L’Edito: Why So Many Working Women Feel Work Is All There Is

by Solange Lopes | May 21, 2016 | Career

Work, work, work!

While the song may be on an entirely different level, Rihanna was definitely onto something with her new catchy tune. Although it makes me smile every time I hear it, it also makes me think: “Yep, that’s right! Work, work, work, ’tis the working woman’s anthem!”

I’ve never believed in work-life balance. Shonda Rhimes actually most eloquently put my thoughts into words in her June 8, 2014 commencement address to the Dartmouth class of 1991: ““Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life.” To me, work-life balance was always this beautiful illusion used by society to make working women feel better about their reality. A reality based on work. Work at work, work at home, work on our marriages, work at parenting, work in our relationships, work, work, work, work, work….

I remember waking up on a Saturday morning, turning over in the bed, and asking my husband: “What’s today’s schedule?” Because after the work week is over, the work week-end starts, filled with planning kids’ activities, catching up on household chores, laundry, working on our dreams, the yard, social media, etc….

Facebook COO and Author of the Lean In book/movement Sheryl Sandberg recently apologized in a Facebook post for underestimating how difficult it is for single moms to thrive at work when they’re overwhelmed at home. Sandberg suddenly lost her husband last year, and has since acknowledged not grasping at first the hardships encountered by single mothers, and working mothers everywhere who may not have all the support they need to succeed at work. And as I understood through my own lens, women everywhere for whom all there is, most of the time, is work, work, and more work…

When I first read “Lean In”, the hype around the book was at an all-times high. I remember closing the book with a sense of hope mixed with a twinge of fear, followed with this overwhelming thought: ” How can I manage to ever accomplish all of that?” By “all of that”, I mentally meant thriving in my career while still spending quality time with my family, pursuing my dreams, keeping up with the laundry, cooking healthy meals, and making it to every soccer game and piano recital with my curls in place and a bit of sanity left…How? Oh Lord, how?

I’m not a single mom though. I’m blessed with a wonderfully supportive husband, as well as family and friends I can count on. Yet as I was reading Sheryl Sandberg’s accounts of her successful career, as a woman of color in Big Corporate who started from scratch, doesn’t yet have the power network, chef, chauffeur or nanny, I felt I had so much more work to do…

For many, if not most women,  work is all there seems to be, mot of the time. As much as we may love our families, our jobs, and be nurturing our dreams as much as we possibly can, we can’t seem to avoid this overwhelming sense that we constantly have to be “doing”. In a society that has raised the bar on how much we can do in little time, whether it’s climbing the corporate ladder, raising the best/cutest/most athletic kids, or taking as many (happy) selfies as possible, we’re constantly “doing”, “doing”, and “doing” some more…

Because “doing” is the disease of our century, and women are the most afflicted. And if there’s an antidote to it, society’s definitely hasn’t found it yet…Instead, we keep focusing on adding more to our already overflowing plates, to be more like Sheryl Sandberg, more like that seemingly perfect mom on Facebook with the thousands of perfect selfies, more like that Senior Manager working 80 hours a week…And less like ourselves…

At the end of the day, to borrow Oprah’s words, what I know for sure, is that all we can testify to is our own experience. And the best we can do is work on ourselves to make that experience the best it can be for us. Not for others, not for society, not for work-life’s balance’s sake, but for ourselves. Whether it means shutting down the computer and taking a nap. Or getting out of work at 5pm. Or meditating 15 minutes a day. Or letting the kids play their own way instead of having them in five different activities…

Sheryl Sandberg may not have known what it felt like to be a single mom back when she wrote “Lean In”. And it may have taken Shonda Rhimes getting to the pinnacle of success to realize and share that it’s more about give-and-take, than work-life balance after all. And it may take us some of us a lot of work to make peace with the fact that work is not all there is…

As long as we respect our own individual journeys, and in the midst of all the work there still is to do, find our own places, in peace, love and acceptance…

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Love,

The Corporate Sis.