I read a piece written by Babble’s Suzanne Jannese, Jennifer Garner Nails What’s Wrong with the Work-Family Balance in America. In it, she makes the point that society still expects the woman to do all the juggling and compromising needed to raise a family while dad can go about his business of bringing home the bacon with little worry about childcare and running a household. I understand what she’s saying. Families have changed over the years, but attitudes about roles within the family haven’t kept up. I get it. She makes some valid points in her article. What I don’t get is this – who ever said that having a family would be easy? Where do we get the idea that we are all inherently entitled to balance? Why is juggling and compromise seen as a bad thing? Why do people believe they deserve to “have it all?”
Sure, in an ideal world, everyone could have it all. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in the real world. And here in the real world, compromises need to be made.
I read articles and blog posts about how hard it is to compromise. I listen to friends lament at how they had to give up their careers to take care of a family. I feel for them and I’m sorry that they’ve had to make changes to accommodate their families, yet at the same time, I want to slap them and say, “That’s how life works! You don’t always get everything you want when you want it. Sometimes you have to wait until the timing is right. Sometimes, although it seems like a death sentence now, you’ll discover later that it was really the best thing that could have ever happened to you. Sometimes you have to give up something in order to get what you really want.”
Let me put it this way. We are all faced with choices every day …
If I have that cheesecake, I’ll have to do extra time on the treadmill or I’ll gain weight.
I want these cute boots, but if I buy them, it will take me longer to save for that vacation.
Some of us need to make even more difficult choices …
If I pay my electric bill, I won’t have enough money to go to the grocery store; if I don’t pay it, my electricity will be turned off again.
If I take a day off to stay home with my sick child, my paycheck won’t cover my expenses this week; if I don’t, I’ll have to leave him home alone or send him to school where he’ll be miserable and could infect others.
We can’t always get what we want the moment we want it. We teach our kids this lesson all the time: “Honey, I know you want to watch Phineas and Ferb, but it isn’t on right now. You’ll have to wait until this afternoon.” “I know you want to eat all your Halloween candy in one sitting, but you can’t have it all now or you’ll fall into a diabetic coma.” So why do we have such a hard time accepting this lesson ourselves when it comes to the elusive Work-Family Balance? We tend to forget that sometimes you may have to give up something, even though it’s important and fulfilling, in order to put our energy, time, and finances into something even more important and fulfilling. Sometimes you may have to wait to get something you really, really want.
And you know what? That’s okay! It’s okay to put careers on hold if having a family is what is important to you. It’s okay to put having children on hold if your career is what is important to you right now. It’s okay to go through a couple years where you feel like you’re having to make sacrifice after sacrifice.
If it just so happens that your husband is the one who supports the family financially, then maybe he’ll be the one to work while you put your aspirations on hold. Does that mean that you’re making all the sacrifices in the family in order to raise your kids? Of course not. Dad is making hard choices and sacrifices too. He probably doesn’t want to work all sorts of crazy hours. I doubt he wants to miss those precious milestones his children achieve while he’s working. Just like you don’t want to give up a career you worked hard at to get to where you are. And maybe mom is the breadwinner and has to give up some childcare and household duties in order to provide for her family financially while dad puts his career on hold to care for the children. People didn’t whine and complain even just a generation ago about how they had to sacrifice. They just did it. They did what needed to be done. Because that is life and no one ever said we could have everything we want when we want it.
Granted, this is coming from a woman who has had the gift of seeing things from two profoundly different perspectives. A woman who was blessed to raise her children as a stay-at-home mom in a nice, upper-middle class neighborhood for 16 years. A woman whose chief complaints then was that her husband was never home and she had to do everything by herself. A woman who suddenly found herself as a single mom in the position of having to move her family away from the only home they’d ever known, away from all family and friends, in order to find a cheaper place to live and a job with a steady paycheck and medical insurance. It is written by a woman who never gets a day off, who works two jobs, who has her six children 24/7/365, and who has to provide all the financial support. A woman who now works at a school in a very poor, very bad area and sees families who make sacrifices most of us cannot even imagine. Obviously, after the past five years, I have a different view about the sacrifices that parents make.
Yes, in an ideal world, both parents could enjoy fulfilling careers if they so choose and both parents would share in the caring for their children and household. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world. It is a real world. And here in the real world, sacrifices oftentimes need to be made. Sometimes long-term changes need to take place. Sometimes desires simply need to be put on hold for a few years.
In the real world, you don’t always get everything you want. How you deal with that, however, is entirely up to you. Do you embrace and appreciate the things you have, or do you cry over the things you don’t have? You can react however you like, but the former is guaranteed to make you a much happier person.
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