On Balance

Posted on | April 23, 2006 5 Comments | e-mail | print

I’ve been reading Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home Moms and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. It’s fascinating. And I am always starved for stories of other women who work outside the home, how they do it, how they feel about it.
A small passage at the end of the essay by Jane Juska, on page 313, made me choke up and put the whole fucking issue into crystal clear perspective:

Let me save you some money: In a life with children, balance does not exist. Once you’re a parent, you can figure you’ll be out of whack for the rest of your life. … Children are not born to provide balance. Children are made to stir us up, to teach us how angry we can get, how scared we can be, how utterly happy, happier than we’d ever imagined was possible, how deeply we can live. Children turn us upside down and inside out; they send us to the depths and heights of ourselves; but they do not balances us. We can’t balance them, either, and a good thing, too. They’re finding out hwo to live in this world, and the most we can do is make them as safe as possible and have a good time with them.

She goes on to say:

I am in favor of choosing, consciously, to have a good time with kids. You can do this whether you work full-time, part-time or overtime. Peekaboo, in all its infinite variations, will see you through three good years at least …

There’s a lot of intellectual debate in this book, a lot of this-is-my-story, and it’s all very good, very interesting. But this was the passage that made me say Yes. Fuck balance, this is Life.

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