Work, motherhood and doing it all

5O YEARS AGO, Betty Friedan asked the suburban housewife’s question: ‘Is this all?’ Today, working mothers are saying: ‘It’s too much’

I’ve started to notice a pattern emerging f rom my day-to-day interactions with the women in my life who are, like me, juggling motherhood and work in all their countless configurations.

We are busy, all of us. We rarely have time to actually get together, to connect, to bitch and laugh. That time with my girlfriends — so sacrosanct and necessary — has somehow taken a back seat to the maelstrom of work plans and task lists, logic models and deadlines, housecleaning, toilet training, appointment-keeping, skating lessons, conference calls, proposal-writing.

More often than not, we run into each other as we are running from one place to another — running to pick our kids up, running to drop our kids off, running to the bus, running to work, running to a meeting, running errands.

Somewhere amid our flur- ried pleasantries, something happens. There is a suspended moment where everything slows down and our eyes lock and an unspoken question seems to hang in the air:

“Am I the only one who feels totally out of control right now?”

It feels desperate, searching.

Then, as quickly as the moment comes, it is gone and we are hollering goodbye over our shoulders and are off in our own directions again, running.

There is a tacit acknowledgment in our society that frenetic is the new state of motherhood and work in the Western world.

Back in December, Katrina Onstad of The Globe and Mail observed that the cry of moms everywhere last year seemed to be “I need help.”

It is perhaps fitting that as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, some of us — particularly those of us who identify as feminist (I do) — are starting to ask some uncomfortable questions not only about whether a family-work balance is possible, but whether “having it all” is even desirable in the first place.

When the book was published in 1963, Friedan’s articulation of “the problem that has no name” (the deep despair felt by suburban housewives that stood in contrast to the idealized “happy housewife” image being sold to women) was groundbreaking. The audacity of The Feminine Mystique in naming the unspoken question at the time — “Is this all?” — is often credited with igniting the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s and launching a highly complex women’s movement that would change the world.

Half a century later, AnneMarie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, published a highly circulated article in The Atlantic last summer titled Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. She had left the position after two years when she found the demands of the job simply weren’t compatible with the demands of raising her teenage children. Her argument is that the only way any of us (men and women) will have it all is by fundamentally changing the underlying structures of our economy and society. I agree.

But did any of us actually set out to have it all? I know I didn’t.

Most women I know who are negotiating motherhood and work are not fighting their way up a corporate ladder in some high-powered industry (although I certainly do know a few who are).

Many, like myself, are simply trying to raise our kids while completing a university degree and/or working part time, sometimes to carve out a career path, sometimes just to make ends meet. Our lives are shaped by varying kinds of privilege, support networks and life experiences.

One of the biggest challenges I face is how to work and, at the same time, be the kind of mother I want to be. This has meant trying to eke out a professional niche while being fully present in the lives of my young children.

Part-time work can be ideal when you have young children. Unfortunately, parttime work can also mean precarious work — freelance, low-paid, short-term contracts with few or no benefits. It can also mean you take on more than one of these at a time in order to jigsaw together what you can, when you can.

The immediacy of email, social media and Skype, and the smartphone revolution, mean that we are available anytime, anywhere. At the same time as these new technologies have freed women from the confines of the 9-to5 office schedule, they have locked us into an untenable state of multi-tasking where motherhood and work co-exist at all times of day and night.

This has meant that many of us are working while we are mothering, and mothering while we are working.

This doesn’t mean we have it all; it means we are doing it all. Big difference.