When women started to go to work in large numbers as a result of the feminist revolution, we were told that that balancing work life and home life was an achievable goal and one to be pursued with great alacrity. Before that, many women worked in low-paying jobs such as waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, factory workers, and all the other service jobs such as hairdressers, maids, typists, but no one was paying attention to them. If they had to go home after a day’s work to shop, cook, clean, and take care of children without the help of a husband or with a husband who didn’t help, no one was writing about balancing their lives or having goals or a clear vision. For these women, it was dead-end jobs with no expectations of promotions, raises, or even recognition.
Then, quite suddenly, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique came out and the term “the problem that had no name” became the problem with a name: the malaise of the stay-at-home mom, the lack of fulfillment of the formerly satisfied homemaker. And so women started looking for work that was significant, well-paid, and on equal par with men in terms of both opportunity and salary. And it worked--well, most of the time. There are still serious salary disparities between men and women for the same job.
But a new problem emerged. Now that women did not have “jobs” but “careers,” they also experienced what men had experienced all their lives: a commitment to get the work done, even if it took evenings and weekends. The newly important woman who could not be easily replaced could not remain in a strictly 9-to-5 job.
However, the culture at home was not changing. Although many husbands took up some of the slack, it was still the woman’s responsibility to manage the home front and the children. The now continuously exhausted woman who was rushing home from work to find cranky children, difficult-to-keep baby sitters, and a sullen husband, started to look for solutions, trying to hone her time-management skills.
I never did manage to handle each piece of paper that came across my desk only once, however I did not buy anything that needed to be ironed, learned the secrets of how to make ready-made look like cooked-from-scratch, and delegated to an incompetent husband and unwilling children some household tasks. This is what all my friends and colleagues did, and yet we were nowhere near finding that elusive balance between work and home.
Either work suffered or the family did, with frustration and guilt ever present in all our lives. We saw ourselves as failures and tried harder. I have come to realize that, in fact, balance between those two extremely demanding roles is an unachievable myth, and the elusive pursuit only made women feel inadequate.
Even a two-week vacation is time that has to be made up on one’s return--to wit the waiting stack of mail and phone calls. And even during that so-called holiday, we check our e-mails on the run and remain available 24/7 via our cell phones.
When women are advised to plan, have goals, and prioritize, it is assumed that we have choices. In fact, life is full of unpredictability, unintended consequences, and problems we cannot control.
We also must deal with our own ambivalence towards our social lives: How often do we see friends, who do we have time for, how often do we go to fun things like movies and theaters, and is it at the determent of other pursuits? And where does “quiet time” go? Where is time with the family to just hang out--down time?
By creating the imperative of balancing work and life, we are creating an idealized image of how we should feel, be, and what we should want. As our self-esteem starts to depend on how closely we live up to this image of balance and harmony, we end up feeling more and more frustrated at what we perceive as our own lack discipline and time-management skills.
The language of work/life balance is one that includes predictability, control, individual achievement, hierarchies of values, constant movement towards goals, and compartmentalization of life. It demands that we set priorities--as if one can easily decide between finishing an urgent report for work and helping a child with her equally urgent report for school.
The self-help books are of no help--each one of us individually must figure out what we can live with and what we can let go of.
We need to re-think achievement, success, and status. I live by the mottos: “not everything worth doing is worth doing well” and “better is often the enemy of good enough.” As a writer I have come to realize that a book or column never really gets finished--it can always be improved--so at some point, it gets “abandoned” to the publisher. I stop before it is perfect, because it can never be that anyway.
The price in refusing to be part of the competitive rat race is thwarted ambitions. Making peace with one’s choices is to forego status. Parenting cannot be delayed, some work can be, but more often the opportunity for significant advancement is lost in bad timing. This, in fact, is our ultimate choice. It is for most women and now also for many men.
