Women, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women ~ and can let loose their strength ~ may be the most powerful creatures in the world.

~ Isak Dinesen


We wish each and every one of our readers (including our loyal male followers) the joy of the day.

        

The WSJ ran yet another column on women reentering the workforce.  Written by Sue Shellenbarger in the 2.17 issue, the column talks about a variety of women who stayed home 5, 10, even 15 years ~ and then sought to reenter the workforce.   Most of the women interviewed were going back to preexisting careers.  And most found the transition unnerving to say the least.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, a little planning goes a long way.  That's not to say that we can ever be certain of our future steps.  Who knows if you will return to work at the moment you make the decision to stay home with children?  And, if you do, who knows when, and in what capacity?  What serendipitous events might intervene to take you in unthought-of directions?

But even with unpredictability and the possibility of untapped adventures, the possibility of returning to some form of work lurks in the minds of the vast majority of college-educated women who have taken a hiatus.  Government data show about 2.3 million college-educated women with children under 18 are out of the workforce, according to the WSJ report, and private studies suggest that roughly 82 percent of them are interested in returning to the workforce at some point.

Here are some of the obstacles the on-rampers are facing ~ and ways to alleviate those tensions:

Adapting to new technology ~ use your time at home to take local classes, experiment with online tutorials, remember that your kids are probably the best teachers around for navigating new software

Finding your new office "look" ~ tell me you can't use some of your girl time for educating yourself on current trends for office wear

Understanding office culture and new best practices ~ stay current in your industry; read the trade mags; invest in one seminar a year; stay licensed; keep in touch with colleagues who have remained in the workforce

Knowing what you are worth is probably a tough one.  The Journal report says that skilled women who drop out of the workforce for three or more years earn an average of 37 percent less after returning compared with those who did not take career breaks.  Some women choose to take less pay for more flexibility; some simply need to add to their budgets and settle for lesser-paying jobs. 

Navigating new schedules at home ~ with some planning and preparation, you can ease anxieties on the part of your kids and spouse.  What household duties can you now outsource, given that you are pulling in more income?  Where can you get help?  How can you stay connected with your kids in creative ways so as to alleviate their feelings of loss now that you are home less?

There is no panacea for life transitions.  But the more time we spend in recognizing that these are real stages, with predictable paths, that women struggle to navigate (no, we do not breeze through the transitions as our former superwomen would have everyone believe) ~ the more attention and resources are committed to getting systems in place that can make these processes far smoother in the end.

        

Marguerite is presenting a number of times this spring a workshop that she calls, "Plan Ahead To Have It All:  For Women At The Crossroads of Work and Family".  For those of you who read our RoadMaps column this week, you will have a sense of what this program is all about.  Basically, it starts from the premise that women will face a series of transition moments in their lives, where they will be asked to make choices.  Will they choose to have work as part of their lives?  Career, self-employment, part-time?  Will they choose a life partner?  Do they want children is their lives?  If so, do they wish to bear children or adopt?  How many children?  How will children affect their work/career aspirations?  How will they care for themselves at each life stage?  How will they foster and nurture relationships?  etc, etc, etc.

Working from the seminal work by Gail Sheehy, Passages, we discuss in this week's column that fact that many of these crossroads are no surprises.  While each individual's answer to the question will, naturally, be their own ~ the fact of hitting each fork in the road can practically be timed.  So why are so many of us taken unawares?

We've been talking in this blog a bit about women who wake up, realize their bio clock is ticking pretty loudly, and finally address the question about children.  Why have they waited to look the issue square in the face?

And what about the women who have had their noses so close to the grindstone that they haven't looked up long enough to wonder about a life partner ~ and now feel that it is too late?

Closest to home for me are the women ~ much like I was ~ who really and truly believed that they could manage both career and family ~ only to discover that for reasons of health or energy or geography or any number of other reasons, they could not.

We can't predict every roadblock that will come our way as we navigate our lives.  But we can certainly identify those stop signs that have been faced by women through time immemorial.  And we can certainly plan for how we would like our choices to play out, once we are at each of those crossroads ourselves.

And so, if any of this interests you, or you want to be part of the "plan ahead" conversation, we'd love to hear from you.  You can send comments along to this blog or, like a lot of you are doing, you can chat with us via email. 

Carol and I have a mission ~ we want this whole issue of work-family balance to be better managed.  And, since we can't change the structure of the workplace or the attitudes of employers ~ we want to give every drop of energy that we have to helping women at the individual level to meet their passages with optimism, research, good advice, practical tools and friendly support.

