Sorry! I’m sorry I was so slow to respond to your email. Sorry I can’t be there. Sorry I was late to pick up. Sorry to reschedule; sorry to ask for more time; sorry to miss the conference, the coffee, the call. Most mothers who work outside the home, writes Katrina Alcorn in her book, “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink,” are perpetually sorry for all the ways they perceive themselves as failing their employers, their families and themselves. Hers is the story of her own “maxing out” after the birth of her youngest child: while working five days a week as a web design executive and shuttling three children through their busy lives, she pulled off the road one day and, as a crushing panic attack settled over her, called her husband to declare that she couldn’t “do this anymore.” It is also the story of our collective “maxing out” in a society that she calls “uniquely hostile to working parents.” Her pediatrician casually tells her that most children get “8 to 10 colds and fevers a year”; she has six sick days a year (and must count herself fortunate) while her husband, a freelance designer, has none. School and preschool hours don’t cover a full day’s work for either of them, leaving them creating an elaborate spreadsheet every week to cover everything and add in doctor’s appointments, grocery shopping and chores. Preschool and day care eat into their budget, and every decision about part-time work or freelance scheduling means redoing the math. At every turn, Ms. Alcorn feels alone — but later realizes (as many reading this will recognize) that her problems are far from unique. For me, it was her litany of “sorries” that sounded most familiar: From five thirty each morning, when I startled awake to the sound of Jake crying in the next room, to ten each night, when I closed my laptop, my day was a blur of perpetual motion. If everything went perfectly, my days could be exhilarating. Katrina wins the race against entropy! But when everything did not go perfectly, I got smacked with the double whammy that every working parent has felt — scrambling extra-hard just to catch up and being in a constant state of apology to people who had no way of understanding the difference between busy and Busy. I’m sorry I’m late. I had to pump. I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. It’s time to get my kids. I’m sorry I have to skip the conference. I can’t afford more nights away. I’m sorry I have to miss the pitch. Jake has a fever. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. Although I was working “only” a four-day-a-week schedule, we had one more child than when I worked five days. Brian and I both were moving as fast as we could, and yet, certain tasks were still not getting done. Jake was behind on his immunizations. I needed new glasses. All of us were overdue for a trip to the dentist. Martha had a school play coming up, the same day as Ruby’s parent-teacher conference. When were we supposed to make time for all this stuff — the stuff that was part of living a normal life but didn’t seem to fit into our normal life? Someone had to collect the paperwork to refinance the mortgage when the interest rates dropped. Someone had to pick up the dry cleaning, get the oil changed, buy stamps, organize family photos, get our taxes ready, plan birthday parties, RSVP for other kids’ birthday parties, buy and wrap the party gifts, shop around for life, car, and home insurance, stock the earthquake kit, bake brownies for Martha’s basketball team potluck, take Ruby to her swim lessons, poison the ants, buy Jake a raincoat, return the overdue library books and princess movies, invest our retirement savings, chaperone Ruby’s field trip, and pay the bills. Ms. Alcorn argues that when we say “sorry” (and the endless apologia are primarily the work of mothers, not fathers), we are too often apologizing for our failure to do the impossible. Anyone can respond to an email in a timely manner or go to a parents’ meeting for the hockey team or contribute just one thing to the teacher appreciation lunch. No one can do all of those things simultaneously while also helping one child with “bar graph” math, listening to another’s poem in the style of Emily Dickinson and taking the call from a grandparent to hear the news from today’s doctor’s appointment. It has been a common mantra over the past few decades for women to chide ourselves for trying to do too much. “Put the emails aside at home,” someone might say, reading the paragraph above. “Why let the child play hockey if you’re too busy? Buy something for the teacher appreciation lunch. Help one child at a time. Prioritize.” Ms. Alcorn argues that that meme — the idea that you can do everything, as long as you’re strategic about it — contributes to our feeling of failure when it truly all is too much. Not everything that overwhelms us is our choice. Instead of examining the circumstances, we examine ourselves. But the circumstances — in the form of the long working hours expected from professionals, the unforgiving schedule of the hourly worker, the every-man-for-himself attitude toward funding the child care during working hours that any parent who serves as both breadwinner and caregiver needs, the lack of paid maternity or paternity leave, the lack of paid sick leave — contribute mightily to the sense many working parents, particularly mothers, have that they are constantly running in place. It is this, writes Ms. Alcorn, that leaves us “maxed out” and sorry, sorry, sorry. Mothers and fathers, she suggests, should stop apologizing and start talking about the sorry cultural, societal and political choices that leave us, too often, with no chance of making it all work. Read more on work-family balance from Motherlode: “What Do Parents Mean When They Say They Want to Work Part Time?”
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 15:54:59 +0000
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