150% and Slack

My husband Jack is a physician with administrative responsibilities. He works long hours, including nights and weekends on top of his regular 9-to-5 responsibilities. He says he has two or three different jobs with one title, and that is true. He gives 150% of his effort and energy to his job.

This is a problem. I've always known it was a problem for our marriage and family, but this week the light bulb went off that this was not good for his department or good for working women with families.

In his field, they expect everyone to give 150%, and the schedule and workload is assigned as such. But what happens when one of those people can only give 75%? Usually, these people are women. Being a woman myself, I should take their side, right? Even though I am a stay-at-home-mom/recovering volunteer whose husband makes enough money that we can comfortably live on one income? (I need to eradicate the phrase "We don't need the money" from my self-talk.)

Anyhow, what happens if you have a job where you need to give 150% and your child develops a chronic illness that needs to be stabilized? What if you get divorced? What if your parents become ill and can't take care of themselves and you are the only child or responsible offspring? What if you nanny is hospitalized? What if--god forbid--these all happen at the same time? Who picks up the slack?

For a single mom, she takes care of her family and her co-workers pick up the slack. Her former partner might not be part of the picture any more, or might not consider family work a priority.

For some married working women, they take care of their family and their co-workers pick up the slack. Even for women doctors, their husband's job take priority.

"I can't work nights or weekends for three weeks because my husband is out of town" or "I can't give you my schedule until my husband gets his surgery schedule."

The conflict here isn't between husbands and wives, it is between the two people who are responsible for raising children, which is different. Before kids, I used to travel for work and never checked Jack's schedule before I agreed to go. Throw a child into the mix, and everything needs to be negotiated. Someone has to raise the kids, because kids can't raise themselves. Nannies and au pairs are helpful, to a degree. My daughter is sixteen and incredibility independent, but she didn't know how to pump gas until last night. Someone needed to figure out the skill gap and fill it. That was me.

Previously I wrote that the Mommy Wars take place between moms and dads instead of between women. I now think the collateral damage of that conflict extends to the workplace. The workplace suffers when husbands put their jobs before their wives', and then the damage comes back home. It is a whirlpool that keeps going around and around.

Men think their jobs are important, which is fine. Their jobs are important, but so are women's jobs and so are raising children.

Many workplaces have changed so that they bring more family balance into the picture, which is great but not always sufficient. I met one woman consultant at the Change Management conference last month whose firm had a program to encourage women to come back to work after they had a baby. Her child is now four and she is still working. No such programs existed when Claire Adele was born sixteen years ago. Those programs would have been helpful for me to a degree, but it wouldn't have changed my husband's job or the amount he had to work. When I was working, there was a big push for new moms to get paid leave. I thought it was awesome until someone said men should get it, too. The incrementalist that I am thought it was a bad idea because it might take away from women, but I was so wrong. Men need to take parental leave, too, so women don't have to do it alone. Giving men parental leave is an employer's way of saying, "You are a parent, too. Don't dump it all on your wife."

I remember when the Boy was born. He was born the Monday after Easter. I remember sitting in his room on the futon chair breastfeeding him when he was four days old. Claire Adele was two and a half, and was spinning around in circles in the middle of the room. Jack popped in to say goodbye and left for work. I nearly died. Two weeks later, he went to a conference in Italy. It was hell.

My solution: maybe jobs shouldn't require 150%. This might be blasphemous for me to say when I am looking for a job. I am sure some employer might google me and see this and think "She won't be committed." Maybe they are right, but maybe they need to rethink commitment. But the point isn't about commitment, it is about slack and who takes care of things at home or work when the shit hits the fan.

At home, it is women who often pick up the slack when things go bad. At work, it is typically men or women without kids. Again, this is like the whirlpool of reinforcement. The more women pick up at home, the more they pick up at home. The more men pick up at work, the more they pick up at work. The balance continues to get out of proportion. This is what needs to change, and one way to do that is to not to have the basic expectations to be 150%. This is fine when life is perfect and no one has a sick child or parent or no one gets divorced, but the model falls apart when something happens--and it does because it is life--there isn't excess capacity. We need to add slack into our systems and into our lives.