Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All

Discerning "work-life balance" for women who don't like living in boxes

A few weeks ago, Mary Harrington published a great post in response to a reader’s question about planning to someday become a SAHM (Stay-At-Home-Mom) whilst still having some sort of flexible career. Harrington’s excellent advice included having some marketable skill(s), especially skills that are portable or easily conducive to “remote” working, thinking in terms of three careers, not one, and celebrating motherhood as a worthy thing to give one’s life to.

This is a question that many women in many stages of life all seem to be wrestling with.

Much of my work as a life consultant involves helping women discern the best fit for their own work-life balance in the current season of their lives. It’s a very personal thing and I’m deeply suspicious of anyone telling women how they should be parceling out their valuable time, energy, and resources when it comes to non-moral issues. 

With that said, there are some general principles and even paradigm shifts that many women I’ve worked with have found helpful, whether they would be classified (ugh) as a “single professional”, “SAHM mom with a job,” or  “mom returning to the workforce after her kids have become mostly independent.” [It should go without saying that all of these women are so much more than any classification on a sociological survey.]

Ditch the idea of having it all and instead discern what matters. 

If you assume than any human being can “have it all”, you’re in for a life of disappointment and heartbreak. Being human means being finite and bumping up against all sorts of limits that can’t be mowed over even with a bottomless wallet or multiverse technology. If you live in the West and are reasonably intelligent and/ or connected, you can have a lot. Someday, you still might go bankrupt or get cancer or face heartbreak and loss of friends. You can’t future-proof yourself against living in a fallen world. But you can make the best of it by figuring out what’s important to you (and when you meet him, your spouse and the family you will form together.) If you’re in the habit of discerning what matters, you’re less likely to be swayed or feel pressure to care about things that you personally don’t actually care about. 

If you need a permission slip to say aloud that you don’t actually care about: having a big house/ travelling the world/ owning a new car/ building a successful career/ dressing in the latest fashion / not ‘wasting your education’ / curating a gorgeous instagram / using the latest beauty products / insert trend here - this is it. This is your permission slip. 

You may still be figuring out what matters, and that’s great! As you discern, you’re free to reject what society tells you is important. This is an ongoing conversation to have with God and your people.

It’s ok to question the idea of ‘career’. 

The online etymological dictionary tells me that the word ‘career’ originating in the 1530s, referred to ‘running (usually at full speed) a course’ - a sense which was later applied to a "course of one's public or professional life." The brightest girls at school are asked, from a very young age, about the course they want their professional life to go. But this, pardon the pun, is a very one-track mindset. Why should everyone have or want a public or professional life? Why aren’t we talking to young women (and men) about the kind of person they want to be? 

There is no rule that you have to want, or have, a career at all. You can have a wildly fulfilling life without a career. 

Will you have bills to pay and will you need a way to pay them? Yes. But you can find all sorts of creative ways to do that. [My husband’s comment here was “cats on YouTube.”]

Might you want an outlet for professional skills you have acquired? Sure. But there’s more than one way to skin, er, Youtube? that cat.

Will there come a day when you may seek external validation for your worthiness in this world? Almost definitely. But no amount of career can meet that deeper desire of your heart.

In other words, it’s good to question the very concept of ‘career’ as a kind of monolithic thing that we give our lives to and in turn provides us with income, outlets, and validation. 

Work, both paid and unpaid, will be a part of all of our lives; but ‘career’ is optional.

It’s important to discern why you personally want a career / the career you’re pursuing.

Many of us go to school, take exams, get on a conveyor belt, hit 30 and suddenly realize that maybe we’re not as happy or fulfilled as we thought we’d be. A lot of women tell me that they “chose” their current path based on external factors like how much money they could make or what their parents or teachers thought they should do. Their career wasn’t exactly a choice: more like a strongly encouraged slide. Maybe at age 15 they could write an essay; now they’re a senior copyeditor with a hefty 401k but a longing to be anywhere in the great outdoors with nary a bar of internet service in sight. 

There are many wonderful reasons to pursue any variety of careers, but someone else’s reason isn’t going to work for you. And your reason from 10 or 20 years ago? It might not work for you anymore, either. If you’re not clear on your own priorities and deeper desires, satisfaction is always going to be out of reach.

