Split the Difference
A bit of a rant on motherhood and work
Yesterday, after my yoga class, one of the students and I found each other in line together at the nearby coffee shop. Making conversation, she asked me what my plans were for the rest of the day. Everything constricted, and I’m sure I started to sweat. But I like her, and I feel some kinship as a fellow 40-something with a 4 year-old, so I told her the truth.
“I’m going to take this coffee to one of the benches outside and work on a writing project.”
She asked me what kind of writing I did, and I told her “creative nonfiction”—but that this was new, that I didn’t yet know if I could make a career of it. The Imposter voice in me knows how to come out of the gate with a laundry list of disclaimers.
But instead of skepticism, she came back with empathy. It turned out she had a degree in Creative Writing. She started writing a novel. Then she had kids, who are now off to college. At that point in the conversation, her focus drifted into the distance and I could tell she was remembering, reflecting.
“…and then I got divorced…” she said, without providing any context, before or after. Maybe she didn’t mean to say it out loud. I didn’t ask. Probably a whole book could be written about that story—a book that she might have written had she gone down a different path.
After a pause, our conversation drifted to the balancing act—the eternal question of how to juggle working and mothering, pursuing two dreams that often feel fundamentally incompatible. The sacrifices you make along the way. You know, your average weekday-morning-after-yoga chitchat.
It’s a tale as old as time—or at least as old as Second Wave Feminism, a movement with which I definitely have a love/hate relationship. For those of us who are Millenials, our grandmothers pioneered work outside of the home during and after World War II. Our mothers could go to co-ed colleges and were burdened with proving to society that they deserved equal status in the workplace. Now that it’s our turn, it has become eminently clear that “having it all” is a myth, and that caregiving, running a home, and working 40+ hours is physically and mentally destroying us. We have seen the light, but we don’t know how to fix what’s broken.
I have high hopes for the next generation in this regard. Many of them are already in therapy, which is a start. But for my own sake, and for the sake of leaving our children a few breadcrumbs, I’m on a quest to figure some of this out. What does balance look like? What is the elusive Third Way? Truthfully, my thoughts on this question could fill a book…and they have. This is a big theme of my memoir-in-progress.
For today, I’ll try to keep it brief and focus on one piece: the problem of Part-Time. The premise is simple: some people are highly career-driven and feel like the sacrifice is worth it to leave their children in someone else’s care for eight hours a day, five days a week or more. Some people are natural caregivers or educators and believe the sacrifice is worth it to put paying jobs on hold for years to parent their children. Many people do not have the resources (financial or human) to make either of these choices. Many people don’t want to.
I think this middle ground is bigger than we think. The percentage of women in the workforce tanked during the COVID-19 pandemic, setting back decades of progress. Women-dominated industries were hit hard, and workers who were parents lost their childcare. Today, women as a group have recovered their employment losses, though women of color, who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, are still working to catch up. Arguably, though, our work looks different, and we are still piecing together what better-balanced lives might look like.
Speaking primarily for myself, here’s what someone looking for a Third Way wants:
To feel like they can be a consistent, active presence in their children’s lives, witnessing their development, stewarding their growth, fostering connection
To feel like they can contribute to the household holistically, through caregiving, providing financially, and managing shared obligations
To feel like they can press forward with work-related or educational interests without falling behind, losing skills, or being downgraded in title or pay
To feel like they can continue to develop as an adult human who had a life and an identity pre-kids and will have one after they are grown
To feel like they are entitled to physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being, not just martyrdom and burnout
Let me know if I missed something. Continuing to speak for myself, here’s where we run into trouble, especially if we didn’t have kids right out of high school or college and spent years or decades working full time and climbing the corporate ladder, as we children-of-feminists were conditioned to do:
Going back to work full-time feels like a Sophie’s Choice between putting ourselves or our children first.
Childcare options do not meet the needs of full-time employees. Hours are short, costs are incredibly high, choices can be limited or non-existent, and no matter where you are, there are way more sick days, holidays, and closures than most folks have in PTO.
Part-time jobs that have flexible hours and pay well, let alone have benefits, are very, very hard to come by. If you are coming from the 9-to-5 world and do not have experience in self-employment or contracting, you are at a big disadvantage for the jobs that do exist.
Starting over is going to cost you. If you decide you want to switch careers, or join the gig economy, or piece things together, it’s going to take time, and you’re going to lose money. These days, that’s true whether you’re a parent or not, but it’s particularly inconvenient at this time of life—trust me.
So where does that leave us, other than broke, overwhelmed, and unfulfilled? I do not have the answers. But here are a handful of thoughts on steps we could begin to take in pursuit of a middle path, and a solution to the Part-Time Problem:
Advocate for flexibility within traditional, full-time workplaces. Beyond paid parental leave, this means flexible hours, work-from-home, shorter work week options, mental health leave, and more. Point your bosses to the costs of turnover v. retention. Keeping employees who have kids will save them $$$.
Post highly-skilled part-time positions. How well you do your job is not necessarily correlated to how many hours you spend doing it. Companies can find experienced, competitive employees—many of them women and people of color—who simply want to work 10, 20, or 30 hours, and are balancing a life outside of this job.
Give employees space to experiment before they have kids. Instead of exploiting the 20-somethings for overtime, encourage them to take classes, develop their hobbies, start side hustles. Implement a sabbatical program. Having a life beyond work will help them when they need work that fits around life.
Think of our work lives cyclically, not linearly. It’s becoming clear that the model of “work full time for 50 years, retire and do nothing, then die” is dysfunctional and has never worked for the majority of the population. What if, instead, we allowed for the waxing and waning of life, of seasons of productivity sprinkled with seasons of rest—or seasons of building and fostering different arenas of our lives?
Normalize hybrid set-ups. Talk about where you’re cutting back, or how you’re piecing things together, or why you chose 3-day childcare, or what you negotiated with your spouse. Talk about what you gave up, and why. Make. It. Okay. Validate all choices so that we can eliminate shame.
Bottom line? It’s all work. I have zero jobs, but I also have five jobs. Some pay, some don’t, but they all hopefully make the world a better place. They are all ridiculously hard at times, and they all also bring me joy.
I was glad that we parted ways before I spurted this entire long-winded rant to my new yoga buddy. But I was also glad that I shared my uncomfortable truth with her. Each time I come out of the closet as a writer, as I claim a piece of my identity, I feel more whole. And that is something we all deserve.
With light, life, and love,
Devon
Beautiful, Dev, love you 🥰