Work-Life-Writing Balance

This fascinating NYTimes opinion piece, "Why Gender Equality Stalled," goes into (among other things) how American families have very little help in balancing work with the demands of family life.

Even in my more-family-friendly-than-most-jobs job as a teacher, I find it very challenging to meet the demands of my work with doing everything I need to do for my family.  Having young children is very intense; not only do they need you physically, you are also their emotional center. It's pretty much a given that if they are awake, they are on you!  After being separated from them all day, I like that... but this is a very demanding time in life, I feel.

I am thankful that I went into teaching; I like having more frequent vacations than the average job so I can be with my children.  Something that's true, and that I think about quite often, is that I went into teaching because I felt it would be the best job to have when I had kids.  And even if I didn't meet a good husband, I was going to have kids as a single mom.  That's how much I wanted kids.  I chose this job, along with other reasons, like it's fun and rewarding, because I knew it was a job that I'd be better able to balance with kids if I needed to be a single mom.


It's also true that I would have liked to be a journalist, if money and energy weren't an issue.  But I could not imagine having a low-paying, time-intensive job like that with children or as a single mother, or even as a married mother. Fortunately, the internet allows everyone to be a journalist, to some degree, so I have an outlet for my writing.  My day job involves teaching reading and writing, so it's rewarding to help other people do what has given me so much pleasure in life.


Still, I miss the days of writing real, researched pieces that were read by hundreds of people.  I've done some good work and I admit that I miss the accolades and compliments from that.  I even miss the good feeling I get when I write something that just *I* judge to be well-done.  It's just that I don't often go to the lengths to spend time writing something of high quality if just I am going to be reading it.  I know when my children are older I'll have more time to write, and I'm counting on that as I continue to think of myself as a writer despite not having a lot of alone time to write.