One of the most satisfying things for a human person is to use our gifts to help others. Just beware: using your skills and sharing your gifts with the world is not always synonymous with career. If you’re looking for a way to serve with your God-given gifts, don’t automatically assume that a career is the only way to find that satisfaction. It’s not an all-or-nothing game. Most things, you can just do! Engineer a playhouse for your niece, volunteer to play games for physical therapy at a retirement home, code a website for a charity, bake a cake for your neighbour, write a story for your friends, climb a mountain with your sister, photograph your grandparents for posterity. Do it because you enjoy the process.

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Consider a portfolio life. 

Especially if you hope to have children and spend time with them, or if you want the flexibility of caring for family members or even just taking occasional sabbaticals, you’re going to need a “non-traditional” career path, at least for some of the time. (“Non-traditional” goes in quotes here because I think we’re probably well into an entirely new tradition, generationally, but the Boomers have really left their mark.) This is no longer a world in which you graduate from university, sign up with a company, give them 30-40 years of your life, and then retire with a golden pension.

Life happens in seasons. Some seasons you have lots of energy for paid work; some seasons you have lots of need for unpaid work. Some seasons are full of dependent people; others entail being surrounded by mostly (almost) independent adults. If you approach life knowing that sometimes you’ll need or want to lean in more and some seasons you’ll want or need to lean in less, a flexible mindset will ease your mind, just as a portfolio of work and skills will ease your ability to earn.

If, over the course of your lifetime, you are honing different (and hopefully somewhat transferable) skills, you can use those to do any variety of things. 

Let’s say you’re good with people. (This is not a skill that gets discussed nearly enough in schools.) You may work in customer service. You may work in HR. You may work in fundraising. You may become a counselor. You may become a coach. You may find yourself in hostage negotiation or real estate. The list goes on. There are many careers and indeed many jobs that you can do with those skills. Will it take some creativity to transition? Yes. But don’t be afraid of that. Fear is almost never helpful. 

Pay attention to women you admire, not so that you can imitate them exactly, but so you can see how they manage their portfolio. There are many female academics I admire, for example, but I notice that none of them are working full time and homeschooling children at the same time. They may teach some classes or none while they homeschool; they may work full time while their children attend a local school; they may be married to a fellow academic with the possibility of job sharing; many of them write sheerly for the joy of it, or find ways of teaching outside an in-person, degree-based, academic classroom. 

Cultivate a spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship.

A portfolio life that allows you all sorts of flexibility requires a certain disposition, namely a willingness to be creative and think outside the box. If you believe that the only way to live is to sign up for one career track and spend your whole life doing exactly as your employer demands, you’re going to miss out on a lot. Get in the habit of thinking outside the box about how you can achieve your goals, whatever they are for this season (more time with the kids; fewer pointless emails; more money; fewer mindless meetings; more holidays; fewer repetitive tasks.)

For some people, and some cultures, being creative is much easier said than done. Some people are more naturally entrepreneurial because they’re naturally more comfortable with risk, thrive on unpredictability, and generally have a lot of self-confidence. If that’s not you, ‘cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit’ can sound downright impossible. But it doesn’t have to mean starting your own business - it just means having the spirit of being your own boss.

In practice, that means you are in charge of your hours and tasks and professional growth and benefits. You may decide to hand over those things for a while to someone else, but ultimately, the buck stops with you. Your employer works for you! That’s not an excuse to be an arrogant jerk: it just means that if you’re no longer content with some aspect of your career, you can change it. Your job serves your life, not the other way around.

Don’t assume that you can’t do something because you’re “not qualified.” (We’re not talking about heart surgery, here, obviously.) For most of human history, people learned by doing. You can be an apprentice at any age! Think of a qualification as something you seek, if absolutely necessary, after you’ve experienced the daily reality of the doing the work. Too many people spend too many years and far too much money investing themselves in gaining a qualification for something they don’t want to do. (Also, don’t be afraid of a “blue collar” career which can now earn you a six-figure income without six-figure loans.)

You don’t need ‘staying at home with kids’ as a reason to not work 40+ hours a week.

