Minimum Viable Work-Family Balance
How do you work when you know this is your last chance to focus on anything today, and that you have between 1 and 60 minutes left? Luckily, today nobody expects me to do anything more than writing this post. But there were days when I had important and urgent stuff to figure out, and very little time or brainpower to even think about it.
I don’t think anyone told me this before I had a kid
Or maybe they did tell me, but I didn’t listen. Either way, trying to work with a sick child is definitely the most challenging part of parenting for me so far. I can’t believe this is how all of my working mom friends have been functioning for all these years. Every single person I talk to says there’s no magic trick. Your kid will catch about 200 different bugs until it gets better.
Our baby girl was healthy for the first 1.5 years of her life. Then she started daycare, and began catching some kind of virus once every in two weeks. Some aren’t that bad, but you have to stay at home for a day or two at least. Some hit me worse than Covid, or gave baby heavy fever for more than a week.
All of my working mom friends say exactly the same thing. It doesn’t matter if your child starts daycare at 1 year old or school at 6. The first time they end up in a group schooling setting, even if it’s a small private daycare with just a dozen kids, they will get hundreds of infectious diseases you’ve never heard about before. The more children you have, the higher chance they’ll catch something the other one brought home from their class.
My baby girl is pretty miserable today. She woke us all up at 5am, and hardly ate anything since then. I’m feeling better than her, but definitely not at my 100%. Taking care of us two, dinner, and laundry is challenging enough even without having to worry about work. It’s even harder when I’m feeling sick myself too.
Why work in the first place?
I could afford not to work professionally at all. That’s the option I chose when my husband’s parental leave ended, and I know I’m quite privileged in having this kind of choice. Still, after a few months I realized how much I crave adult conversations that aren’t just about raising kids. I love my daughter’s company more than anything in the world, I just can’t give her all the attention she deserves unless we occasionally have a chance to miss each other for a little bit.
I love doing stuff that matters out in the broader world. I am certain that my daughter, myself, and my whole family, are much happier, healthier and more grounded when my world doesn’t begin and end just at her. If I stay at home for too long, I get salty about clothes piling up on the furniture or other minor things. Working outside of my family helps me keep a healthy perspective on what actually matters.
But how are you supposed to do that?
I know I could work a mediocre coding job like this. I know a guy who has 4 such full-time jobs at the same time, and he can only do that because these jobs are set up for people like me rather than young smart men with no family obligations. But for as long as our survival doesn’t depend on it, I’d rather do stuff that matters or have no job at all. And I just can’t figure out how to do stuff that matters when I’m interrupted every 5 seconds and completely unable to think more often than not.
I thought working 20 hours / week would help. Even if she’s sick at home about 50% of the time, surely it will even out for the whole month? What I didn’t realize is that other people will require my input more often than I’ll be able to provide it, and that for every day spent sick at home with a sick kid I would need at least two more days for my brain capacity to come back. There’s no amount of coffee that will make you think creatively when you’re this tired.
And yet, thousands of moms and dads are trying to combine children with work, year after year. All of my mom friends say they had to step aside from important projects after they had kids. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he announced only “extremely hardcore”1 people should work for the company. A working mom who’s trying to solve hard problems with a sick kid in her lap is extremely hardcore for sure, but probably not the kind of extremely hardcore that Elon is looking for.
Is this the best we can do?
People sometimes say work-life balance is an unhelpful frame - that if you do what you love for a living, no balance will be required. I used to be one of these people, until I had a kid. Work may not collide with life, but it definitely collides with a family, especially if said family is feeling sick and miserable for another day in a row.
As I’m trying to figure out my minimum viable work-family balance, not having to think about work, attend meetings, or even send timely responses when I’m taking care of a sick kid seems absolutely crucial. Even if this means I will only work for 10 days in a month and be completely unreachable for the other 12. Even if I’ll never know in advance which 10 days will be doable for me in any given month.
I don’t know anyone who works like this. At the moment it all seems like wishful thinking. But out of all people in the world, I have as much as anyone could have to figure it out. Either I’ll find a way to work on important problems in a completely asynchronous and unpredictable manner, or for the next few years I’ll have to give up working on important problems at all.
This balance changes over the life of your child. When they are tiny, young and cannot explain what is going on, you are more on edge, involved, and the brain dead is real. As they learn to articulate, it gets better in terms of balance.
What Elon doesn't get is that if no one is looking after that little toddler, there will be no future customers for the Twitter he wants to create. So someone needs to figure this conundrum out, fast.