Onward!

        

What do statistics on women's education or marital decisions have to do with The New Having It All?  Why do we spend our time discerning trends and analyzing current news reporting? 

Aside from just being interested, we watch these reports because we believe it is our mandate to help young professional women to figure out how to ensure continued success in their lives going forward.  Because we found the whole process of managing work and families so daunting for ourselves, we take very seriously the job of guiding the next generation toward a smoother time of things. 

When you think about it, balancing work and home is a learned skill.  Just as we take classes to learn how to give birth, to learn how to parent, to learn how to interact with our pets, to learn how to decipher good wine -- we also need to take instruction on how to manage our time, energies, and passions so as to build optimal lives.  These abilities to prioritize, to understand what lay ahead, to make informed decisions, don't just happen.  They need to be taught.

Take, for example, the legal profession.  Law school classes are filled with well over 50 percent women.  Ten years after graduation, however, women make up less than 40 percent of the practicing population.  Coincidence?  I don't think so.  I think a good many of these law dropouts are women managing young families, facing child-bearing decisions in light of their changing biology,
making decisions about marriage or life-partnering.  And many conclude that the demands inherent in sustaining their legal careers collide with life choices that often sprung upon them unawares.

Sure we need to continue to work for change from the employer/workplace side of the equation.  But policy changes don't happen overnight.  And while we are waiting, we need to be arming the upcoming batch of young women with every scrap of information and hard-earned wisdom that we have acquired in the trenches.

So, see you next round, when we will continue our conversation about the changing roles of women in society -- and when we bring you every shred of good information and thinking we can amass.

        

We've been talking about current statistics that show that as many as 80 percent of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men.  Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on another demographic statistic related to the rise in unemployed males ~ the notion of "marrying down" for well-educated, professionally successful women.

We have long known about gender imbalances on college campuses in the US ~ where, apparently, 58 percent of all bachelor's degrees and 62 percent of associate's degrees are awarded to women.  Women have already faced, then, the prospect of having difficulty in finding an equally or better-educated man to marry.

Now that men are losing jobs as well, well-educated women are asking themselves, "Am I willing to marry down?" ~ particularly if there is a desire for children.

And it's not only the women who find the disparity in education and income uncomfortable.  Many women report that, in dating, they find that salary or education advantages can scare men off.

Not long ago, the New York Times ran a cover story in its Sunday magazine about college-educated women choosing to start families without husbands.  The Times reported that there has been a 145 percent rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980 - and that doesn't even address single-parent adoptions.

"Going the sperm-bank method is definitely not my first choice," one woman told the Journal, "but I am not willing to give up my dream of having a child just because I can't find Mr. Right."

  

        

The point about changing our names to our husbands' has little to do with names, of course.  The real question is whether the trend toward taking husbands' surnames signals a resurgence of the traditional (i.e., 1950's) female role.  Does the name issue symbolize the death of feminism, the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme, where women once again throw themselves into hearth and home, relinquishing any career ambitions some might otherwise have?

Not according to current research.  In fact, we all have probably read similar articles to one I just read in a current newspaper.  38-year old Dad is laid off from his job and returns to school to become a nurse anesthetist.  His wife, a hair specialist, now supports the family single-handedly.  Stories like this one abound, as reports tell us that women now make up greater than 50 percent of the current US workforce.  Not only this, but reports indicate that if the numbers continue to grow at current rates, women will outnumber men as the major breadwinners in their homes within the next 20 years.

"Women entering the workforce require a big adjustment in attitudes that for generations defined marriages".   Some of the breadwinning wives report being admonished by other mothers; continuing to shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping duties while working full-time, or downplaying their successes so as not to shame their stay at home husbands.

Adjustments aside, it seems clear that there is one reason that women have taken up the breadwinning mantle of late: necessity.  "This is not about empowerment", one women stated, "It's about being practical". 

And maybe that leaves our initial question dangling still.  Have women's attitudes shifted about their ambitions and roles within the workplace and family?  Perhaps.  Or they might be just too darn busy making ends meet to really think about it.

        

We welcome you back to Blogging To Have It All, where we endeavor to stay current on issues affecting women.  Our goal is to follow the conversations that matter most to our readers -- debates about women in the workplace, at home, raising children, choosing to partner, creating successful lives, questioning, reinventing.  We encourage our readers to participate in these conversations even, as often is the case, if that participation takes place offline or in private.  Our hope is to expand our understanding of the issues, to bring to the table what we glean from our workshop interactions, and to broaden the discourse.  Our fervent wish is for each of us to optimize the lives we choose.

