Workaholic Dads and "family values"

Ack, I can't believe it's been a week since I blogged over here. I have a dozen windows open on my desktop with material to blog about, but little time to write. The back-to-school whirlwind is in full force. So I am going to settle for a quick post this morning to send you to over to an article by Brazen Careerist blogger Penelope Trunk.

In this San Francisco Chronicle piece, Penelope writes a scathing indictment of executives who work insanely long hours, yet are not viewed as neglectful parents.

She says:

Thank goodness these boards do not value fathering, or there would be no one to run the Fortune 500. There appears to be little room for parenting if you're at the very top.

Fortune magazine ran an article about Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony. He is married with two children and is quoted as saying at company meeting, "I don't see my family much. My family is you."

Fortune ran a profile of Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE. Immelt said that he has been working 100-hour weeks for the last 20 years. He also said that he is married and has an 18-year-old-daughter.

I can't decide which is more pathetic - the way these men approach their roles as parents, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

Must-read: "The Little Secret of Women Who Have it All"

I'm not going to have much time to blog this morning but I wanted to recommend Laura Vanderkam's August 13 blog on The Huffington Post.

"The Little Secret of Women Who Have it All" provides a breath of fresh air by discussing the possibility that motherhood and work are compatible, and that it's really okay to feel fine doing both!

News vacation

I am back. I was so burned out right before summer vacation that I just let the Mojo Mom blog go dark last week. I apologize for the abrupt escape, but I really needed to get away from work and step out of my regular life for a few days.

Being away gave me great perspective on work/life balance. The break showed me the never-ending hamster wheel I had built for myself. Now that I am back with renewed perspective, can I make some changes? My main challenge is to get my daily work done with enough time left over to work on longer-term projects as well.

It's time that I take to heart the advice of productivity experts who recommend checking email only a couple of times a day. I won't debate whether the internet is a true addiction, but the online connection sure can be a time sink. Being a writer and blogger requires that I stay on top of the news, but the information flow doesn't change as often as I hit the "refresh browser" or "get email" buttons.

Unplugging from the news was a fantastic luxury. I highly recommend trying it at least one week per year, or whenever you feel like you need to hit your mental reset button. I managed to blog over on (parent.thesis) until our broadband connection gave out at the end of the week, but when it went out it was actually a little bit of a relief. I could feel myself pulling away mentally, not really wanting to hear the latest news updates. Jumping in the lake and playing with my family seemed much more appealing.

I happened to come across the book version of Fark.com while I was away. While the book could have been better-written, it did point out the 8 classes of "go-to stories mass media uses when there's not enough hard news to fill a newspaper or a news broadcast."

Waiting in the Detroit airport yesterday, I was subjected to about an hour of live CNN, and it was indeed full of the inane stories that Fark reports on. The most egregious reporting was a toothless Q&A with an author who claims that liberal foundations are ruining America (what Fark classifies as "equal time for nut jobs"). Somehow conservative foundations were no problem, a fact that was glossed over with puffball questions.

The laziest piece of reporting was drawn out over about an hour, revealing the top 5 reasons people have sex, one reason at a time. The newscaster sounded especially embarrassed to keep coming back with "After the break, the #3 reason people have sex," because none of the reasons were at all surprising, for example "It feels good." That's a non-news-flash if I've ever heard one, but since there was a study about it and the subject was sex, it was media fuel.

So don't stop reading the Mojo Mom blog, but feel free to tune out CNN any time you wish!

Working moms feeling untethered by our summer schedules

I have been linked to the school year schedule almost my whole life. Since entering kindergarten myself I have timed my life to summer and back-to-school for my daughter or myself almost every year: 32 of my 39 summers total.

This summer I feel that I have become unmoored, unglued. Half the time I don't know what day of the week it is, what date it is. My daughter is generally in day camp but I have to leave at 2:30 each afternoon to pick her up. Is it my imagination, or is my "vertical information storage system," aka the stack of work on my desk, only growing and never shrinking? I managed to start a new job on the first day of summer break (not my choice of timing!) and it's all been downhill since then. Today my daughter is home "sick," and I am not sure if it's really a mental health day or what, but I told her she needs to rest and entertain herself. I believed that she felt off her game this morning but now she's back to normal and bouncing off the walls.

My friend PunditMom wrote about her Mommycamp schedule with her daughter--so if you want to hear from someone who can make that work, I recommend her blog. More power to her, but it is so not working for me.

I am feeling a lot more in tune with Judith Warner this week, who writes in her blog Domestic Disturbances about her resentment about the myriad school and camp events that ask parents to drop their work to come visit or volunteer during the day.

