BC Council for Families

by Carolyn M. Usher

We're the ones with the most power to balance work and family.  How can we start?

Over the past months I've done quite a bit of reading about “work and family.” What I've noticed, is that when people talk (or write) “work and family” what they usually mean is “what the workplace should be doing for its employees.”

During my 30 years in the workforce, I've witnessed a literal revolution in this area. There is still some distance for employers to go, there's no denying that, but the revolution is well underway.

What I have discovered, however, is that the person with the most power to balance work and family life has always been me, the employee.

Making Choices We Can Live With

The first step in balancing our lives has to be thinking through our values and being intentional about the choices we make. It's very easy to just let life happen to us, to let our workday spillover into our personal lives. “It's the job,” we say. “No one else can do it,” we explain. “This is really, really important,” we declare. “You just don't understand,” we defend.
But our families do understand, all too well. Values are not what we say, they are how we live. If we say that our families are the most important thing in the world to us, but bring work home every night, spend our evenings in meetings, travel on weekends and shortchange holidays, we are declaring, loud and clear, what is most important to us. It's that simple. There is no such thing as one-minute parenting and whoever promoted the notion that quality time with our mates and children could be conducted over cell phones or scheduled into day timers is very, very wrong. Nurturing family relationships takes time and you can't go back and do “parent of pre-school children” again or “couple in their 30s” again. Once those days of our lives are gone, they cannot be retrieved and replayed.

I'll come clean. I'm a recovering workaholic. Like so many of you, I too was once irreplaceable at my job. I worked till 7 or 8 every night. I brought home a bulging briefcase every night and sent my handsome husband off to bed alone while I kept company with budget printouts and calculators. I was a very important person. So important that when those budgets got tightened and someone had to go, they let me go. You can bet I was in some shock.

My husband had been trying to explain the facts of life to me for years. I believe “schmuk” was the word he used to describe my behaviour. The really good thing about my story was that my children were still young, my husband still loved me, and I learned my lesson well.

On the job, I give 150%, but with only occasional exceptions, at 5 p.m. I go home. But even 150% means that I have to prioritize my time and that can sometimes be risky. It's not politically wise to say, “I can't do that,” or “I can only do that if I drop this or this or this.” Employers don't want to hear that.

But I believe that people who, on the job, take on more and more and more (without dropping something) become very scattered and ineffective. Their energies are going in so many directions that they're not focusing on what is most important and no matter how brilliant they are, nothing gets the benefit of their best. But it's a temptation because it often happens so insidiously. A co-worker is ill so you cover a couple meetings for them. Then the organization takes on a new contract and you get a couple of more people to supervise. You're asked to make a presentation at a prestigious conference, but while you're preparing for this and away doing that, your regular work piles up so you have to put in some evenings to get caught up. And on it goes.

Some of us, being honest with ourselves, will realize that work is more important than family. So be it. But those of us that truly value our families more than our work need to ensure that we are intentional about the workplace choices we make. A good starting place might be to make the subject of balancing work and family a topic of discussion at a staff meeting. By making it a topic of general discussion to start with, rather than a personal issue between you and your supervisor, you'll have a chance to “get the lay of the land,” as my father used to say. What are the prevailing attitudes and where would support for more family-friendly work hours come from?

If our workplace culture is too often in conflict with our values, it's time to get our butts in gear and rev up the resume. It might take some time to get a new job and it will certainly take some effort, but as Cher so profoundly put it, “This ain't no dress rehearsal, babe. It's my life and I can't do a retake.”

Do you really need that job?

Somewhere along the line, even those of us who came of age during the '60s and should know better, climbed onto that hamster wheel and started our run towards success and security. But of course, the faster we ran, the quicker we got to nowhere. That's because the more money we make, the more money we need.

If we buy a big house, we pay more for hydro and it has lots of rooms so we need more furniture and when you have both a living room and a family room, of course you need two TVs so that means two cable connections to pay for. Of course you need two incomes to pay for all that and since you and your mate both work at opposite ends of the city, you need two cars so that's double insurance, double gas and double repairs, and since you often chauffeur clients around it needs to be a fairly current model.

You have to look good at work, so that means a decent, working wardrobe and everyone goes out to lunch together every Friday and there's a never-ending stream of baby, wedding and good-bye gifts to contribute to. You spend so much time commuting that you're too weary to keep that big house clean so you hire someone to do that and make regular stops at the deli to pick up pre-cooked dinners to feed your family. Naturally you don't have time to make your kids Hallowe'en costumes so you buy them, just like you buy the cookies they take to the class party and the packaged granola bars they take in their lunch kit.

Did I mention daycare or after-school care, or summer camps to keep the kids safe and out of trouble? Or the trip to Disney World that you took because you've been spending so much time at work you wanted to give the kids something special for being so understanding?

Don't misunderstand. Some people love their jobs and wouldn't change a thing. For them, I'm happy. But there are many others who just haven't realized that this is a race they have the power to back out of. Re-evaluate what you really need. Pretend you and your family have just arrived in this country with nothing. What do you need? Start from ground zero and look at what is essential for your health and happiness. If you simplified your life, how much income would you really need?

• Once you figure out how much income you genuinely require, look at where you could get it.
• Could you and your mate both switch to part-time work?
• Could one of you quit altogether?
• Could you manage by doing contracted work at home?
• Could you quit a job you dislike and do something that gives you a lot of personal satisfaction, but much less pay?
• Could you move out of the city (further lowering your living expenses) and rediscover life in a rural area?

The possibilities are as limitless as your own desire and willingness to re-shape your life.

