A fascinating report from the Pew Research Center recently highlighted just how difficult it is to balance work and motherhood. Among their survey respondents, the majority of working mothers said that their own work-family balance was less than ideal and identified some other model as preferable. And 40% of working moms reported feeling rushed all the time, as opposed to only about a quarter of the overall public. Whether the moms worked part-time or full-time had no impact on how rushed they felt. (Interestingly, working dads and at-home moms were no more harried than everybody else.)

The fact that working motherhood is tough is no news to me, or anyone else I know who’s doing it. But here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough—my life is more joyful and fulfilling right now than I could ever have imagined. When my husband picks me up after work and my daughter catches her first glimpse of me walking toward the car, her whole face shines and she literally dances in her carseat. It is impossible not to be cheered by this welcome at the end of a long day.

My dad said an interesting thing to me recently. It was during a phone call in which I’d been running through the usual litany of daily chaos at our house—deadlines and chores and colds and decisions. He’s retired now, and he said that from his vantage point it’s clear that the stage we’re in now—just establishing our careers, and our family, and our home—is really the most compelling epoch of a lifetime. Other times are more restful, more settled, maybe easier, but never are you more deeply connected to the work of building a life than we are right now.

It’s true. I know what he means, and I feel it. It’s easy for that feeling to get swamped by the tide of everyday details, but I try to pay attention to it. In the midst of the clamor and the mess, I will sometimes pause and notice how happy I really am—how much I laugh these days, and how much hope I have. These moments fill me with gratitude and humility. I hope I can hold onto them, like photographs, to look back on in later years.

Hardship is always easier to talk about than joy, and working motherhood is no exception. It’s not easy to stay afloat in this busy life of ours, and there are times when I gripe about it, but I know just how lucky we are, and I wanted you to know too.

Hat tip: Nataly of WorkIt, Mom! for the Pew study.

My husband and I, like many of our peers, have squeezed and juggled our careers to make it possible for each of us to spend some weekday time at home with our daughter (and, not incidentally, reduce our daycare expenses). This flexibility is a blessing, and also a luxury. But it is not without cost. To compensate for lost daytime hours, we are constantly tempted to sneak work into family times, and we’re able to do that thanks to high-speed internet.

Everyone is susceptible to techno-creep. A recent study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School found that nearly a third of respondents reported spending less time with family members since being connected to the internet at home. That number has increased dramatically over the past several years, as has the percentage of people who report feeling ignored by a family member using the internet.

Parents juggling the demands of work and family may feel the pull of that wireless connection more keenly than others. I need to clarify here that I am deeply grateful for the ability to telecommute with ease. It has allowed me to strike a more comfortable balance between career and parenting than I thought possible. When I was pregnant and contemplating these issues in the abstract, I imagined that the tradeoffs between work and family would be dramatic and wrenching. They have mostly turned out to be incessant, minute, and mundane. Many of them have involved whether or not to do computer-based work during off-work hours.

And the thing is that checking email on a Saturday morning is not necessarily a terrible thing. I do it frequently, and am often glad that I did. But the question that worries me is where to draw the lines, and how to respect them once they’re drawn.

I don’t have any answers here, so I will close with an anecdote. It is 9:30 in the evening. My kid is asleep. My husband and I are sitting in the study with our backs to each other, typing furiously away at our separate machines. We haven’t spoken in over an hour. I think I will go say hello.

I fear that I may call down the furies by putting this in print, but in the past several months our family life has reached a manageable and apparently stable level of chaos. This shift from crisis to normalcy coincided with two important milestones: weaning and a reliably decent night’s sleep. But I credit it primarily to garlic powder.

Also frozen vegetables, pre-sliced deli meat, paper towels, disposable diapers, and a hundred other mundane shortcuts. This is not an infomercial for convenience products. It is an admission that, for the first time, I’m really learning that isn’t possible to do everything well. Balance is a nice word, but the reality is not so pretty. I think what it comes down to is deciding what you really care about, and giving up on everything else.

Which sounds easy, and is, of course, the work of a lifetime. It’s surprisingly hard to know what really matters to you. I enjoy chopping garlic. I like its slipperiness, and the smell of it on my fingers long afterward. And I like cooking fresh, fragrant meals with it. I like being the kind of person who does this. But on weeknights, when all of us are hungry and harried, taking that time and dirtying those extra dishes just isn’t worth it.

Some of the decisions are pretty simple. Cleanliness in our house is at an all-time low. I’ve figured out exactly how much clutter and grunge I can tolerate without losing my mind, and that’s exactly how much cleaning we do. Our clothes are always wrinkled, our yard is always full of weeds, and our car is always overdue for some TLC. Which is fine with me.

But some of them are a whole lot harder. I care about regular exercise, and cooking from scratch, and tending friendships near and far.  I care about gardening, and reading, and sex. Everybody knows that life is a series of choices, but when discretionary time is narrowed to naptime and after bedtime the tradeoffs become comically clear. “What shall it be today, dear? An afternoon frolic, or putting in the tomatoes?”

The process of growing up is a gradual paring away of dreams, a pinching back of sprouts of yourself that never took off. For me, these tend to pop up in my New Year’s resolutions. I will learn an instrument. I will get really fit. I will practice yoga regularly. I will find a church community. I want these things, year after year. But I don’t want them badly enough–at this point in my life–to follow through on them.

I think this is less a failure of discipline than a failure of realism. I know what’s important to me right now–spending peaceful time with my family, building a fulfilling career, keeping in touch with a small circle of loved ones, and, yes, writing. The way I know is that, faced with lots of constraints, this is what I choose to spend my time on.

And really, that’s plenty. It’s easy to second-guess your choices in this whole balance game. Why did I spend another night watching “The West Wing” when I could have gone running, or prepped tomorrow’s dinner, or taken down that dusty flute that I still don’t really know how to play? But that time curled up on the couch with my sweetie is a haven these days. We don’t have to plan or think or even talk. I love that easy closeness in the tired twilight hours, and I think that at some level, we need it.

Sometimes I get greedy and want too much–why can’t I have a beautifully landscaped yard, and a sparkling house, and those slow-simmered meals that I hunger for? But my mission these days is to stay focused on that tiny handful of things that really matter and cheerfully give up on the rest, even if that means that there’s another bottle of garlic powder in my future.