I know this has been The Week of the Mommy, but here’s one more bit to ponder and then I promise to be done. This article lays out nicely how difficult it is to find work-life balance. It’s important for melting down parents to read about how everyone else is having an out-of-control moment/day/week/life. Because when you haven’t slept and your whole day is one peanut butter, cream of wheat or fuse bead disaster after another and you’re wondering how it can be possible to work this hard and to be in such an extreme state of constant motion and still not manage to get anything accomplished in a day, it’s necessary to have solid evidence that other parents are grappling as desperately as you.

Seriously, how hard is it to take a damn shower? There’s water, soap, more water, a towel, done. Not so with children running amok. There is no sneaking off and showering while leaving tiny people unsupervised. Their food-in and food-out needs must be met; all food must then be removed from the table so no one chokes to death while the parental unit is showering; and then–the deep dark secret of parents who claim to loathe television and maintain a high volume of literature input in the house–the television must be turned on so the little hellions won’t harm themselves or the property during the 180 seconds that mommy is in the shower.

And still, still, even with full access to the television crack pipe that my children are whores for, 60 seconds into my frantic Speed Shower of Doom, someone is banging on the bathroom door demanding to know where their mommy is and when she will be returning. This moment has three possible outcomes: (1) I turn on the ceiling fan and drown out their cries (sort of); (2) I yell something no non-parent will ever imagine they will utter some day when they become parents: “Every mommy has the right to shower alone!” or “GO AWAY!” or “You’re making me insane!” or, when I’ve given up, “Whatever, dude. Cry all you want. It’ll just make me shower longer.” and (3) the dumb mommy unlocks the bathroom door and stupidly gives in and lets the two-year-old in to have a shower/bath too. This is immediately regretted when the six-year-old shows up and suddenly mommy is trying to get clean while standing calf-deep in what she’s pretty sure is a kiddie pee party.

Okay, done with the mommy theme. I refuse to become a mommy blogger. As far as I can tell, the blogging populations with the highest numbers are mommies and convention geeks.

Further work-life balance reading:

Strategies for Work Life Balance

50 Useful Blogs for Work-at-Home Dads

Downsizing for Work-Life Balance

Working Moms Need Not Feel Guilty

Opting in: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself

Avoiding the Mommy Track: Returning to a Career After Maternity Leave

Home Jobs for Moms: A Guide to Choosing the Right Opportunity for Stay at Home Mothers

A Stay-At-Home Mom Re-Enters the Workforce: A Chance at a Second Career

Stay at Home Mom and Work at Home Mom

Balance is Bunk!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This past post ties in with the mommy vein as well, but more from a student perspective.

Jon Morrow from On Moneymaking just did a guest post on Brazen Careerist about why he regrets getting straight A’s in college. He lays out pretty clearly what he did, what he got out of it, and why it wasn’t worth it in the end. Some of the comments on the post had a definite pent-up rage undertone—I’m not entirely sure why. Were the commenters feeling threatened by Morrow’s ponderings about his own life and the decisions he’s made (which I’m fairly certain had nothing to do with them)? Who the hell knows.

I understood where he was coming from, even if the cranky commenters didn’t. And I can back him up in saying that being obsessed with your college GPA to the detriment of your actual life is unnecessary. As he points out and as I’ve said before: unless you’re applying to some highly competitive grad school program, an exquisite grade point average isn’t something anyone important will ever give a rat’s ass about.

I did the same thing Morrow did: I studied all the damn time and was focused to my very core on getting the highest score on every lab write-up, assignment, quiz and exam. I had an amazing physics instructor once who was smart, tough, unsmiling, and told us on the first day of class that she didn’t believe in extra credit so we shouldn’t waste her time asking for it. She expected us to learn the material well and to do the work she assigned, end of story.

And then she handed back our first set of lab reports and told the class that one student had gone above and beyond what even she expected and she had therefore gone against her twenty-year no extra credit policy and had given this particular student several extra points. This turn of events did not amuse her, and she stood over me and stared me down while announcing this in front of my glaring classmates. The grade-obsessed perfectionist half of me was supremely proud and was jumping up and down (on the inside) with delirious joy, thinking “Oh, hell YES! I kick ASS!” The normal half of me thought, “Crap. Now they all hate me and think I’m a freak.”

Which I was. Physics Class Me occured when I was working on degree # 2 and was ditching my infant daughter, my husband, my friends and any semblance of my life in order to devote every waking moment (of which there were quite a number as I rarely slept) to achieving academic success. Necessary? Yes, if I wanted to get into the program I was so focused on. No, if I had taken a step back and gotten my priorities straight. Unconsciounable? Absolutely. I ditched my child for about the first three years of her life because I couldn’t just let go a little (unclench) and get a few B’s.