The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, 14 February, ran an essay entitled, "The Ms. Myth".  Written by Kris Frieswick, the piece synthesized a a recent study by a Harvard econ professor, that concluded that young women are, in greater numbers, choosing to take their husband's name when marrying.  (The study did not address the question of women partnering with women).  [T]he truth is that a married woman who keeps her original name is rare, and getting rarer", Frieswick reports.  And, of course, we wonder why.

Several theses are provided.  Perhaps women look ahead to having children and find that a unified name best expresses the family unit and continuity.  Perhaps women today harken back with romanticism to the traditions of a "simpler" time.  Perhaps, as one interviewee stated, it just doesn't appear that important anymore:  "[Y]our generation won all the battles so that we don't have to do things like that anymore".

In a similar study undertaken at the Universities of Indiana/Utah 71 percent of those surveyed were in favor of women taking their husband's names, saying they believed it was  "beneficial" for women to do so.  Some went so far as to say that state governments should mandate the name changes.

Truth be told, I have not taken my husband's name although I have been married for going on 21 years.  Having come of age in the 1980's, and a firm believer in feminism, the question of taking my husband's name was never even a question.  Being someone other than "Dorn" would not be me.  

On the other hand, I have no problem with choices that others have made to take their husband's names, and never have I considered that these friends are now "owned" by their husbands or subsumed into their identities.  Similarly, I count on my friends not to see me as a strident anti-male non-traditionalist in my choice.  Not unlike the question of work/stay home for women, I believe the question of choosing a name is one that can be made only at the individual level.  

Does the trend toward taking a husband's name bode a backwards step for women's strides?

To be continued,

 

        

May 18, 2009

Readings for May on the theme of Motherlove

With summer around the corner, perhaps this is a good moment to offer more than one recommended book.  To that end, the following are a handful of books that are at once wise and insightful, provocative and unnerving, poignant and magical - to add to your hammock-reading list:

 

NonFiction:

Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life, Daphne de Marneffe (2005):  “De Marneffe brings her experiences and perspectives as a psychologist, feminist, and mother to this absorbing look at the enormous personal pleasure that women derive from mothering. Citing the political, cultural, and social factors that have devalued motherhood, de Marneffe notes the reluctance to explore maternal desire; as common wisdom would have it, motherhood and desire don't belong in the same phrase. There is fear that discussing maternal desire will feed old notions about women's nature and justify restrictions of their rights. The price of that reluctance is a lost opportunity to understand women more deeply”, writes Booklist.  Amidst all of the discussion whether women should, or can, manage work and family, de Marneffe poses the question, “What if a woman raises her children simply because she finds it fulfilling?”

 

Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood, Karen Miller (2007): The central premise of Miller’s writing is the realization that "your life is not yours at all" but "an unbroken line of love" to others in one's family and in one's life.  It is this perspective and awareness that, Miller tells us, will carry us as mothers through all of the changes and compromises, doubts and fatigue, of parenting.  The current avalanche of parenting self-help books can be overwhelming; yet, "Momma Zen" sets itself apart by connecting with the heart of motherhood - the enduring, essential challenges, lessons and blessings that we encounter in our relationships with our children.

 

Fiction:

The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd (2005): Set on Egret Island, a fictional barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, the novel focuses on 42-year-old Jessie, a Southern housewife who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after learning that her mother, who's still distraught over her husband's death 33 years earlier, has cut off her own finger.” (Publishers Weekly)  Caring for her distraught mother, Jessie rediscovers love in its many forms.  And in undertaking to parent her aging mother, she comes to understand the healing power of a mother’s presence.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel, Lionel Shriver (2006): How is a mother to come to terms with a teenaged child who kills fellow students and teachers in a Columbine-like spree? Does mother-love ever cease to endure?  “In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness. Never letting up on the tension, Shriver ensures that, like [the mother], the reader grapples with unhealed wounds” (Booklist). 

 

Click here to purchase these books on our Products page through your local independent bookstore or through Amazon.com

 

May 11, 2009

 

Parenting from the Inside Out, Daniel J. Seigel, M.D. and Mary Hartzell, M.Ed. (2003)

The essence of motherlove is abiding and unconditional love, formed from the attachment that is seeded when one tiny, wholly dependent creature is born and must rely entirely upon another to provide food and safety. It is a love memorialized by cards, and poems, elevated in religions and songs and stories, and claiming its own holiday. Motherlove is quickly romanticized, and is often imperfect. Motherlove alone does not a competent parent make.