Judith's rant was cathartic for me. She said:

"Conversations about parents who break promises or let their kids down or generally make them feel less important than work shouldn’t be common. But they are. I hear snippets of them every time I attend a school event during the workday. And I’m fed up. I’ve just about had it.

"But not with the ill-accused parents.

"I’ve had it with a culture that willfully refuses to face up to the fact that almost 80 percent of mothers with children beyond pre-school age – and, of course, a much greater percentage of fathers – work. This refusal to face facts, coupled with the ideology of 'parental involvement' as a panacea for all social ills, has created a situation in which not only guilt-ridden parents, but children are needlessly suffering.

"It doesn’t need to be this way. It only takes a quick look across the Atlantic to see that many other countries have done what’s necessary to grow up and embrace the 21st century. They provide kids with a longer school year, a longer school day and subsidized summer activities. And they consider that a parent’s place is in the home – not in the classroom."

Add in the uber-competitive nature of parenting in some affluent communities and working parents can really feel left out of it all.

Interestingly, Judith's post got over 160 comments and of the ones that I've read, the vast majority of those who wrote in supported her point of view.

And yes, both Judith and I realize how lucky we are to have jobs that allow us to flexibly break away when needed, even at the cost to our work. It's important to remember that as Judith points out, 50% of Americans have no right to sick leave and 25% have no vacation.

Life calls me away from my desk at the moment, so I will leave you with one more link to an article that says that parents shouldn't have to feel that they are their kids' playmates and entertainers: "Leave those kids alone" from the Boston Globe. The tide may be turning away from child-centric rearing and back to a more sustainable approach.

Work-life balance: Our ladder is up the wrong tree

All the research I have done as Mojo Mom has led me to a conclusion that I really need to share with you. As mothers trying to have an integrated life with many facets, have set our sights set on the wrong goal. Our ladder is up the wrong tree in a major way.

I am talking about “work-life balance.” This idea is everywhere, and has become a watchword for my generation, Gen X, which has put “work-life balance” on the map as our highest ideal as we negotiate with our hard-charging Boomer bosses. Although it is usually presented as a positive ideal, “balance” is a trap. I argue that rather than being our highest goal, “balance” accurately describes our current situation that asks families to do it all…on our own. Until we change our thinking on this issue, we are going to be stuck with the same set of unappetizing work-life “choices” that we are faced with now.


Think about it. Who needs balance? Jugglers, tightrope walkers….and Moms. Picture the iconic cover of a chick-lit novel, showing a woman struggling to “balance” a briefcase, cellphone. and pacifier. In real life there would most likely be a dog and stroller involved too, in addition to an actual baby. When we tell women to strive for balance, we’re really telling them to keep dancing as fast as they can. We are telling them that they are failing to keep it all together without asking for help.

“Balance” is in fact a telling metaphor for motherhood. Balance is the underappreciated sixth sense in our brains. Our sense of balance is active, dynamic, and takes a constant hum of processing and adjustment to achieve—yet this vital work barely registers in our conscious mind. We only notice it when our system fails and we are thrown into disequilibrium, left dizzy and unable to function. We couldn't get out of bed to stand up straight and walk, much less work and lead productive lives, without our sense of balance. But when is the last time you thought of your vestibular system, not to mention stopping to thank heavens for the vital job it does?

This is just like the work that mothers provide: unpaid, uncounted, and invisible labor that forms the foundation of family life. If it were counted, women's unpaid household labor would add an estimated one-third to the world's annual economic product, more than $4 trillion.

So if our balancing act is a farce rather than a lofty goal, what should we be aiming for?

Support.

This needs to become our new ideal, our North Star, our guiding metaphor. The motherhood movement should aim for creating a real support network that involves everyone--employers, communities, men and women. We need a team approach to holding up the world, one that recognizes the contributions that all family caregivers make, a system that does not just expect us to make the pieces fit all by ourselves on an individual level. My Mojo Mom Mantra is to "make the invisible work visible and then divide it fairly." We are still at the beginning of that first step, increasing awareness about what mothers and fathers contribute to society, through the sacrificial giving that is required to raise the next generation of children. Support and teamwork need to trickle up from the grassroots to a policy level. We can use this context to explain the motherhood movement to our supporters and skeptics alike.

I learned a lesson about support recently. I had ordered a giant beanbag chair called a Foof Cube for our home. My 7 year old knew a good thing when she saw it. Within a day of its arrival she had commandeered it for her bed, and she’s been sleeping in it every night since then. Kids are great at taking what they need.

I am also ordering another one for myself. In the meantime, I sneak into her room during the school day and sink down into the foam cube to remind myself what support feels like. I am cradled in a snug nest. I let go, and nothing falls.

I could get used to this.