Lest you think the perfection obsession was limited only to the New-Mommy-Staggering- Under-the-Weight-of-Parental-Responsibility Me, I have another sparkling example of School Obsessed Alexa. I had two weeks left of my senior year at Evergreen. There are two important bits in that last sentence: (1) normal people, if they are capable of unclenching, can usually find it within themselves to do so during the last two weeks of senior year; (2) I was at Evergreen, where obsessing about academic perfection is dumb because there are no grades.

Anyway, I had just returned from a photography road trip and had a lot of printing to do in the darkroom before my final project was due to be shown. My then-boyfriend, now-husband asked me to go away with him for the weekend to the San Juan Islands. His friend is a pilot and had offered to fly us there. How romantic. I knew that what my boy really had planned was to propose to me. He had set up this whole thing, his friend was willing to fly us, he had a ring, etc. I played dumb, pretended I just thought he wanted to go waste a weekend of printing time at a bed-and-breakfast, and told him I loved him very much and it was a very sweet gesture but I needed to stay home and rack up as many printing hours as possible in the darkroom before my project was due. I’m usually a very forthright and honest girl (I have no filter between my brain and my mouth, so I tend to say everything the moment I think it), so it’s fortunate I held back and didn’t say, “I’m too busy with school to get engaged to you this weekend. Better luck next time, pal.”

Isn’t that awful? I’m such a bi*ch. I cringe when I recall that stunning moment. For the record, he proposed after I turned in my project and hung my show. We’re living happily ever after and I’ve since learned my lessons regarding life vs. school and I’m a much better mom, wife and friend because of all the learning I’ve done (read: cringe-worthy moments have carved me into a real person).

Anyway, school is good and working hard is commendable. But the pursuit of perfection to the detriment of your real life is usually not worth it. Find some sort of balance. Minus the crystals and granola. Unless that’s your thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I’m re-posting this as it goes along nicely with my previous article regarding moms and career decisions.

Examining the Trend of College-Educated Women Leaving the Workforce

I love research done by people who’ve heard a general, society-wide rumor and just have to know whether or not it’s based in fact. Sylvia Ann Hewlett (author of the 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children) recently researched just how many college-educated women are ditching their careers to be at-home moms for a while. I’m a science girl at heart, so I’m always down with anyone who backs their thoughts up with cold, hard numbers.

Off-Ramping and On-Ramping
Hewlett refers to the leaving and the subsequent return to their careers as “off-ramping” and “on-ramping.” The main issues it brought up in my mind were the still-around, can’t-get-away-from-them discrepancies between what’s expected from a working mom vs. what’s expected from a working dad. Working moms are expected to make money and be stellar in their careers, then come home and be perfect, nurturing mommies with lots of time and energy left at the end of the day for their little ones. Working dads are expected to go to work and make money. Done.

The new trend seemed to be a mass exodus of college-educated, successful women ditching their careers, so they could be home and do the family thing for a while. It’s interesting that not as many women are “off-ramping” as everyone (society in general) had previously thought. (As a funny side note: it’s also hilarious that the career women who were staying in the rat race were irate at the bad rep these off-ramping bi***es were giving career women everywhere.)

Hewlett’s data showed that only 37% of career women are bailing out of the rat race, and then only for a short period of time. The bailing out isn’t ‘cause these ladies can’t hack it. The reasons listed include having kids, caring for aging parents, and “taking care of other life needs.” (Do you think potentially life-threatening illnesses fall into that category? I was just wondering.)

I’m guessing that these women were doing fine and kicking some corporate booty in their fields, obviously able to handle all of the thinking and the work load, the deadlines and the pressure of career plus normal life on top of that. Add in something life-altering, like, say, giving birth or having a new kid to care for 24/7 or perhaps an aging parent around who needs your help, or even maybe battling cancer, might throw a wrench in the ass-kicking works and could conceivably throw the perfectly balanced career / life juggling act off. Something has to give, and apparently 37% of those career gals are willing to give up the careers you know they busted their asses to succeed in. (more…)

Possibly it’s just the negative effects of the Seattle winter doldrums, but I’ve noticed a large number of female parental units freaking out about careers lately. The at-home moms think they should be working, and the career-having moms think they should be home making play dough from scratch. It seems as though no mom is content where she is and all moms feel like they could be doing more and doing it better.

Here’s my dime of advice: the health and well-being of the kiddos should be the top priority. The health, well-being and sanity of the parental units is an overlapping second on the list. And money-making is a farther-away third on the list. Screw the career and the money if the kids are being raised by preschool teachers and the whole family is stressed-out and miserable. Screw the perfect circle-shaped PB&Js with raisin smiley faces and volunteering in the classroom if mommy is one potty-training mishap away from shaving her head, taping down her rack and trying to join a monastery.