We all come to the parenting party with baggage in tow; it is the way we each unpack those bags that determines our effectiveness at mothering and, ultimately, the impact of our motherlove. We come to motherhood as children of our own mothers—as the products of the talents and flaws that our mothers exercised in raising us. While it is generally understood that the complex models of motherhood and motherlove we experienced as children inevitably influence the patterns we employ mothering our children, we sometimes lack understanding about how to unpack our childhood baggage and lay to rest the unresolved issues that undermine our own effectiveness as mothers. We may find ourselves unable to identify the source of our baby’s distress; we may erupt with frustration, shame or rage when our child misbehaves in public; we may crave solitude at the precise moment our child needs attention and inadvertently reject them; or we may dismiss a child’s joy or excitement in a misguided effort to enforce a family rule. Sometimes, we struggle to mother well.

In Parenting from the Inside Out, authors Siegel, a psychiatrist and specialist in neurobiology and attachment, and Hartzell, a child development and parent educator, provide a toolbox of scientific, developmental and therapeutic exercises and devices that allow us to unpack those bags once and for all. The expertise they share allows us to identify the ways in which we attached to our own parents, the seemingly minor yet formative episodes of trauma or loss that may have impaired that essential attachment, and the ways in which we understand and develop narratives about our own childhood as a method of achieving the insight, and mindsight, that permits us to listen to, and communicate effectively with, our own children. Siegel describes four levels of attachment—Secure, Insecure/Avoidant, Insecure/Ambivalent, and Insecure Disorganized. These types of parent-child attachment develop in early childhood along a spectrum. The factors that place us at a particular point along that spectrum are: the degree to which a parent is attuned to a child’s needs; the parent’s consistency of responsiveness to those needs; and the child’s ability to balance and synthesize the parent’s responsiveness.

Fear not, the parenting train has not already left the station for good with all of your attachment baggage on board. What emerges from this book is the promise that regardless of where you as a child landed on the attachment spectrum, you can improve your parenting, and experience the joys and power or motherlove, at least more often, by understanding the ways in which your own childhood attachment experiences formed you and influence your responses to your child. You can develop a narrative that connects the facts of your childhood experience with the emotions they generated. By developing the narrative, by writing and telling the story of your childhood, you can become the director of your child’s experience. Unpack your bags, and stay awhile.

Click here to purchase Parenting from the Inside Out.

        

April RoadMaps Discuss: Community

April 27, 2009

The Shelter of Each Other, by Mary Pipher (1996)

“Families need communities the way my corn plant needs soil.Since the beginning of time, humans have shared their lives with those around them.Families shared their fish from the sea, gathered reeds for thatched roofs and looked at the stars.We have watched out for each other.Now for the first time in human history many of us feel alone and unconnected to groups.The world has changed but we have not.”

lthough Mary Pipher published her renowned work on American families over a decade ago, it remains as relevant today as it was at that time.The Shelter of Each Other draws upon stories of families Pipher had counseled in her decades’-long practice as a family therapist.The thesis Pipher posits is that the dramatic changes in the culture in this country have affected the mental health of families – and not always for the better.Rather than attempt to capture the diversity or complexity of family life, Pipher has narrowed her inquiry to considering how the culture affects the lives of individual families; what values the culture teaches to families and to children; and the behaviors that the culture may influence.How does the culture define what is good and important?How can we become more conscious of how we are shaped by the culture in which we live?These questions are, of course, vast in and of themselves.Yet, Pipher continues the renowned scholarship – initially identified in Reviving Ophelia, her seminal work on teenage girls – that is at once anecdotal and readable, while also empirical and particular in its concrete examples.

Pipher divides her exploration into three parts, the first of which is entitled “The Crisis.”Here, Pipher seeks to encapsulate the extraordinary changes on the cultural landscape that occurred between the time of her grandparents’ lives and those of her children.

“Our culture is at war with families.Families in America have been invaded by technology, mocked or “kitschified” by the media, isolated by demographic changes, pounded by economic forces and hurt by corporate values.They have been frightened by crime in their neighborhoods.Parents worry about the children’s physical safety and children are afraid of strangers….The parents are trying harder than parents twenty years ago tried, and yet their children aren’t doing as well.In the 1990s, it’s harder to be a “good enough” parent.Parents seem desperate and lost and their children are bitter and out of control.”

