This past weekend, I attended Podcamp NYC 2.0. This was a conference I organized, taking place in a city where I do not live, requiring tons of time and effort on my part to put on, and requiring sacrifices on the part of my family as a result. The conference was terrific, I feel very proud of what we accomplished as a team, the people I met, and every aspect of what happened in my “grown-up” life, but I wondered how my family felt about the time I spent on this project.

Planning this conference required calls on evenings, weekends, in the car- all sorts of time that might have been focused on them, and that I saw, at the time, as squeezing work in between my family obligations. In reality, work took precedence over many of the normal mom tasks- dinner short cuts were used, kids were allowed to watch more TV than usual, and I was often distracted. My husband was patient, and knew it would be over soon, and that things would get back to normal, so to speak, after the conference ended.

This juggling of home and career is really hard for all moms- mine just seems to come in spurts rather than a never-ending treadmill of work week/evenings/weekend time shifts. There’s becoming less separation during my project time between home and work, and as a result, there’s less demarcation between when work ends and when life and leisure begins. Especially since most of the work is done on the phone and online, there’s not even the excuse of having left something at the office to allow you to put off a project to the next day- you just need to develop a way of saying “enough is enough” each day and learn when to turn the computer off and walk away from the keyboard.

Doing for others, in a work context, in a volunteer context, in a home and family context, requires giving of yourself and your time. This is not an infinite resource. (I was apparently a slow student figuring out that fact ….) Giving some of this to one project means sacrificing the ability to give it to another, and requires weighing your options, prioritizing, and looking at the cost/benefit analysis of what you do. For each opportunity you choose, there are others that you lose.

For example, organizing this conference meant I could not chaperone a school trip with my 9 year-old’s class; my husband and I had to scramble to piece together child care solutions to balance our business and home lives and rely on the kindness of neighbors; my child also had to miss a promotion at karate due to the school trip and both my husband and I being unable to home in time to take him to this event.

I got to go be a professional person, and meet other professionals. That’s important, and does tons to make me feel like a valuable person outside of the role of mom. But I love the role of Mom too, and I just wish the choosing didn’t always seem so hard.

I often feel the woman’s movement of the 1960′s and 1970′s gave women a false impression of being able to have it all. We can have it all, I guess, but never at the same time. When we choose A, we have to give up B- it is a zero-sum game, where when someone wins, it means someone also loses in return. While attitude can change the feeling of “losing”, such as giving up the guilt associated with not being able to do everything, and accepting the fact that it’s okay to be selfish and not selfless all the time, it still doesn’t let me clone myself to be multiple places at once, nor buy me an extra 24 hours some weeks to accomplish a little more of what I’d like to have done.

How do you balance the roles of Mom and Grown-up? How do you feed your sense of self, without feeling like you are sacrificing your family in trade? How do you wear many hats, yet feel like a unified whole? I’d love to hear how you deal with juggling work, family, and self.

by Whitney Hoffman

Photo graciously provided by lanuiop, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved