When I graduated from college I made the conscious decision to stay in DC. It was my home - it still is my home - and despite it's overwhelming cost of living that often made me feel as if I would drown in debt and starve to death, I kept on trucking along because it was my dream. I was living my dream in my dream city, something that I had worked my ass off for and deserved. So I made it work.

I don't know how I made it work but when I go back to DC now for business trips with my salary that has increased three fold since moving, I still wonder in what world it would be possible for me to afford living there. It's now graduation time and there is the onslaught of 20 somethings full of high hopes and big dreams flooding major metropolitan areas after spending four solid years working their respective asses off and still with that drive to make things work. And according to the New York Times most recent article on young New Yorkers just starting out, I am not the only one who felt the need to make it work. And if that meant not eating a grand meal but instead mooching off of the free food at Congressional fundraisers, then so be it:

Having one’s mother mail rotating boxes of old clothing is just one of
the myriad ways that young newcomers to the city of a certain income —
that is, those who are neither investment bankers nor being floated by
their parents — manage to live the kind of lives they want in New York.
Every year around this time, tens of thousands of postcollegiate people
in their 20s flood the city despite its soaring expenses. They are high
on ambition, meager of budget and endlessly creative when it comes to
making ends meet.

After my graduation I recall a visit with my mother. We were driving through Ward Circle in Upper North West when we got to talking about work and how she felt going back to work after having children and how she really wasn't all that fond of children in the first place and because of this she would only take us to the park when other working women went to the park: At dusk. It's Ok. We live in Upstate NY the only people out after dusk were farmers and police officers on horseback. But ever since that conversation and watching the way my mother worked, I have always wondered how things changed after she had me and then my brother. I do know that she had our Aunt babysit for us and she would come home once a day to nurse (I come from a family of rampant breastfeeders) and to say hi and to cuddle and yet I wonder if things changed for her workwise. Actually not if, but how. Which is the same question that Linda from Sundry asked of her readers:

How about you? Are you in a good place, job-wise? Have you changed the
way you think about working as you’ve gotten older? Those of you who
are staying home with kids, do you plan to go back to work at some
point, and if so, will you pick up where you left off — or do you have
different interests now?

Now I am that working woman. A single working woman but a working woman who sits just a few feet from her mother. I am that working woman who travels for work at least once a month sometimes for just a few days other times for a solid week but each time I return exhausted. Each time I get home and immediately plop on my sofa only to be nudged by my cat who I then shove off the sofa because I cannot be bothered. My mother had the same travel schedule way back when my brother and I were mere babes and probably came back utterly exhausted and in no mood to deal with children. It's not as if business trips are vacation they are work. Tedious and boring meetings and receptions where you spend the entire time wishing to be in the comfort of your hotel room under the covers with room service. So I would imagine that she felt the same way as Kristin feels in her new column at Work it, Mom:

I had some time in LA between client meetings, and I pulled my rental
car into a shaded Starbuck’s lot, fighting the urge to recline my seat
and close my eyes for a few minutes. Business trips as a single Mom,
for me, are a tangled concoction of elation, focus, guilt, fatigue, and
pride that I am somehow juggling this, making it happen. And I want to
keep getting better at it.

Which brings me back to my mother and overall career decisions. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Sometimes you just make it work. You don't know how and it might seem next to impossible. But somehow, someway, we get up each day, put on our big girl panties and find a way to make it work.

Heather B. just returned from a six day business trip to DC. She is exhausted and still living paycheck to paycheck and yet she makes it work and lives to tell about another day at No Pasa Nada.