I’d say this has been one of those days, but I fear it’s been one of those weeks. Or months. Or worse. It just feels like I can’t get ahead. I realize some of this is chronic caregiver stuff: laundry, cleaning, cooking that are just completed when it’s time to do them again. I try to think of these things not as goals to be attained but as the background activities of my life, the patterns of the everyday. But it’s hard when I’m so tired some days that getting dinner on the table IS in fact a major achievement. What’s troubling me most, anyway, isn’t the dismal routine of maintenance but instead the strange psychological adaptations that are happening. The onslaught of winter isn’t helping, with its corollary SAD and Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe that can account for what’s going on. But I’m somewhere between agoraphobia and hibernation, and anyone will tell you that’s a tricky place to be. I’m CRAVING time at an office, with tasks and challenges that need my brain and expertise. I’m lusting after adult conversation, preferably not about children. Most of all, I want blessed quiet and my body, my space, my environs to myself. This feels ungrateful but it’s truly not: it’s just that I, like almost everyone, am too complex to do just one thing or be just one way. I love parenting and I love the other things I’ve done with my life, and I’m headed toward a new kind of balancing, I hope. In the meantime: I do the strange and crazy dance a friend in college termed “full body flail” and try not to act out in public.
Category Archives: Working
It’s not out there, it’s in here
I’m heartily tired of that “supermom” line of discussion, but I bring it up because I actually know one. Or rather, I know a superwoman who is also a mom, and I think that’s part of what we’re talking about here. She posted on fb today:
In the last few minutes, while taking a break to pump, I edited a book review first proof, consulted with a colleague through the door about an e-mail, responded to my book editor about a change in an illustration, posted on Facebook to a friend, AND corresponded with Kevin about missing the deadline for Xavier’s chess tournament this Saturday (crap! he’s going to be disappointed). No wonder I feel pulled in a million directions! Just keep swimming…
The comments are even more fascinating — “I am wholly inadequate. Thanks for that”; “If you have a few extra minutes, can you solve the Israeli/Palestinian issue?”; “You are my hero. I went to the bathroom and played Angry Birds for 15 minutes.” It would seem that most of us don’t come close to achieving this remarkable synthesis (or at least synchronicity) of work and family life. I wonder: do we want to? Is there some satisfaction in keeping things cordoned off a little better? What are, in fact, the pros and cons of doing so much at once? I mean, of course we all THINK we want to — it would seem fabulous to have the skill, the ambition, the caring, the capacity to do and be so fully all the many things we are. But as my friend says, there’s swimming involved.
On my “About” page I offer the age-old image of a river as a way of thinking about the forces that carry us through our lives. This friend is among the most thoughtful, intentional, capable people I know; she has made conscious choices that take her well outside the conventions of social and professional expectations, and not in easy ways. The idea that even SHE is working hard to “just keep swimming,” well, that has me worried.
See, I envision a point of balance, or rather an act of balancing, as do we all. And of course there’s that juggling metaphor, too, that has us perpetually in motion, arms sore and eyes strained, working not only to keep the balls in the air but to remember which, when dropped, will bounce and which will shatter. The trouble with all of these images is, as Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests in “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” that they assume surplus. But there’s only so much of each of us, in reality, and while great professional and family lives make MORE of us (Gail Godwin’s beautiful novel “Evensong” posits this as one definition of vocation), there’s still just us.
There are choices to be made. I am in awe of people who make these choices with open hearts and curious minds. Every choice to be somewhere is a choice NOT to be somewhere else, and I for one get a little stuck on where I’m not, where I should maybe really be. People who center themselves in the many aspects of their lives do so not by some magical process of equidistancing but by embracing each aspect in its turn, or (as in my friend’s case), several at once. I picture my niece, who is blind, in a story her mother told me — she had an exciting activity at school, for which she had spent days preparing, and from which she brought home a series of artifacts. She arranged the objects in a circle on the floor around herself and lay down, touching them one by one, reveling in their presence and the experience that they recalled. Her mother told me that the “Happiness Project” describes joy as deriving not just from an experience, but from anticipation of and reflection on it…which makes that model of devoted time for centered celebration vital. To me, this means that doing fewer things more deeply, with more whole-hearted preparation, presence, and appreciation, seems a surer way to happiness. And yet, and yet…if I could be working with my book editor while I pumped, wouldn’t I? You betcha.
So maybe what we’re saying, again, forever, is that it’s not out there — it’s in here. If we can bring the joy and attention to what we’re doing, that matters far more than what we are in fact doing. The trick, it seems, is to feel okay about merely pumping, or changing diapers, or bathing a small person, when that is what we have chosen to do, instead of absently running our fingers over the rows of what’s missing. We can do as much or as little as we can do; what we deserve is to honor our own choices by showing up while we do it.
“Going back to work?”
As if we stopped working in the interim. As if carrying, growing, birthing, nursing, and raising a child are not work. (Someone told me that the process of gestation and childbirth is equivalent, in terms of energy expended, to climbing Mount Everest. Someone more reliable told me that the single most energy-intensive activity a mammal can undertake is gestation. This seems obvious.)
But when you’ve had a professional career and you step away for a different kind of life, people always want to know if you’re going back to work. By which they really mean one of two things: a) will you get paid again, or will you keep sponging off your husband (who must make a MINT)?, and/or b) will you do something that uses your vast experience and training or will you just keep changing diapers ad infinitum? I’d be offended by these questions if I weren’t asking them myself. (Except for the MINT part. We wish.) But I kind of want to know, too. And I REALLY want to know if I’ll be able to go back to work in the ways that make best sense. Those are:
1. With limited hours so there is still time to spend with kids and so we don’t spend my whole paycheck on childcare. You’d think in a tough economy and a social context where more parents want to parent more, that we’d see an increase in smart, flexible, responsible part-time positions. No. Instead, most organizations are forcing more on overworked, underpaid employees in the strange American all-or-nothing principle. I don’t get it, nor do I like it. The parents I know could change the world, and the lucky ones get to do it in both ways at once: through paid work AND raising the next generation of citizens and leaders.
2. With a passion for the field and an excellent match for my distinctive sets of skills and capacities. Why aren’t there more (decently paying) jobs in the most creative and engaging fields of teaching and social change? Don’t answer that. I get it. I just don’t like it. Mostly, I can’t help thinking about how much positive change could happen if we actually embraced principles of prevention rather than treatment — if we made sure kids have what they need, and parents too. If we got people interested in building things early, instead of teaching them to behave like a cog in a wheel or an arm in a factory. The world is what we make it, friends. Let’s make it something we want to inhabit. That takes artists and engineers and organizers and teachers and doctors and environmentalists, and it takes cooperation and negotiation and the crafting of shared hope.
3. With a context and situation that permit and even encourage the recognition that all workers are human and deserving of dignity, flexibility, support, integrity, and engagement. Being a parent has made me a better human and also, I believe, a better worker and supervisor. And it has made me less patient with forms of interaction that are counterproductive. Ask for people’s ideas. Give them a chance to shine. Be honest with them. Encourage them to learn and grow. Remind them that they’re not just laying brick upon brick, as the old story goes; they’re building a great cathedral.
This is all to say: I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that I can find ways to sustain us in the long haul, whether through writing or teaching or foundation work or crafting or consulting. And for now, I’ve got a job I love with two tiny colleagues and one great big one and a shared vision of fun, love, and creativity. Can’t beat that with a stick.
On Crafting a Life 