Boss by day, mom by night is not “work life balance”
It begins when your toddler climbs into bed before you’re even awake and takes over your pillow. Getting ready for school you’re the only one allowed to make the breakfasts and put on all the shoes and jackets despite a perfectly capable dad who is up to the task. You solve a problem for a peer, your boss and two employees in 3 hours of meetings without having time to pee. You accept a last minute lunchtime meeting because that’s the only time left on most people’s calendars.
You also don’t eat lunch.
You get home and are sweetly greeted by your toddler who wants you to watch cartoons with him and begins pulling you into the living room while you’re still wearing your coat, bag and shoes. Both children must be touching you at all times until bedtime. You put one to bed, sometimes also the other. And if you don’t fall asleep in bed with one of them, you sort of enjoy an hour of Game of Thrones from the previous night before you stumble up the stairs, brush your teeth, and fall into bed yourself.
Sound familiar? Sound like balance?
If the answer to the first question is yes, then the answer to the second is likely an emphatic no, because that, my friends, is just life, and who has time to figure out if it’s balanced?
So, if work life balance isn’t really a thing, what do you do?
Contrite though it may sound, the answer may be just to live.
Be clear on your values, establish your support systems, and live. Sometimes, you’ll miss a Mother’s Day tea at preschool for a meeting, sometimes you’ll miss a meeting for a school concert. Sometimes you’ll miss all of those things for a vacation you take with your friends. Not one of those things is right or wrong. Did you do the thing that is best for you in that moment of your life? Then, good job!
The idea of work life balance is wrought with unspoken judgements. First and foremost, it’s a concept applied almost exclusively to women who have children and work. Not even men with kids have the same expectation to create this mythical balance. But, just as insidiously, it also comes with the value assumption that for women life is at home, and work is something else entirely.
And that’s crap, you guys. If the full day you’re spending at the office making money, supporting your team, building relationships, and exploring passions outside of motherhood isn’t life, then what is it?
Let’s back up to the example of 24 hours in your life as seen above. Clearly, you’re too busy to also add to your list of responsibilities actively creating balance. Once you free yourself of this made-up responsibility perpetuated by the media asking women in charge how they achieve it, you’ll find you’ve freed up a usable bit of time. And in that time, ask yourself, not whether your life is balanced, but if you’re doing your best - for yourself, for your family, and in your job. Are you being your truest self and adhering to your values, whether those are kindness or ambition or both?
That’s the balance we should all be working to achieve - the one that connects who we are on the inside to who we are on the outside. It’s what we have control over. It’s what crosses gender and socio-economics and race.
So, for the woman - because the question of work life balance is so very much one made up for women - for the woman who lives each day like the day above, don’t ask yourself whether your day was balanced between “work” and “life”, instead ask if you felt good about what you accomplished that day, did you feel love and give love in return, did you have moments when you felt you were being your best self? Congratulate yourself on the yeses, forgive yourself for the nos, and go to bed, lady. You must be exhausted.