A lot of my single clients aren’t happy working 40+ hours a week. These women aren’t lazy - they’ve worked hard their whole lives, and they’re tired. Usually they’re tired of spending their weekdays pouring themselves into a company or career or colleagues who give very little back in return, and their weekends recovering. They don’t have time or energy to date, despite really wanting to meet a good man. They barely have time to see friends or socialize, and they still need to spend their hours outside work managing a household and life - grocery shopping, dentist appointments, laundry. 

There is no rule about how many hours of your week - how many hours of your life- that you need to work. You know what bills you need to pay, and you get to decide what’s worth trading to do it. 

I’ll never forget when this paradigm shift happened for me. I was in my early 30s, talking with a woman in her 40s who was an emergency room doctor. “Oh, I never do 40 hours a week there,” she said, to my surprise. “I did at first, but I realized that it just takes so much out of me, to really be present to my patients I can only do 20hrs a week.” Since I met her when she was on holiday visiting a mutual friend overseas, I assume that working those hours left her solvent. She spent the other days of the week teaching NFP and enjoying her life. What struck me so powerfully was the peace and joy with which she told me about it - no apologetic air nor any kind of gloating. I think she had always wanted to get married and have kids, but it just hadn’t happened, and she had learned that she didn’t need marriage or children as an ‘excuse’ to lean out of the ‘traditional’ life of a single career woman.

Frugal living is a skill that will serve you well no matter what season you’re in. 

If you value flexibility, frugality is your friend. I’m no Boomer, telling you that foregoing avocado toast is going to get you a deposit for a house, because in most current Western housing markets, it won’t. I’m just saying, life is generally a little less stressful when you don’t mind going without in some areas. It is possible to make an idol of frugality, and let it run your life rather than being a skill that serves you. But learning the areas where frugality bothers you less is really helpful when you’re trying to make it for a while on one income (or less income) and still feed yourself and other people. 

Maybe homemade sourdough stresses you out but you can spend hours scoring deals on Vinted or ThreadUp. Maybe you love the creative challenge of making dinner from the beef that’s been marked down to sell immediately, but can’t stand stepping into a secondhand shop because the smell of mothballs makes you gag. Maybe you’re happy to refurbish furniture but worn-out shoes make your feet ache. Figure out the areas where you’re happy to live frugally and lean into them, knowing that they may shift by season.

If you’re less worried about paying the bills, you’ll have more freedom to focus on the whole of your life, and not just the question of career / paid work.

Build a community of support

Humans are designed to live in community. This is particularly evident when there are lots of little dependent people crawling around. Or when someone gets sick. Or breaks a leg. Or suffers a mental breakdown. 

Our Western culture - especially America, but I see it here in the UK too - is really big on independence. We pride ourselves on being able to do things on our own and not being “a burden” on others. But we’re also suffering a huge epidemic of loneliness and mental health epidemic among teens. Clearly, our current ways of living aren’t working when it comes to a culture full of happy, healthy, well-connected adults.

So whether you want to be a SAHM or just a person who wouldn’t need to face a cancer diagnosis alone, it’s crucial to invest in building a community of support. For most of human history, this looked like nuclear + extended family in close geographical proximity. But the family as an institution is, to put it mildly, kind of a mess right now. So if you can make it work with family, great! There are many benefits to a healthy relationship with grandparents. But if your family is just too dysfunctional, you can be intentional about investing in a community committed to supporting one another. We don’t all have to join the Bruderhof, but can you imagine if every new mother had that level of support?

This is a really, really practical thing: create meal trains for people with new babies or who are experiencing illness. Offer to drive people to hospital appointments, or pick up anything they need from the grocery store. Host potluck meals. Pray together. Play sports, if that’s your thing. Host a book club. But don’t keep everyone at arms’ length. Invest, intentionally, in building a community of support for others and yourself. 

In conclusion…

There are many, many more things that could be said (if you’re living a portfolio life/ career, please share your experience in the comments!) but the bottom line is this: your life is yours to discern as an adult. No parental figure, no professional mentor, no popular expert can tell you exactly how to balance out your desire to use your gifts and talents with your plan to raise your children and your need to pay your bills. Pray hard, be flexible, and try to enjoy each day as it comes.

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If you’re looking for some help discerning how you can live your own portfolio life, that’s what I do! Have a look at my website, ClarityLifeConsulting.com, and contact me there if you’d like to explore whether 1:1 life consulting might be a good fit for you.

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