pat willard

It was 10:30 in the morning, on the third day of the new millennium, and I was stuck in traffic. The car was full of groceries: I had one hour to get back home, unload everything and head into the city for a meeting with an editor. After that, I was hoping to get back in time to catch my son’s basketball game, make a stab at another project that I was late getting started on and call back the three people I knew would call me about deadlines that were coming up. I was thinking I could do those things after the game, while I helped my other son with his homework and figured out what to make for dinner.

There was a Bell Telephone truck double parked in the middle of the street and three workers in little yellow hard hats milling around the back of it. Generally, I think people who blare their car horns when they get stuck in traffic are stupid jerks. But there I was, a complete jerk, leaning on the horn for all it was worth, as if by sheer, shrilling, annoyance I and the four or five other people blaring their horns with me could shove the truck out of our harried way. I actually agreed with what the guy in the car ahead of me, the one with a TLC license plate, was screaming out the window, using words I don’t usually utter much in public but which seemed suitable to this occasion. The Bell workers glanced back at him with bemused grins on their faces and one added a hand gesture that was compatible with the curses. I realized then that things did not look good for any of us to be moving any time soon and my head slumped forward onto the steering wheel as stress slithered swiftly up my back.

What a wimp, I chided. Several years ago, I was working full-time at a rather demanding job and counted myself lucky that I had a boss who allowed me to leave early so I could pick my kids up before their afterschool programs closed. My husband had the morning shift: he went in late to work so he could get the kids dressed and fed, then walked them to school while I rolled out of bed at the crack of dawn, arriving at my desk long before anyone else came into the office. I didn’t break for lunch and I often brought work home simply so I could close my office door at 4:30 to get to my Brooklyn neighborhood an hour later.

Everyone else I knew was doing the same thing so I didn’t think about how crazy life was. What was there to think about? This was my career, we needed the money I made, the kids were in good programs, happy and thriving. If most of the time my husband and I felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown, well, so did everyone else. And I knew we were luckier than most–starting with the availability of nearby quality day care and going right through to that flexible boss of mine.

But everything has its cost and everything meets a break point. Ours was adolescence. The world does not have quality day care for fourteen years old and you can’t pay someone enough (even if you find someone willing) to look after this unruly segment of the population. What was very clear to my husband and I was that our son needed us; he needed the kind of watchful, on the spot, take-no-prisoner guidance that only a parent can provide. We looked at our lives and knew we’d have to make a change. My husband makes more money than I do and he can’t do his job from home. So I went back to my boss and, very nicely, he offered me a computer and modem. I would come in for meetings and whenever he asked me to, but I could do the rest of my work at home. Great, I said. I think I even hugged him.

A friend of mine calls this kind of arrangement the business-world’s great secret: how parents becomes insanely happy to do anything–ANYTHING–for the chance to fit their work life in with their family life. Here’s what happened to my life when the computer and modem was set up in the corner of my bedroom: It ruled my life. Sure, I was home and able to watch over my kids but I was never, ever, away from work. My boss and the rest of the staff called me at night and on the weekends and I felt guilty if I wasn’t home, feeling the need to explain that I was only gone for 5 minutes while I ran up the street for a loaf of bread. I accepted any assignment that was thrown my way–the ones no one else wanted, the ones with ridiculous, humanly-impossible deadlines, so everyone back at the office would think I was still a productive member of the company. When I laid in bed at night I could feel the modem’s little green light watching me, secretly sending a message to my boss–“She’s sleeping–and it’s only 2 a.m.!”

So I quit. With the blessing of my husband, I drove our family right off a financial cliff. I picked up a few freelance assignments but for a long time we lived with hole-y socks and an ancient oil heater that was held together with spit and old rags. We couldn’t go anywhere, we couldn’t buy anything. But we pulled our son back on track. And, you know what? Life was a little nicer.

Then why was I sitting in traffic, stressed out of my mind, on this third day of this new age? I’m working a lot more. That wayward son is off to college next year; his brother is hitting his adolescent years; spit and old rags are no longer holding the ancient oil heater together. The fact remains that balancing work and family is sometimes harder and more challenging than the work we get paid to do. Sometimes the balance teeters more one way than another and no amount of flex time, job sharing, four-day workweeks or the Family Leave Act will make it right. I don’t know what the answer is but I hope, during the course of the next thousand years we learn a way to make it all fit better together.

About fifteen minutes later, the Bell truck moved and we were all free to speed away. I did everything I was suppose to do that day. But that still leaves tomorrow and the next day and the next, and I’m already pretty tired.