Working Mom Emeritus
What do you call a working mother whose kids have grown up and left home? She’s no longer a “working mother” as we’ve all come to know and understand the term. I’ve come up with the term “Working Mom Emeritus.” What do you think? Is there a more concise way to express this?
There are a lot of us out here. Our kids are now in their 20s and 30s, and some of them are beginning to have children of their own. Some of us are even involved in the care of those kids, our grandchildren. (My own daughters (age 27 and 31) have dogs, not kids.)
Here’s what I can tell you about work life balance from the other side of the intensive parenting years. It gets vastly simpler. Not necessarily easier, because if you have a tendency to be a workaholic, well, there’s even more opportunity to do so when you’re not committed to getting to the ice hockey game or having a decent dinner on the table by 6:30. But it does get simpler.
For one thing, there are fewer stakeholders. After the intensive parenting years, it’s just you and possibly a significant other in your primary circle. It’s not that your adult children want nothing to do with you. Hopefully, you play your cards in such a way and are lucky enough that you are still part of their lives and vice versa. But you’re just not in their lives in the same daily, intensive way. And it’s really OK.
And then there’s your work, which of course can consume your whole life. The challenge is to stay conscious and intentional about how you allocate your time and where you draw your boundaries.
For some of us, it was easier to have firm boundaries around work when our other time went to our very compelling other work: our children. When there are no children at home, there is a very real risk of giving it all away to work. Particularly for driven women who have not yet “made their mark” and for women in challenging financial straits.
But the beautiful little non-intuitive secret is that giving it all away is not sustainable. Being completely out of balance with overwork is like trying to run a marathon without drinking any water. You crash and burn. You can’t finish the event. The ONLY way to finish an endurance event is to hydrate along the way. Which translates into doing the things that nourish you for the long haul, whatever they are for you. For most people that includes having regular time off from task list mindset.
