Jugglers Workshop | All About Time
Juggling Workshop
Working Moms' Q & A
The daily tug-of-war between your career and your kids can leave you torn between the two worlds. Where do you turn? The Juggling Workshop! Ask questions and share suggestions about juggling work and family.
This month's question:
<I have worked full time since I graduated from high school. I have two children 8 & 12 and find I am busier now than when they were babies. My
family is my priority. I work for a large financial institution that
pushes for, praises, and rewards employees who involve themselves in the
community outside of work time. If you are a working mother you know that
there is little spare time. I would rather go home cook my family a decent
meal and help my kids with their homework than pick up fast food, tell them
goodbye and see them the next morning. When I am at work I give 100% to my
job and my clients and feel I do a good job. But when it comes time to my
free time, I feel it should be my free time to do with as I please. I
should not be made to feel disloyal to my corporation because I like to be
with my husband and children. I feel the pressure, but I refuse to give up
my values. Does anyone feel the same way?
-- Wrobel
Too right! Your company pays you to do a competent job of work within your
contracted number of hours. It's got no business to interfere in how you spend
your time outside those hours. You've got your priorities right, and it seems
to me to be extremely arrogant of the company to think that employees who
involve themselves with the outside community are somehow better people than
those who devote themselves to raising decent future citizens. BTW, do the top
levels of management similarly involve themselves in community action, or is
it a top-down policy?
Stick with what you know to be the right thing to do!
-- Pat
I want to acknowledge you for achieving such great balance in your life.
Yes, free time is your time to do as you please. You also have the choice
to feel whatever about this time and my suggestion is you don't allow
yourself to feel disloyal to the company. We can all choose what to feel
about a situation. Well done for not giving up on your values. Sometimes
we feel it would be easier to give up on them, yet in the long run our
values are one of the most important parts of us as a person.
And yes, I've felt this way before. I find easy to drift back to feeling
guilty about family and work. Taking time out for myself helps with this.
-- Wendy
I think it is very important to let your employer know up-front that your FIRST job is being a mother. That is not to say that you should make a habit of missing work, but be sure your boss understands that you have children and they do occasionally get sick. I am very lucky to have an understanding boss like this- I take the entire summer off with my kids while they're on vacation from school and school holidays when dad isn't off. When I am at work, I give 110% of myself to my career, but my number one priority is being a mom to my sons.
-- Susan
Children are the future. It's as simple as that. Doesn't Corporate
America get it?
-- Tina
I am 38 years old. I am married 15 years. I have two children ages 6
and 1. Until I was downsized in March 1997, I have worked full time
since I was 23. After the downsizing, I simply couldn't accept the
notion of not working. After all I have two degrees. So after a
six-month job search (with a newborn at home), I accepted a sales job in
October 1997. Well guess what? My new boss is an entrepreneur, a
control freak, works 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, admittedly
places his own family behind himself and his businesses in terms of
priority, and I simply hate it. Not only do I hate it, I have no desire
to conduct a new job search, and put myself and my family under the
stress. And my husband does pull pretty close to a 50/50 around the
house.
I am lucky if I see my daughter who is 1 a grand total of 2
hours per day! My husband makes a very good living working in IT for an
fortune 500 company, so I can quit. The irony is he hates his job as
much or more as I hate mine. If it weren't for the money, he'd quit
corporate America today. Corporate America is only pretending to be
family friendly, or worker friendly for that matter. Do we both want to
work -- yes! There is great value in work, it's how to we choose to
work, need to work, want to work that has to change.
So I am going to
create some type of home-based business and do with it what I can, and
give my kids what they deserve. At least one parent who is attuned to
them. I chair a working mothers group, and believe me I am fully behind
working mothers. But, I hear an enormous ground swell of frustration,
anger, resentment, disallusionment at having to always be the one to
accommodate. Men don't accommodate. We are told in order for corporate
America to change we must bring our families into the workplace. When
we do though we are slammed. Corporate America doesn't want to deal
with families. So we hide it, women and men, we suck it up, we get on
with it, and we are killing ourselves. Only when business America
recognizes that the family is fluid and that work needs to be fluid too
will it really succeed beyond it's wildest expectations.
--Karen
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