Work/Life Balance? Time to Lighten the Caregiving Load

Posted July 7th, 2009 by Gloria Pan

(This piece is part of the Fem2.0 blog carnival: For Women, the Other Side of Work Isn’t Play, It’s Caregiving.)

I’m tired. My job and two kids take it out of me both physically and mentally, every day. The husband, a most loving partner and doting father, is happy to help, eager for instruction like a dog waiting for its master’s next command. When he’s not focusing on his 70-plus-hours-a-week job, that is. Some days, I resent this terribly. At what point in our game of house did the rules change so that he should be the one free to go out and beat the world while I assume full responsibility for beating the children? (Just kidding, I don’t really beat the children. Okay, when they were younger, maybe I did, but only a little.) Other days, however – and I try very hard for it to be the vast majority of days – I am grateful. After all, though I have the husband, I don’t even have a dog.

There are many women who are working and raising children all by themselves (13.9 million in 2007), other women caring for both children and elderly parents (about 75 percent of eldercare giving is by women), and still others taking care of loved ones who are ill or disabled (about 30 million in 2004). There are some women who are dealing with all of these things at once, with pets thrown in for good measure. The recession has furthermore brought home the fact that my very ability to whine about fatigue and agonize about things such as work/family balance, and holding onto dreams, ambitions and identity, is a privilege. However impossibly hectic my days, I have choices, and time and mental energy left over to whine and agonize. Millions of women don’t.

Millions of women care not a whit about impressing their children’s teachers because they don’t have paid leave and can’t afford to take the time off from work to attend parent-teacher meetings. Millions of women don’t torture themselves about how they’re doing professionally relative to their partners because both are working long grueling hours so their family can survive paychecks to paychecks. Millions of women are glad to just hold on to their jobs, never mind worry about “fulfilling their potential.” Millions of women patch together less than adequate childcare, eldercare and other care because that’s the best they can do to allow them to work and provide for their families.

And millions of women, privileged or not, accept caregiving as their own personal burden, and never question why it has to be so hard. It rarely occurs to us – or perhaps we’re just too overwhelmed to realize – that society, originally constructed by patriarchs, has yet to accommodate women who have taken on so much more responsibility beyond what’s at home. Whether out of necessity or choice, women have assumed much of the economic load from men (making critical contributions to the family coffers in 70 percent of American families) and we need a serious realignment of our social and economic systems to lighten the caregiving load at the other end of the seesaw. This means better policies for healthcare, childcare and employment for an infrastructure that fits women rather than what we have now: millions of us every day trying to jam the square pegs of our lives into the round holes currently on offer.

Women are tired, but let’s be tired of thinking we have to go it alone. Let’s be tired of the lack of support we get from our policy makers and society and of a status quo completely inadequate for our needs. It’s time to stop agonizing and start advocating for ways to help us in our 21st-century dual roles as bread earners and caretakers.

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Gloria Pan is VP of Internet communications at Turner Strategies, a boutique public policy communications firm in Washington, DC. She conceived and organized the first Feminism2.0 conference, Turner¹s in-house pro bono advocacy project, and administers the Fem2.0 online community.