Whenever anyone asks how I’m doing, my gut reaction is to say “hanging by a thread”. And when I hear the phrase “work-life balance”, I always have an evil chuckle at the ready. For me, between work and home-life I feel like I’m running around trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing. It is a triumphant feat when I’m able to complete anything including this very blog post. And when I see “how to achieve better work-life balance” tips I want to rage. Because it’s not all within our control.
That said, I know I have a privileged life. There is a roof over my family’s head, and I have more resources than many people who are struggling the most right now. This includes having a good career that allows me to be home with my son once a week, a great 50/50 partner who shares the parenting load and grandparents who help take care of our son during the week. #blessed right? Sure, but even though I am fortunate in many ways, I am still overwhelmed and I need to acknowledge it. Between work and parenting, I struggle to find enough time for much else like regular bathing (both myself and kid included), or god forbid doing things strictly for me like some form of exercise or attempting to keep more than 1 houseplant alive at a time.
But even in the most ideal living situation we are still setup to fail. We’re led to believe that in a household with both parents working, we can manage the kids, keep our home instagram-ready, and have a regular sex-life, all the while paying a premium cost for daycare so we can work full-time to keep our health insurance and pay off our exorbitant school loans. This is not a sustainable model and it is almost a guarantee that you will be burning the candle at both ends. Sure, you can try and do it all, but not without a raging case of anxiety, a marriage held together by toothpicks and constantly feeling guilty because you can’t be 5 places at once. It’s this delicate balance between working just enough to fund your life but not enough to miss out on your kids and everything else. I know there are many parents out there that would love to work less and be home with their kids more but they can’t afford to after they factor-in the loss of income. Until our country unburdens families with the cost of raising kids, severely cuts the cost of a college education and ensures basic healthcare untethered to employment, many of us will continue on this death march…ok, a little dramatic but I’m trying to make a point.
While many of us are struggling to keep up with this way of life, my generation and millennials have still managed to make a comfortable seat on our high horse scoffing at our parents. We almost obsessively reassure ourselves that we have it so much better then they did. But do we? Yes, women now have a viable option to have a career outside the home after becoming a parent and our roles aren’t as strictly defined by society. But at what price? Part of me thinks that having a stay-at-home parent in the mix just makes sense. A true divide-and-conquer approach seems to take some of the guesswork out of home-life responsibilities. Maybe that is truly the enlightened parenting model where a parent chooses to stay-at-home because it just works better for their family.
At the end of the day, for any household, it comes down to what works best for you and your family. We all have different thresholds for managing life stressors. Some parents are able to juggle 3 kids, 2 careers, 1 golden-doodle, and the never-ending massive amounts of dirty laundry, but that doesn’t mean I can. I’ve found it extremely helpful to know my own threshold and limits and to simplify things as much as possible. That meant anything that I was doing because I felt I had to, needed to go. This also meant that I needed to keep my blinders on to limit my comparisons to other families. So if you enjoy planning an elaborate birthday party with Pinterest-worthy creations, do it. If you are only doing it for other people, don’t. And if your frenemy appears to have cracked the code to this way of life and seems to have it all held together, just remember that they haven’t and they don’t and they are struggling too.
For me, I am exhausted with this way of living, or being, because there is way more to living than this. Every time I wave goodbye to my 4 year old as he’s standing in the window and I’m driving to work, it kills me. Does this mean that I want to be a SAHM? No, because I wouldn’t be happy with that either and frankly I don’t think I’m cut-out for it. What this means is that I need to re-calibrate the balance. Maybe it’s the clarity that the cloud of the pandemic has provided or the glimmer of hope that my school loans might be paid off sooner than I thought but I’m tired of spinning too many plates in mid-air. For now, I am mostly stuck in this holding pattern. In the meantime, I will continue to try and adjust the variables that I can control.
While reflecting about my own life, I definitely do not want to dismiss the stressors of a stay-at-home or single parent but I can only comment on my experience. What I will say for certain is we are all struggling in our own ways to different degrees and you can’t go full bore in all aspects of your life. Something has got to give. Additionally, I fully acknowledge that this post reeks of privilege and lacks gratitude but sometimes you just need to lean into it in order to find a better way out. I am interested to know what hacks any of you have learned along the way in order to streamline your life which could be helpful for others. And as always I’d love to hear your take on this subject and what holds true for you.
