Here is what I want from life: a reasonably rewarding career, one that leaves time for my family and friends. Enough money to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table and hey, maybe take a Disney vacation every third year.
In other words, I want a job that doesn’t eat my life and my soul. I want to earn a paycheck without forfeiting my sanity, my marriage or my children’s formative years.
Why does that feel like a difficult proposition these days?
When I was preparing to leave my last job – a job that had been both occasionally rewarding and undeniably damaging – I told a colleague that I was hoping for more balance in my next job. Okay, I was telling her this having just left my toddler five hours away with Grandma, while we were both working a 12-hour day that ended with a late dinner meeting.
But did she have to laugh so hysterically?
She’d left behind her three school age boys to hop on an airplane and spend a marathon 48 hours or so on site, serving as expert and facilitator much of the time.
Yeah, okay, laughter was probably a reasonable response.
I was not raised to be a whiner. I am the granddaughter of an entrepreneur who built and sold the kind of Main Street businesses that were once the heart of our country; the daughter of a woman widowed young who picked herself up and raised four children on her own. I’ve worked most of my life, and most of my life at jobs that were poorly compensated and incredibly difficult.
And while the current economic turmoil has us all on edge, that’s not what I’m fearing right now.
What feels so difficult is the idea of having Just Enough. Just Enough job to pay the bills, but not so much career that it leaves room for little else. Just Enough challenge and opportunity to grow so that I’m not working on an assembly line; not so much that I’m constantly putting in a few more hours to get ahead.
It seems like we’ve set up this twisted system where you can be incredibly professionally ambitious, or horribly mediocre. The idea that there’s some middle space is elusive.
I read a “Bright Sides of the Downturn” article the other day, where the author joked that all those Wall Street financiers will finally get to spend time with their families – as soon as they figure out which of the children rattling around their mansions are actually theirs. It sounds absurd, but I can recognize that reality – the too busy for my own life reality. Jimdear works in the belly of such an industry, and the fact that he remains an involved and committed father is something of a miracle.
Somewhere out there, there is a job that allows me to be firm about needing time for my family, to grow and evolve professionally and to earn enough money to pay the mortgage in this incredibly expensive city.
Why does that feel like such an ambitious wish list these days?
