Mom's life@work Post #1: Help for the Working Mom

This post is the first in the "Mom's life@work" series that I'm writing on this blog. I'll be exploring career topics that are of special interest to mothers, such as transitioning, on-ramping, balancing, blending, and negotiating. If you're not a mom, keep reading! There are tips in these posts that apply to everyone seeking career happiness.

Deciding to write this series was inspired by the world I'm immersed in at Mom In The Balance, where I help sandwich generation moms (those juggling responsibilities for both their kids and their parents) thrive, even as life feels stressful and extremely challenging.

Mom In The Balance is a new, additional venture for me that you'll be hearing more about in the coming months!

Career happiness is a never-ending battle or a hard-won prize for highly skilled and educated mothers who have a husband or life partner and whose children are home.

Finding it is akin to entering a labyrinthian maze, a world seemingly filled with many possible options but which reveals itself as a complicated tangle of decisions to be explored, discarded, explored and discarded again.

As one of my friends who left a responsible and stressful position so that she can devote more time to her kids and experience some semblance of sanity in her life said, “There’s only room for one 70-hour workweek in our family, and my husband cannot quit his job.”

The facts go something like this:

More women than ever before are highly educated, experienced and highly skilled professionals.

Many organizations expect many of their employees to work more than 40 hours a week (sometimes a lot more).

On the whole, men still hold the highest paid positions.

Most nannies, day care centers, and after school programs do not care for kids more than 10 or 11 hours a day.

In many families, most of the behind-the-scenes work for maintaining the household is done by mothers. This includes hiring sitters, shopping for groceries, signing the field trip permission slips, arranging and chauffeuring for extra-curricular activities, buying the kids’ shoes, getting the sick dog to the vet, and dozens of more jobs.

To the professional working mother, career happiness isn’t only determined by how much she enjoys her work, but also by how feasibly she can combine work with the other responsibilities in her life.

Most of the approaches to achieving some kind of balance depend on us (rather than our employers) doing something different. We get creative with scheduling, negotiate different arrangements with our partners and our managers, and rely on help from others.

As moms who are figuring out the best way to make it through our work, family and personal lives, we could use some support.

We could use this at the national policy level, in our neighborhoods, and everywhere in between.

There are many organizations and online networks that have something valuable to offer moms who desire career happiness.

Here's a partial list of those I've found useful over the years:

Alliance for Work-Life Progress

Catalyst

What about you? What groups or organizations do you know about that promote the career happiness of mothers?

photo by sal petruzelli marino