You Can’t Have it All, But You Can Be Happy
Today, I turned 40. It seems like a good day to start a blog. As a professor in management, my expertise is in work-life-balance and employee well-being. I know many relevant theories and research articles that tell us what work-life balance can look like on paper. On top of that, I find that my experience as a mom of 2.5 kids helps to understand what balance looks like in reality.
If you ask me, the reality of work-life-balance is that you can’t have it all. It is really tiring, if not impossible, to be a perfect parent, a star employee, and a top marathon runner. Some people pull it off. Good for them. This blog is likely not for those super stars. This blog is for people like me, who find it quite challenging to keep all the balls in the air while experiencing some form of happiness during this juggling act. My reality is that I make trade offs and put things in perspective.
Today, I really wanted to go for a run. It’s my birthday after all, I should be able to do something I truly enjoy. It meant, however, that my 8yo son had to stay in after school care until 5pm. He did not complain. I still felt a ping of guilt. In the morning, my sister called me from South-Africa to wish me a happy birthday. Her calls are consistently amazing and make me happy. They are also consistently during my workday because of the time difference. If I call with her for an hour, it means I don’t get to prep a work meeting. Trade-offs in life are real.
People who only know parts of me might think that I have it all. My students are aware that I am a mom and they probably picture a happy family of 5 as I usually speak very positively of my family. They might not realize that I teach some classes on 5 hours of sleep because the youngest was teething. My friends might think that I am very successful at work because I have a stable job and published articles. They do not know that I receive rejection letters for my research papers 75% of the time.
Social media does not really help to see life as it really is because most people only post about what is going well in life. In this blog, I’d like to do things a bit differently. I am planning to post real life events related to juggling work and family that include failures and successes. Or just plain routine-like days. There are many of those days in most people’s life. Yet, we never talk about them, or how we get through them. My intention is to post some tips along the way, insights from research, and do’s and don’t based on my own experience on how to be a happy or content juggler.
I hope you find these tips helpful, or maybe even entertaining. If so, I hope to see you here later.
– Lieke