“Balance.” This word annoys me. It’s fine coming from my yoga instructor or in a budget analysis, but please leave it out of conversations regarding mothering. Life is hard enough without this ideal being dangled in front of us.
Women utter the word with a wistful sigh as something they are seeking, not unlike Nirvana or a smaller jean size. Or they laugh at it ruefully with a roll of the eyes, knowing how ungraspable it is. As my sister-in-law said about a gay couple with two kids who moved in down her street: “One of them is a stay-at-home parent, and they have a live-in nanny; now, that’s balance.”
In recent years, as the stay-at-home versus working mother camps have been more tightly drawn by the media, a large and third camp has been overlooked. These are women who cobble together jobs in order to be at home “enough” with their kids (define “enough” for yourself and you’re well on your way to solving the balance conundrum). In addition to doing the brunt of childcare, they also work, sometimes more for the income, sometimes more for the self-satisfaction and mental acuity which a job provides. In addition, they seek time and space for their own creative impulses: belly dancing, gardening, piano.
Of course it never adds up. I’d describe my own balance sheet thus: work, fifty percent; mothering seventy percent; writing thirty percent. I’m not stellar at math, but even I know that something is off. Whenever I sit down to consider what I might give up in order to balance this mathematical disaster, there are no good candidates (except for house cleaning). I love my children, I need to work, and I’ll be damned (and go insane) if I give up writing.
Beyond those who have chosen this alternative, often complicated, approach to mothering, many others are trying to puzzle it together. Corporate moms investigate job shares and sabbaticals. Stay-at-home moms swap hours with one another and then seek elusive ten-hour-a-week gigs. Such ingenious schedules are always precarious because they don’t fit with the more traditional schedules on which our world turns—9-to-5 offices and September-through-May schools. Thus, the need for invention—and reinvention.
Since having had my daughter six years ago, I haven’t had the same schedule for longer than half a year. And even within a week, no two days look the same, except for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, when I am pretty much always at violin lessons.
When I meet a woman for the first time and hear about what she does, I am struck again by how complex many of our lives are. It is difficult for a lot of us to succinctly answer that nagging question, “So what do you do?”. Answering truthfully means bringing order and hierarchy to our sundry commitments, which run the gamut from mothering, care taking for sick relatives, office jobs, under-paid creative pursuits, and volunteer work. How to neatly describe this web? (Men, I notice, tend toward the easy answer of a job title and leave it at that.)
When I put out an initial call for this column seeking women who are successfully juggling it all (a parenting term nearly as fraught as “balance”), I received replies from women who after describing an array of interesting pursuits said, “I’m pretty exhausted,” or, “I’m not sure I’m doing any of it successfully…but I’m doing it!” There’s no doubt that being a mother while holding on to what makes one tick, the elemental pleasure of creating something beyond Playdough bowls and Lego towers, can make one crazy and exhausted. But most women sense that working for oneself—using here the broadest sense of “work”—is also necessary to keeping at bay the far scarier kind of crazy identified by an earlier generation. As Betty Friedan, who dared to ask on behalf of lonely suburban mothers everywhere, “Is this all?” put it: “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
“Mothers of Invention” offers a window on women who are tending complicated lives while also maintaining a creative spark. Whether it’s the singer-songwriter with an infant who needs to be fed between sets, the baker with a roving shop (more on that soon!), or the business exec who crochets over the noon hour, I’ll introduce you to savvy, funny, gifted women who have devised their own approaches to having it all. In the wending of these tales, I hope that we can collectively obliterate “balance” as an ideal. Surely, we can invent a better model!
If you are a Mother of Invention or would like to introduce readers to one, please contact me.
