Tipping The Scales Toward Balance: Mothers of Invention

“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.