Back when I was a stay-at-home mom, I didn’t have to take a special day to show them what I was already doing in front of them for upwards of 100 hours a week. That’s why I created my own holiday, Please Take My Children to Work Day, for part- and full-time at-home mothers and fathers — so we’d all get a break from the everyday.

My husband’s office didn’t have their usual Take Your Kids shin-dig today, presumably because they were too busy having layoffs. I dunno.  Maybe they’re working too hard with fewer people on staff to take time out of the day to show the kids how to teleconference and how to design web sites.

What I do know is that this is a hard holiday for a lot of parents this year in particular, whether they’re unemployed or working doubly hard (some, while making less). Maybe it’s better if the kids don’t see that.

I can’t help but wonder if our kids’ generation will grow up more like my grandparents than we did. Even during the recession of the early 80’s, I don’t remember much angst over where the money was coming from or how much things cost like I’m seeing not only online, but in my own fairly well-off neighborhood.

I don’t remember consciously picking something cheaper on the menu while out to dinner with my parents like my kids do now, on the increasingly rare occasion that we go out to dinner. They save boxes and tissue paper like I never did, and they squeeze every last drop out of their shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes.

Yet I suspect that a little worry, coupled with smart teaching about money (both have CD’s, if only with dismally low returns), will serve our children well, and would have served our own generation better prior to the Great Recession. We all got a little drunk on credit and “had-to-haves” that were really just “nice-to-haves-if-you-can-afford-it.” Now we’re paying for it — or wondering how we’ll pay for it.

Maybe our kids don’t need to see us work — if we’ve even got work — this year. Maybe they just need to know that we love them, and that we hope that the economy turns around again before they decide whether or not to take their own kids to work some day. Now that’s something I’d love for them to see.

What do you think? Feeling the squeeze of the Great Recession?

Coming in May! Preorder now at Amazon:

 Jen Singer’s “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself books have a thank-goodness-I’m-not-the-only-one tone while also offering practical advice for whatever parenting challenges may arise.” — Baby Center

“Jen has bestowed us with the rare parenting guides that actually give parents the shot of confidence we need to survive another day. ” — Cool Mom Picks

Andrea Summerville of B'Cara Salon trying to make me look like my eyelashes are naturally long for Park Place Magazine.

“What other rooms would you like to shoot in?” the magazine photographer asked me this morning, sweeping her hand toward my family room.

“Uh, well, this is the room I cleaned,” I said, thinking about the little papers from my shredder strewn pretty much all over my office floor and the dining room filled with remnants of The Great Closet Clean-out of 2010.

When she finished taking my photo on the couch, I let her photograph my kids and me in the living room. I didn’t have to move the tape dispensers, which was nice, and nobody reading the magazine article about me and “Mom 2.0″ will see the Pee Wee Herman doll sitting on the coffee table. Not this time, anyhow.

I’d never have predicted when I lauched MommaSaid.net seven years ago this week that I’d one day have my hair and makeup done in the middle of my kitchen for a magazine article. Or that CBS would send out a camera crew to my house — several times. Or that the Associated Press would care about what I have to say about all things motherhood.

Back then, nobody had put together the words “mommy” and “blogger.” Facebook was a year from starting up on the campus of Harvard University, and “tweeting” was something only birds did. I think we actually went hours, perhaps even a day or two, without checking e-mail. It was practically the dark ages of web 2.0.

I’d launched my web site in part because I thought it would help me build an audience that would some day buy my first book, when I got around to writing it. Besides, I was lonely and a little crazed, having just survived the colicky “Don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth” years. I found motherhood to be rewarding, yes, but also taxing, and I thought it was high time somebody said that out loud — and on the Internet. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that other mothers felt the same way.

Over the years, I heard from moms around the world who were happy to have a place to get a virtual pat on the back and a giggle. We laughed together, we cried together, we watched our kids reach middle school together. By the time the grown-ups took over Facebook (fastest growing segment: women over 40),  social media had made it so much easier to build a community online that hundreds of thousands of moms had started their own blogs. And we all felt a little less alone.

It has been the golden age of the mom blogger, and it still is. Marketers woo us and moms depend on us to make sense of their poop-filled days, the boo-boos, the carpools, the math homework and puberty. We get free swag from companies who hope we’ll write about their products, receive invites for luncheons from PR firms, and we get interviewed by the very mainstream media that seemed to think back in the day that what we did was a cute hobby.

Maybe it was, but not anymore.

But where do we go from here? What happens to the mom blogger when the kids get older and move out? Though I’m certain that a new generation of mom bloggers will fill in where we leave off, I wonder if the novelty of it all will wear off. Or will we simply be known as the pioneers of a phenomenon that keeps on going long after our kids have their own children? And who will do my hair and makeup then?

The last seven years at MommaSaid have been a wild ride. I had no idea when I launched it in the basement of my house, back when my kids weren’t in school at the same time and I had to learn HTML to post anything, that  it would become a part of a great movement shared with so many talented writers and vloggers. Or that the one book I’d aspired to would become five…so far. But I do know that I’m ready to keep on sharing the good, the bad and the ugly of motherhood just as long as there’s still something to say.

Share, share, that’s fair: What do you think mom bloggers will write about when the kids leave home?