The second shift syndrome

How many of us put in a full shift on the job, then come home and start cooking meals, cleaning toilets, helping with homework, doing laundry, balancing the cheque book, painting the porch, repairing the dryer, washing windows, mowing the lawn . . . It's endless and we get really, really grumpy because it seems like we're the only ones who care about how the house looks and the rest of the family isn't pulling their weight and we're just plain, bone tired. So we get really mad and our mate gets really defensive and the home that is supposed to be our refuge against the world has become a battleground.

There are two fronts on which to neutralize this conflict--change your expectations and re-distribute responsibilities.

When I was growing up my mother did a full house cleaning every Saturday. This included washing and waxing all the floors, cleaning the windows, moving the fridge and vacuuming under all the couch cushions. She baked her own buns, cakes, pies and cookies, and put up preserves, made her own jam, and sewed new outfits for every one of us six kids twice a year. Twice a year she also did a full-fledged cleaning which meant that every wall got washed and/or painted, the floors got stripped of old wax, all drawers, cupboards and closets got turned out and cleaned, etc. Like most of her contemporaries, she was a stay-at-home mom and she was adhering to the standards that her own mother had set for how a decent woman keeps her home which were the standards that her mother had set for her. We are talking generation upon generation of conditioning here.

None of this conditioning seemed to kick in while I was a university student sharing a basement suite with four other people. We lived in a pigsty and I was happy as could be. However, once I acquired a wedding ring and a home of my own, the monster moved in with me. Now I, too, spent my Saturdays cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. And I tried to do everything that my mother had done all week, in two days.

This can be done. There are millions of women who do it. But it's just not healthy for anyone in the family.

Sit down together as a family and talk about the standards that you are all willing to live with. Now most men were not subjected to the “Homemaking Standards for Decent Women Conditioning Program” so you will find their standards (and no doubt your children's) fall far short of yours. You have to find a middle ground. It's their home too and if you want to be released from the burden of working a second shift you have to learn to relax in the middle of a mess sometimes. Not just endure (in a tight, angry silence because someone isn't doing their job according to your standards), but relax.

They may not do things as well or as neatly or as quickly as you would have, but they will do it in their own way and it will be okay. Sometimes, when I start to get a little hyper because things aren't as orderly as I like, I remind myself that someday my kids will be living somewhere else and my house will be very, very clean but it will also be very, very quiet and I will miss them terribly. This thought seems to help me put disordered cupboards and smudged windows into their proper perspective.

As a family, develop “good-enough-for-us” standards. Sit down together and draw up a list of those housekeeping chores each of you feels needs doing. Then prioritize them. For example: buying groceries might be an “A” list item; cleaning the bathroom might be a “B” list item; while washing the windows might be a “C” list item.

Discuss the following questions:

• How often do each of these things need to be done?
• Is the family willing to give up something to pay someone to do some of these things?
• Are they willing to negotiate who'll do what or should a draw system be used?
• Just how are these chores going to get done?

Sitting down together like this and negotiating the re-distribution of the second shift, based on an agreed-upon set of “good-enough-for-us” standards is not too difficult if your family is in the habit of holding family council meetings. Our skill card offers a step-by-step guide on how to create a family council in your home.

Your “leisure” time

What leisure time you ask! By the time you've worked the first shift and the second shift and gotten the kids off to bed and presented the Treasurer's Report at the PAC meeting at your kid's school on Tuesday and attended choir practice on Wednesday night and had your sister and her new boyfriend in for dinner on Thursday and gone to the theatre (you have season's tickets) on Friday night and played cards with your neighbours on Saturday night . . . exactly.

When my kids were in Grades 1-5, I worked part-time from home. During this period of my life, I helped at their school and was on the executive of the Parent's Advisory Committee and the executive of the Community Association and was one of the leaders in the “Keep that Pub out of our Neighbourhood Committee” and a member of the Community Design Committee. This was all fairly compatible with my workload and my home life. However, when I returned to full-time work, I tried to maintain these commitments. Within the year I was about ready to have a nervous breakdown. Literally. So, feeling like a real failure (because “quitters” are failures, another interesting piece of '50s conditioning) I backed out of all this community work.

These days I look at things differently. I think of my life as having seasons. I had my young-mostly-stay-at-home-mother-season and during that period of my life I was heavily involved in the community and that was good. Right now I am in my mother-of-adolescents-busy-career-
woman-helping-husband-start-his-own-business-season and that means I have no time for community involvements, very little for socializing outside my family and just a bit for “hobbies” that refresh and renew me.

I used to feel anxious that I wasn't packing as much as I wanted into my life. I want to play guitar really well and learn how to play blues harp, and throw pots and write novels and go to the Jazz Festival and the Fringe Festival and the Folk Festival and learn how to sail and kayak and get really fit and . . . What I realize now is that I have another season coming up. A season when my children will be grown and my husband's business will be running just fine without me and I'll have a lot more time to pursue my own interests.

I used to think that if I wasn't doing something right now, I was abandoning that dream or that interest . . . maybe that I was being a quitter if I didn't pursue proficiency in my music right now. I now realize that dreams and desires and interests can be put on the shelf during one season and picked up again in another or not.

So the season of being a young-parent-of-little-children may not be the right time to have season's tickets to the symphony or to join a mountaineering club that is going to take you away from home on weekends. And the season of parent-of-adolescent-children may not be the right time to start up a political career or take a job that involves a lot of travel.

You have the power

Balancing our lives in a way that we are alive in each moment, experiencing all the joy that moment offers, requires us to give genuinely serious thought and heart-to-heart discussion with our mate and children. Balancing work and family—we do have the power.