Everyone is impressed by tight-rope walkers because the ability to find balance and walk that fine line is effing hard to do gracefully. That being said, finding the middle ground and doing some variation of mommy-ness and career could be a viable compromise. Part-time doesn’t mean flipping burgers. And thanks to the Almighty Internet, working from home doesn’t mean telemarketing. Easy never works out, but aiming for simplification and sanity probably will.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

My daughter doesn’t have math homework yet, but I’ve already staked out helping her with it as my exclusive territory. Fortunately, my husband was a political science major, so he’s totally fine with “letting” me be in charge of all math and science-related aspects of our kids’ education. He will be in charge of teaching them how to turn boring discussions into heated debates, how to argue their way out of paper bags, and how to confuse the opposition using vocabulary words in lieu of logic.

I suck at debating—I’m more of an action girl. But I am good at math. It’s logical, it follows clearly laid-out rules, and when you do it right you can almost hear the little snick sound the universe makes when everything clicks into place.

Thus far, according to my daughter, everything Mommy does is super cool. Mommy being good at math, Mommy coloring inside the lines in the Flower Fairies coloring book, and Mommy knowing the lyrics of every Social Distortion song all come in under my five-year-old’s umbrella of My Mom Is Super Cool (Except When She Tells Me Princesses Are Helpless Pains In The Ass). Someday this bubble will burst and my daughter will drink the Math Is Hard Kool-Aid and see me not as a trigonometry badass, but as a supremely embarrassing dorky mom who likes math (how lame).

Before that happens (somewhere around middle school, I think) I have to convince her that being smart is hot and knowing how to kick algebra booty will not be detrimental to her future. I have less than eight years to instill in her a solid smart-girl ethic before she hits the teen years and never speaks to me again.

If worse comes to worst, I can always employ some cranky military tactics and make her watch The Wonder Years until she gets how hot Winnie Cooper is. Then I’ll show her this math proof and tell her the hot girl coauthored it. Then I’ll give her the book Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar (Winnie) and tell her to read it if she knows what’s good for her.

Or not. Sometimes you can lean so far to the left that you end up going to the right. Don’t worry, I won’t crush my good intentions with evil tactics. Between me telling her that Barbie was wrong and all of the positive attention girls, math and science are getting lately, it’s conceivable that my daughter’s relationship with math could be healthy and well-adjusted.

Good articles on girls, math and science:

-Closing the Gap for Girls in Math-Related Careers
-For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They’re Good at It
-Approach to School Affects How Girls Compare With Boys in Math
-Math, Science, and Girls: Can We Close the Gender Gap?
-Girls’ Math Anxiety Undermines Performance in Other Subjects

Posted by Alexa Harrington
books | college

Title IX gets a boost.

For her master’s thesis at Brigham Young, Kelly P. Troutman looked at 5,000 high school girls in the National Education Longitudinal Study and found that girls who play interscholastic high school sports are 41 percent more likely to graduate from college than their counterparts. The athletes had the advantage of “social capital,” a network invested in their success, mentor coaches and parents in the stands sharing college information.

I’m interested to know how many of those women had sports and athletic scholarships, which would increase their allegiance to staying in college. I imagine that male athletes might have lower graduation rates due to the call of pro sports.

From the June issue of the journal Youth & Society .

college | sports

US News and World Report’s June 21st article College Majors Could Cause Women to Earn Less provided some revealing insights into reasons why women, one year after college graduation, earn 80% as much as men. [NOTE: The title of the article is strangely off, because according to the article, even when women choose higher paying careers in engineering and science, they’re still paid less.]

It’s not their college major that’s causing women to earn less than their male counterparts; it’s that most women don’t view themselves as primary wage earners. Even if women aren’t married, even if they don’t have a family, it shows that women anticipate a time when they won’t be expected to work or make money to support themselves or their whole family. Traditional gender roles are so deeply ingrained that women don’t anticipate being the family breadwinner, which means they also don’t feel the pressure / drive to earn more money. It’s my suspicion that this breadwinner psychology mindset is also fueling the discrimination women experience in the workplace.

From the article:

Londa Schiebinger, director of Stanford University’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, says it’s not that women don’t care how much they make but rather that they are more influenced by other factors. For example, she says women tend to prefer being around other women. If more professors, students, and professionals in a field of study are women, female applicants are more likely to choose that discipline as a college major. “I don’t think they consider pay as much as something they have a stronger commitment to,” she says, citing teaching and community service as examples of fields women connect to.

The idea that women don’t place high financial gains as their top priority is an interesting comment on how women perceive their responsibilities within the family unit, Schiebinger says. “Women still feel freer to do what they want to do and still feel they aren’t the primary wage earner,” she says.

AAUW Educational Foundation says the smaller numbers of women in certain fields can always grow. But even if that happens, there’s still a piece of the gender wage gap puzzle that is missing. Hill says, and the study agrees, that piece could be discrimination. “It seems to be conventional wisdom that as younger generations make different choices, the wage gap will disappear,” she says. “But even when women are making the ‘right’ choices, they are still getting paid less.”

We saw this story on feministing.com. Their attempt at “satire” was bungled to say the least. It’s good to know that the women’s Center at UCSD is holding a letter writing get-together about this.