Looking for some great mommy blogs? Here are just a few of my many favorites:

Alice Bradley of Finslippy
Daphne Brogdon of CoolMom.com
Dawn Meehan of Because I Said So
Lenore Skenazy of FreeRangeKids.com
Lisa Belkin of the Motherlode at The New York Times
Liz Gumbinner of Mom-101
Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child
Ree Drummond of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman
Stephanie Wilder-Taylor of Baby on Bored

PLUS: All of MommaSaid’s fine and fabulous bloggers over at Linger. (Don’t miss a thing. Subscribe to the RSS feed.)

Too much shopping to finish. Too much decorating to do. Too much to juggle this holiday season.

And I know you don’t want to complain. You don’t want to seem like a scrooge. So you smile and tell me you’re “ready” for the holidays, when really, you’ve got a load of wet snowpants making a racket in the dryer, and you can’t find the vanilla for the cookies you’d planned to make tonight. You know, after you finish hunting down photos and cotton balls (a.k.a “snow”) for the “surprise” holiday craft the kids are making for you at school.

You thought you’d surprise them back by decorating the pine tree out front, only to discover that the 1,000 lights you ran out to buy during the kids’ basketball practice pretty much covers 1/8 of the stinkin’ tree. So you stand outside in the freezing rain, staring at the neighbor’s elaborate selection of decorations, and wonder why you’d even bothered at all.

You try to remind yourself that the kids won’t be kids that much longer. You remember that they’ll leave you soon enough, and then you’ll have to share the holidays with their in-laws. And you’ll miss them. You truly will. And you’ll miss what the holidays were like when they lived at home. But your previously wet hat is frozen solid now, and you have to go pick the kids up at basketball.

Yet, as you’re leaving your driveway, you see something that lifts your spirit…

And for a moment, you realize how pretty this time of year can be, and now grateful you are to have family and friends to celebrate the holidays with again this year. As you pull out the camera you keep in your purse, just in case, and snap this photo, you think about what a pretty holiday card it would be.

Then you remember that you forgot to order holiday cards and you’re out of stamps anyhow. Plus, you’re late for basketball pick-up, and you’ve got no time to stop for vanilla. And then I see you at the school bus stop, and you smile and wish me a happy holiday. I smile back and wish you a happy new year, before we both head to our houses to get scratch something off our to-do lists.

It was nothing new for my pet hamsters to escape from their Habitrail, led by Salt, the silver and white mother hamster with Houdini-ish teeth, but it was the first time she climbed on my bed while I was sleeping. I had nightmares for weeks thereafter — after I extracted all the hamsters from my bed and closet and put them back in their cage. At least, I think I got all of them. My cat did seem extra content the next morning.

I’d tried duct tape and weights (books, shoes, a metal bank shaped like a soccer goal) to keep the hamsters’ cage door closed, but somehow, Salt could still get out. Her spouse (the pet store had said Pepper was a “she”) and their latest brood of babies would dash out behind her and make a beeline for whatever nook or corner they could find. That night, they were busy chewing through cardboard boxes in my closet. When I found them, I decided I was so very done with owning hamsters. I brought them back to the pet store and didn’t look back.

So when my neighbor told me this morning that my fifth grader had expressed interest in one of the babies that her kids’ guinea pig is about to give birth to, I thought of Salt and Pepper, and I shuddered.

“That’s nice that he’d like one of your guinea pig babies,” I told her, “but he’s not getting one.”

“Why not?” she asked. “They’re very cute.”

Cute? I’d taken care of my neighbors’ last guinea pig while they were on vacation, and I did my best to avoid her big ole teeth as I reached into her cage to change her water dish. I told her what I thought of her guinea pig.

“Well, this new guinea pig is nicer than Rosie was,” she assured me.  So I was right to worry that I’d lose a chunk of finger, eh? Hmmm.

“I don’t want anything in a cage,” I said. “And Pete doesn’t want any animals at all.”

She tried to sell me on how easy and cute guinea pigs are, but I would have none of it. I told her about Salt and Pepper and the midnight dash across my blanket.

“No guinea pigs,” I reiterated. “No rodents.”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” she said while I laughed at her and her guinea pig baby problem. She confessed that the pet store didn’t know their brand new guinea pig was pregnant when they sold it to her.

“Still no. But if the cat gets pregnant, give me a call,” I said.

She assured me that the cat can’t get pregnant, but I’ve been told that before — before I wound up extracting hamsters from of the boxes in my closet.

How else can you explain why she has so much memorabilia and informative materials at her fingertips and yet, no clutter in her house? She has no piles of anything, anywhere, and yet she can find whatever you ask for from whatever year dating back to before the construction of her house in 1965. I, on the other hand, have piles of stuff everywhere and yet, can find nothing.

She has birthday cards dating back 25 years, brochures, maps and books from Disney World from as far back as 1973 and brochures for spas across the Northeast Corridor. She’s got ticket stubs from New York Cosmos games in 1978, pamphlets from hotels where she stayed while visiting me at summer camp and maps of just about every state in the union. And she’s got a story for each of them, which she keeps in her head. (She’s probably going to correct my dates, too. You’ll see.)

In short, my mother is our very own Google. She just announced what she needs and the men in visors says, “Just a moment, Mrs. Perkins.” And soon, whatever she looks for is in her hands.

I am keeping this in mind as I consider cleaning out my own closet. I am certain I will find nothing of the kind that my mother retrieves whenever she disappears into her closet. If I do, it’ll be by accident, and then I won’t know what to do with it, because I don’t have a secret room with men who organize my things — until she dies and leaves it all to me.

“Just a minute, Mrs. Singer.”

Ah, if only I could be so lucky.