Meet my Uncle Peter. He’s a really cool guy who happens to be an employee rights lawyer in New York and has talked with more than a thousand women and men about their work lives over the course of his career. He has a theory about why conditions are so difficult for working moms.
My friend Jane has a problem. She works full-time for a government agency in California and has two little girls in preschool. Jane is really good at her job. Jane is losing her mind.
Becoming a parent means there are new demands on our time and for many of us, we feel strangely disloyal to our jobs after we have kids. And yet, many of us become better employees. So why do mothers make only 68% of what men earn? And forgetting about the disgraceful pay inequity for a moment, why is it that we feel so horribly guilty when we skulk out of the office at 4:30 to pick up our kids from daycare? Could these two things (guilt and pay inequity) be related?
…At some point, of course, I realized I wasn’t happy. I was trapped. I had money, but not time. It was like being surrounded by food, and dying of thirst.
It turns out that there is a way out of this mess. There are people all over this country–both women and men–who have made a conscious decision to value their time more than their money. Against the formidable current of popular culture, they have decided that this may be the only life they will ever have, and they’re going to live it fully.
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