The 36-Hour Day
with Amy Urquhart
I’m Amy and I’ve spent the last three years trying to strike that perfect balance between being a wife, mom and professional career woman. I’ve decided that I’ll never perfect the art of “having it all”, but this blog is a chronicle of my attempts to continue to do so. I’m a blogger (my personal blog about Canadian home life is Hearts into Home), gardener, college instructor, wife to Graham and mom to Nate. If you’re also a working mom who finds there just aren’t enough hours in the day, I hope you’ll enjoy this column!
Read her blog at Hearts into Home.
Did having kids change the way you view your career?
Categories: Career, Hacking Life, Parenting, The Juggle
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After watching this “60 Minutes Overtime” interview with CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan — who was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo last week, prompting some media executives to consider pulling their female reporters out of Egypt — I’m struck by one observation she shares.
In the interview, which aired in September 2010, the 39-year-old journalist describes coming under fire while with US troops in Afghanistan. “I ran for cover. Usually, I would run for the cameraman,” she says. “But once you have two little babies at home, you have a little different perspective on things.”
As working moms, we’re all too aware of how other people may (or may not) perceive us once we become parents. Studies show that the age-old gender gap has been replaced by the motherhood penalty. Some companies woo parents with work-life balance-improving benefits and then penalize employees for using them. We worry that we’re seen as slackers if we have to dash out of work to pick up a sick child, or if we can’t stay late to work on an important project.
But what we don’t often talk about is whether our feelings about our jobs change when we have kids. Not whether we’d rather work from home (or go into an office) or whether we want to downshift from full time to part time or opt out of the workforce entirely. I mean how becoming a parent can influence the work we do, and the risks we’re willing to take while doing it.
So, let’s talk. Did you view your job differently once you became a parent? What do you do, and how did your perspective change?
Photo: CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan in Iraq (Photo from CBS News)
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Yes, to some extent. I am far less likely to consider attending an evening meeting of any kind, and my willingness to travel for work is almost zero. I am a lot less active in nonprofit work (because of the inconvenient hours more than anything else); and the stuff I do undertake usually allows kids to tag along. (Hey, my time with my kids is precious - I’m a single mom.)
But frankly, around the time I became a mom, I was pretty much to the “I don’t give a dang” stage anyway. I never did like much of that marketing / networking / traveling stuff.
I am not afraid to tell people that my kids are the reason for some of the constraints in my job. For example, I will drop off of a conference call that is going on beyond 6:10 because I have to pick up my kids. If that bothers anyone, I don’t care. Next time schedule the call so it can be finished before 6.
Funny thing is, when a man says “I am going to put family time ahead of workaholism,” he is a hero. When a woman does it, eyebrows are raised. But I think the more we hide the fact that our kids dictate some aspects of our career, the longer it will take for this to become accepted in the workplace.
SKL | February 17th, 2011 at 7:41 pm
Absolutely. I socialize less at work to get my work done faster so that I can leave the office exactly on time to be able to spend time with my girls. I switched from full-time to a four-day work schedule, because life was too hectic otherwise. I gave up a promotion and said that I couldn’t travel much anymore, leading to career stagnation.
That being said, I could have chosen otherwise and continued my career growth. I decided that my overall family’s happiness was more important than any job from which I could be let go on a moment’s notice because stockholders’ wanted better margins, etc. My husband and girls will always be my family. I am definitely a COO or co-CEO here.
In some ways, while women typically take on more of the burdens of childrearing and sacrifice in their careers for several years for that, society expects that we might choose that path and writes us off a bit. Men, on the other hand, frequently suffer more if they simply choose to take more than 2 weeks off after a child is born. This isn’t fair of their employers either.
My thought is that we typically choose to have children or not nowadays, so we should understand that a career is part of many sacrifices that come along with parenthood. We all know that “having it all” is just about impossible, so we have a choice to make. We can have no children, one, two or more children and each choice impacts our work and other aspects of adult life (time, money, travel, recreation, etc.).
Annie | February 24th, 2011 at 2:09 pm