Mom, is it hard to be a Mom?

I've always thought that I had things under control as long as everything went as planned. Throw in a sick kid, a flat tire or a leak in the roof, and the wheels fall off the family bus. My wrinkle this week? Husband on business travel.

While my husband lived it up in Sparks, NV for an industry conference (said with a hint of irony, Nevada in July? Come on!) this week, I wrangled three boys and a workload that suddenly spiked due to some great press coverage. Anticipating a rough week, I upped my babysitters hours a bit, planned some easy meals and even scheduled a luxurious lunch with a mentor, replete with pomegranate martinis.

Was it a smooth week? Not by a long shot. Did I yell more than I'd like? Absolutely. But all told, we came out of a week of solo parenting unscathed and I have more than a lot of respect for legions of single parents who do this day-in and day-out. But as I was tucking in my six year old son tonight, he sweetly asked, "Mom, is it hard to be a Mom?"

Before I launched into a long diatribe of what's hard and what's not, I asked him why he wanted to know. He didn't have a good answer, and maybe he didn't know why he had the question, but I thought it important to try and figure out what he was getting at. Looking at his freckled nose and sun-bleached blond head I finally replied yes, it is hard being a Mom. There are a lot of people depending on you and you have lots of work to do all the time but it's by far the best hard job I could ever ask for. The smug grin on my six year old's face told me that was all he needed to know.