Obfuscate

This past weekend felt like summer’s last call.  With rumbling thunderstorms, intermittent sunshine, temperatures in the mid-60’s and runners in shorts, you could almost trick yourself into thinking it was early September.  The thermometer predicted to plummet this week; I dropped everything in order to winterize.  Berried branches from the flowering crab apple in back have made their way into a white pitcher in the porch. Spent chrysanthemums dropped into the ground in hopes they’ll return next summer and flower that beautiful pale yellow that waxes pink.  While it’s a little too early for the dwarf pine trees now sitting in the concrete planters on my front porch in the stead of the mums, history tells me if I don’t plant now, I won’t be making time in the early December cold, no matter how pretty the picture in my mind. 

Choosing to spend my free time on fun instead of work is relatively new for me.  Doing things I love like decorating with found objects always seemed to get pushed to the bottom of my list, shooting to the top only in the mad scramble that comes with opening the house up to entertain friends once in a Blue Moon. Work life balance feels good. It’s about time women weren’t the only ones talking about it.

I had drinks with a friend recently, a guy I hired about six years ago who worked on one of my former teams.  No longer with that same client, we hadn’t spoken in a while.  He caught me up on his kids; it was evident how much he is enjoying spending time with them.  On my team he traveled constantly, with this current assignment he is home nearly all the time. His new client recently asked if he’d go to China for six months to fix their problems over there.  He thought about the possibilities of this from the vantage point of increased compensation and career growth.  But he likes the balance he has found being grounded, and is thinking about how he can continue to be challenged without sacrificing his new-found freedom. What he really wanted to know from me is how I’ve been able to be so successful in my career without ever traveling. 

Wow!  When I talk about women redacting their stories to exploit how they are achieving results equal to men while still maintaining a work life balance, I expect that we will need to push these tales to the masses, authenticating what surely must be urban legend, convincing men there really is validity in our approach.  I am asked all the time by younger women how I achieve despite the “limitations” of motherhood.  It never occurred to me that a man seeking his own balance would solicit this information from me. It is so encouraging to see evidence that women’s success could be considered gender neutral in the eyes of men. 

“Having it all” is a concept that seems reserved for women.  No one ever talks about men in this vein.  It’s interesting to me.  Are men considered to have it all already because tradition calls for men to be breadwinners at the expense of time with their families?  Who defines how much time or involvement a man has with his family as the proper balance?   What would having it all even look like to a man?

At a recent after-hours work event, the waitress at the restaurant brought out a birthday cake for one of the guys.  We (weakly) sang to him, watching him blow out his candles and make his requisite wish.  He struggled to recall the last time he was home celebrating his birthday with his family.  This struck me as sad, in a way.  Doesn’t he know his loved ones are jealous, wondering why he would give this moment to co-workers?  Maybe they’ve given up, resigned to the fact that work always comes first.  Maybe he’d like it to be different, but after all this time closing the chasm that has widened at home seems impossible.  But this is exactly why women fight so hard to have it all. We know our relationships need at least as much care and attention as work.

It may sound harsh, but sometimes I think maybe men don’t want it all, so many of them seem willing to allow work to bleed into family time.  Maybe in a single-income household men experience tremendous pressure, trapped on the treadmill of travel and entertainment to keep the job?  I don’t know; I’ve never been in that place. But I see a fair amount of men who appear to use work as an excuse to avoid unfulfilling relationships at home. 

It feels like a monster has been created, work consuming more and more personal time while marriages crumble and kids expect that dad is rarely around.  Does mom need to be ambushed as well if she wants to be successful at work?  What if we could instead build a gender bilingual platform where we structured our approach around the successful techniques of those who have had no choice but to balance work and home?  

This is exactly what I’m giving thought to these days. The conversation the other night in the bar with my male co-worker seeking his own balance is now the first draft of my chronicle.  Working women telling their success stories won’t just benefit women, they’ll benefit men, too. And the married women at home raising families in what must feel like a whole different kind of single motherhood. 

Stay tuned.