Needless to say, much of Pipher’s discussion centers on the impact of technology and its constant presence in our lives. Cultures construct reality, Pipher reminds us, and today’s culture is shaped by strenuous media influences.“The electronic village is our hometown,” says Pipher, and for the first time ever in current history, children have access to the same information as adults.

Lest the reader despair at the litany of evils undermining our familial health, be assured that Pipher does not leave us without the benefits of her wisdom.In the third and final section of the book, entitled “Solutions: What Will Survive of Us is Love,” she sets out to diagram hard and soft strategies for addressing the fallout from societal ills.If you are a parent, aunt, sister, concerned citizen:read this book.It will open your eyes while applying balm to your heart.

Click here to purchase The Shelter of Each Other from your local independent bookstore or through amazon.com.

April 20, 2009

Having It All After World War II

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008)

by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Though set during the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe, on a relatively unknown Channel Island of Guernsey, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, resonates with the theme of community in unexpected places for the modern-day, “having it all” working woman.. The authors devise a series of letters to tell the story of the German occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and create a protagonist with whom modern women will identify. Juliet Ashton, is a London author of some repute who happens upon the unusually named literary society when she receives an inquiry from one of the society’s members, Dawsey Adams. The two begin a correspondence that expands to include other residents of Guernsey, whose wartime occupation experiences become the seeds for Juliet’s next book.

Despite the generational remove, Juliet is a modern woman facing familiar dilemmas. She struggles to find a partner who sees her as a whole person. She is embroiled in an unsatisfactory romance with a rich, debonair publisher, whom one of her closest friends describe as “all charm and oil…who wants Juliet because she’s pretty and “intellectual” at the same time…If she marries him, she’ll spend the rest of her life being shown to people at theaters and clubs and weekends and she’ll never write another book.” Even Juliet acknowledges that she would “become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I’ve always despised that type, but I see how it happens now.” Juliet slowly recognizes her beau’s latent disrespect both for her intellectual curiosity about the story she is discovering on Guernsey, and for the role of her work as a writer in her life. Echoing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Juliet gradually discovers that her heart lies elsewhere, on Guernsey. Guernsey Literary Society also depicts a refreshingly alternative view of family and community, one which at its core consists of a tight-knit community of neighbors caring for one another and for a child, and motherhood by way of unplanned adoption.

Perhaps the themes of successful mapping of work and family is ever on our radar at The New Having It All, or perhaps modern authors like Guernsey Literary Society’s Shaffer and Barrows are exposed to a sufficient number of women who embody the successful intersection of work and family that they have become adept at creating complex, multi-dimensional characters whose dilemmas and struggles mirror those of modern women--women who harbor passions for community and family and careers, women who not only endeavor to, but also succeed at, having it all.

Click here to purchase The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

April 13, 2009

Happy Spring.

We are enjoying Spring Break with our families and hope that you are too. Roadmaps will return next week. The New Having it All Wishes you Happy Easter, Peaceful Passover and time to enoy spring break.

April 6, 2009

The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff (2008)

What in the world does polygamous community in the early Mormon Church (and the persistent remnants of the practice in modern renegade cults which refuse to banish the practice) have to do with having it all, today? A great deal and very little. At first glance, we are stymied by these communities. Recent and recurring media fascination with polygamist cults in the West reveals that the allegedly private exercise of religion often includes the underage ‘marriage’ of girls as young as 14 to men in their forties and fifties, and the teen pregnancies that inevitably follow. We cannot understand how the women in these communities can defend so staunchly a way of life that sentences their own teen daughters to such marriages. We see a concept of community gone awry—where admirable tenets of sisterhood and faith are twisted into a practice where women are often emotionally abused and where children hunger for scraps of a father’s love and attention together with dozens of siblings, resulting in mass neglect. We can only assume that the women and girls in this community know no alternatives, and have been brainwashed into believing that their eternal salvation and, perhaps more significantly to a child, that their reunion in heaven with everyone whom they hold dear, depends upon their compliance.

In The 19th Wife, author David Ebershoff constructs a complex three-tier novel. In the earliest tier, we are introduced to the early pioneers of the Mormon faith beginning with the contemporary followers of the first prophet, Joseph Smith and his purported revelation from God of the rectitude of plural or “celestial” marriage. The practice of polygamy is sold to skeptical early followers of the faith as a divine practice necessary to grow the faith and one which guarantees the consenting first wives eternal salvation. The intermediate tier of Ebershoff’s story lies in the subsequent generation of Mormons, in the person of Anna Eliza Webb Young, the titular 19th wife, who is a product of a plural marriage, a wife of Prophet Brigham Young, and later, a crusader to end plural marriage following her scandalous decision to divorce the Prophet. The third tier of the story is embodied by a modern day teen, Jordan, a young man banished from a renegade polygamist sect for the crime of attraction to a teenaged girl whom his community’s leader desired as an additional young wife for himself. Jordan returns to his community to investigate and defend the arrest of his mother, herself a 19th wife, for the alleged murder of her husband and his father, the current-day ‘prophet’ of this breakaway sect.

