She Quit Her Job to Get a Life
Posted by Danielle Bean in News on Monday, November 16, 2009 9:15 PM
In a thought-provoking article, Gaby Hinsliff, former political editor of the Observer in the UK, recently admitted something astonishing:
The successful career woman and mother of one small son only appeared to have it all, she explained. Her life was out of balance. And she planned to fix it the only way she knew how—by quitting her job to stay home with her son.
In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started. But perhaps it was back this spring, when I took my son to be measured for new shoes: the woman asked what size he took, and to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember. I felt like an imposter. Or perhaps it was the summer morning when our nanny had to peel my howling son off me: he had a fever and wanted his mother, but I had a cabinet minister to interview. I shot out of the door, hot with shame.
I especially appreciate Gaby Hinsliff’s candor when she claims that by trying to balance her young family with a high-profile career, she had “everything but a life.”
This is the tricky place we women find ourselves all these years after the women’s liberation movement. The mothers of previous generations, many of whom abandoned homelife in favor of careers, had a secret they kept from us: That “having it all” comes with a price. And it’s a price that some of us won’t be willing to pay.
Of course some mothers need to work, some mothers want to work, some fathers stay home, and some families find all manner of creative, non-traditional ways to make a mother’s work fit around their family lives.
But none of us can escape the reality that mothers who work pay a price. They pay in sleep. They pay in stress. They pay in time. They pay in guilt. And their families pay too.
I know of what I speak. I am a working mom. Those words look odd to me on the page, but they are true. I never in my lifetime planned to be a “working mom” and yet here I am ... with a husband, eight kids, and a job that provides income my family depends upon.
I’m not complaining, mind you—I happen to have a pretty great set-up for a working mother. I thoroughly enjoy what I do, I work almost exclusively from home, and Faith & Family is a dream employer when it comes to understanding a mother’s need for flexibility.
But of course my work costs my family something. Even as I type my first draft of this post, I have dinner simmering on the stove and a too-wild household that I know could use my intervention. But it won’t get it just yet.
At the end of most days, I do come up short on time somewhere—for sleep, for exercise, for answering emails. I really do make family my first priority and I aim to make sure it’s never my kids or my husband who get the short end of that stick, but I would be lying if I said they never did.
These are the kinds of compromises I have been willing to make. Because Dan and I have prayerfully determined that God has put me here and presented me with working opportunities for a reason.
But pretending that being a working mother doesn’t come with some level of compromise isn’t fair—not to our families who pay part of the price, and certainly not to other women who might then enter family life with unrealistic expectations.
Like Gaby Hinsliff, we need to do our best to make working decisions with our eyes wide open about what they will cost us. Because nobody does have it all. And in this life, none of us ever will.
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