I intended for Friday, December 14, 2012 to be all about celebrating my child becoming a teenager. Instead, it was the day that 20 first graders were killed in a small Connecticut town. In the days since, there has been a lot of talk about why this tragedy happened and how we might prevent it from happening again. This space is largely unsuited for most of those discussions. However, there has been one topic, something President Obama even mentioned during his speech in Newtown Sunday night , about which I can write: how to get help raising your kids.

We all need help.
Read the rest of this entry

I was chatting with my friend and former Work It Mom columnist Karen Walrond recently and she used a phrase to describe her husband that has stuck with me and caused me to take a closer look at my own relationship to work. "He doesn’t live to work," she told me when I asked if he loved his job. "He has always worked to live."

Karen and I had been discussing our own passion for what we do; we both earn our incomes through work that we love to do. Our husbands - because mine seems to approach work in the same way hers does - have jobs in order to support lives that they love. I can see benefits to both philosophies and wonder if we make a choice between the two, or if we are hardwired for one over the other.
Read the rest of this entry

This weekend I met a woman who, like me, is constantly connected to her work via the magic of technology. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a day completely off, without so much as a glance at Twitter, Facebook or email for work purposes. Unlike me, however, she is an actual employee of a company and not a freelancer. What we did have in common was an apparent need to disconnect, which is why we met to share an old-fashion passion: knitting.
Read the rest of this entry