The practice of polygamy was banned by the Mormon Church in the late 1800’s and is illegal in the United States. Fringe religious communities skirt these laws by creating households with only one legal first wife. Plural marriages happen privately, when a ‘first wife’ accepts into the household ‘sister wives’ who are not recognized by outside law, but are accepted as plural wives within the community. In The 19th Wife, plural marriage is revealed as a practice which breeds jealousy, diminishes self-esteem and results in the neglect of women and the multitudes of children ravenous for the affection and attention of the sole male head of the imbalanced household.

The 19th Wife is rich with history, relying on documents from the archives of the Mormon Church and 19th century newspapers. In its depiction of the subjugation of women in this period of our nation’s history, we are reminded of how far we have come in our quest to have it all. We are pressed to examine the ways in which the dignity and aspirations of young women may be inhibited, directly and indirectly, intentionally or otherwise, by the happenstance of their community’s faith or socioeconomic status, and by the randomness of the geography of their birth.

Click here to purchase The 19th Wife.

 

 

 

 

        

It is hard to imagine not having a job or a career. I first starting working when I was 14 at an insurance agency to earn money to pay for the trendy clothes my parents wouldn’t get me. Then in high school, it was a job at Baskin Robbins to pay for gas for my car and the clothes my parents still wouldn’t get me. In college, a job at Nordstrom and a job waitressing at Red Robin earned all the extra money I needed for food and clothes and gas for the car and “going out” money. The next step in my employment history landed me into my career. Graduating from college with a degree in economics and psychology, I entered into the actuarial field with a job at CIGNA.  Becoming an actuary requires years of exams in higher level math and insurance math after college to become credentialed. I was eager to get started and began the arduous task of passing the exams. I became an ACAS (Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society) and continued as a consulting actuary at a few different consulting firms before eventually joining my husband at our own firm.

 

Along the way, I have had to make many decisions related to balancing my life and career. I worked full-time until I had my first child in 1994. At that time, I took advantage of family leave and stayed home with him until he was 5 months. It was the first time in my life I didn’t have a “job.”. Taking care of him was harder than any job I ever had and arguably more rewarding - but I didn’t get paid for it. I made the decision to go back to work part-time working at my husband’s established actuarial consulting firm. I continued working part-time through the birth of our second son.  That time, I didn’t take a break from work at all because when you own your own business that luxury isn’t available.  More recently, I have moved away from actuarial consulting at our firm to heading up our human resources department and managing benefits including health insurance and payroll. While my career and focus over the years has changed, I have continued to work part-time uninterrupted.

 

My decision to work is constantly fraught with guilt.  Sometimes I think that I could be a better parent if I stayed home full-time. I could participate in all the volunteer requests that come my way from school. I could go on all the field trips. I wouldn’t be as tired or stressed out from work issues and might have more energy for my kids in the evening. On the other hand, sometimes I think I would be a better contributor at work if I worked full-time. I could give all my projects a hundred percent focus. I wouldn’t get to the office later than everyone and leave earlier to pick up kids from school. There is definitely a guilt component that comes from both sides that I wish I could avoid. Sometimes I think of it as the 60 percent rule. I am not always completely satisfied with myself because I seem to only be able to accomplish 100% of my life with a self-graded 60% success rate rather than accomplishing 60% of my life at a 100% success rate. Although I suppose that one could argue that neither of those scenarios defines success.

 

Ultimately, I just don’t think you can have 100% of it 100% of the time. But, I think you can have a balance that works for you. I truly believe that finding that personal balance is one of the most important individual decisions a woman can make for herself. And what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. And just you need to be comfortable with the decision. At this time in my life, I know that I need to have a job/career. It makes me feel accomplished. But I can’t work full-time. I have found for me that my job needs to be part-time because I also get a lot of satisfaction out of participating in my children’s school and sports activities. I want to do both.

 

Judy, Business Co-Owner, Actuary, Human Resources Manager and Mother of Two
-Pacific Palisades, California