When I’m lying in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, I have a few tricks to help me relax and get sleepy. Usually they involve word games of some sort, but sometimes I play with numbers and set myself some math problems. It was in this way that I discovered, some years ago, that there is the exact same age difference–to the day, with leap years accounted for–between Brynja and Yrsa as between Tage and Petra. This means, of course, that there is also the same difference between Tage and Brynja as there is between Petra and Yrsa. Kind of cool, I think.

Last night was another math problem night, but the results were less cool. I calculated how much time I’m away from home for my work. Most weeks I come down to Uppsala on Wednesday morning after the kids go to school and return home around 11:00 on Friday nights. That comes out to 62 hours per week that I’m not at home. Occasionally I’m away for longer stretches, but at other times I’m home for longer periods, so I think it mostly balances out. 62 hours is 37% of all the hours in a week, which really seems like a whole hell of a lot. I try to tell myself that it’s not much more time than I’d be away if I worked full-time closer to home, without the long commute, and I remind myself that I’m home with the kids to get them off to school three out of five days of the week. I further point out to myself that Olof works from home whenever I’m in Uppsala, so that our kids always, always have a parent available, even during those hours when they’re at school, and there are plenty of kids who don’t have that.

You know what, though? All those reminders don’t really help; they feel more like rationalizations than anything else. In my heart of hearts, I can’t help feeling that what I’m doing is not good for my family. What makes it worse, somehow, is that I really love my job. In the long, dark moments of the night I have sometimes wondered if I should quit, if it wouldn’t be better for everyone if I were home again, but it would absolutely do me in to give up my work. I’m not sure that I could physically make myself do it. So then, of course, I’m left with the realization that I’m putting my work and my personal satisfaction ahead of my family, something that I never thought I’d do.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of mother guilt, all of this angst is coming from me, myself. My husband is entirely supportive, and when I’ve asked him from time to time if he thinks I should quit, he always reacts strongly against the idea. He sees the value to all of us in what I’m doing in ways that I’m not able to do. As for the kids, they’re fine. I’ve been doing this for so long now that it feels normal to them. I don’t doubt that they’d like it if I were home more, but they don’t seem to miss me unbearably or agonize over my absence when I’m away. I still have a hard time convincing myself, though–not in convincing myself to keep working; that’s a given–but in convincing myself that I’m not being outrageously selfish.

So yeah, that’s the kind of thing I think about when I can’t sleep.