Balancing Act

In another lifetime, I worked in an office hiring and firing people. One of the questions I had been trained to ask was whether the applicant had children, but only if they were female. This job also opened my eyes to the equality movement.

My boss told me that his unwritten policy was to not hire mothers because they were always missing time due to the children's needs. As a young worker who had no children, and no desire to change that, I did not question his reasoning at the time. Anyone who had young children were put on the bottom of the pile, and this particular company was by no means the only one who operated under misconception that people with children are a liablity to a company.

I now have many more years experience, and 4 children to boot, and have come to the realization that the average mother can get more done before breakfast than a non-parent achieves all day. Another mother I know told me how her old friends would sometimes come out to their organic farm for lunch, and these women who were still putting off motherhood to pursue their careers would complain of how tired they were and how busy their lives were. My friend bit her tongue and thought about how it had been a week since she slept longer than an hour. She said nothing, and instead she just vented to me later, concluding that "if I had that much time, I could take over the world!"

It's funny how perception changes over the years. I once thought that motherhood was a job for those too dull for the corperate world, for those who had no vision or desire to change the world. I now know that it is really the only way to truely influence the future and change the world for generations to come, and that you need to be very clever and on the ball to survive the challenges that need facing every minute of every day.

It is true that I do put my children first and I would make a rotten employee if a warm seat in the office was needed, but if results are the goal, I could get more done in an hour that I would have done in a whole day during my pre-kid life.

Luckily, I do not have to worry about choosing between my job and my kids, seeing that my only "boss" is me. I love the fact that I help other moms, too, because they are the best workers in the world! I sometimes wish I had kept in touch with my old boss, so I could call him up and tell him how wrong we were.