates with us. So I’m going to let my kid run outside with no shoes on, drink out of a hose, and follow the 5 second rule, but i’m also going to validate their feelings and tell them that no, you don’t HAVE to hug someone you don’t really know to say hello just because an adult tells you to.
If any of this resonates with you, I welcome you to keep reading. Not every subject here is going to be great, but if you’ve made it this far, you’ll probably like the rest!
Confessions of a Type A Millennial Mom 