Louisa noted the the contrast between the lives of Tom Kreider and Dana Shell Smith.
Tom Kreider writes,
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
Dana Shell Smith's article, "How to Have An Insanely Demanding Job and 2 Happy Children" may be the most heartbreaking of all the responses to Slaughter. She describes her life like this,
We are clear in our own minds that in this phase of our lives, so-called "work life balance" means work and family. Full stop. Social life is on the "nice to have" list, not the mandatory list. We haven't seen a non-animated movie in a movie theater in a decade. We collapse from exhaustion most evenings and are each settled in with a book by 10 p.m. We watch almost no TV and shop for everything except for groceries online. Fun for us, at this point, is family dinner time, walking the dog, camping with our kids for a night on the weekend, or maybe getting together with another family.
You get the idea. Everything else is work. Friends and colleagues are surprised, and occasionally offended, when I categorically state that I do not agree to engagements on weekday evenings (with the exception of my monthly book club, which keeps me sane).
Our lives sometimes go into Shell Smith territory. It was especially horrific when we were both working with no childcare. I went for days with 3 hours of sleep. Things are more normal now, because I work when I like and have taken on almost all of the household chores. Still, things do get crazy.
Summer relieves a lot of pressure. We're released from the homework/after-school grind. We drive places and physically separate ourselves from home chores and the phone. I can't imagine every getting to Kreidre level of chill with kids and all the obligations, but it's a nice goal.
Apt. 11d 
DSS’s kids are tweens. She’s got nearly another decade of the same schedule to look forward to.
“Social life is on the “nice to have” list, not the mandatory list.”
Not to load another item on her plate, but isn’t modeling a successful social life important to her kids? I expect her social needs are fully met at work or book club, but those kids rarely get to see their parents relating socially to other adults, which is very unfortunate.
(I’ve heard of at least two child psychologists who think it is very important for parents of children on the autism spectrum to make an effort to model a social life.)
“Friends and colleagues are surprised, and occasionally offended, when I categorically state that I do not agree to engagements on weekday evenings (with the exception of my monthly book club, which keeps me sane).”
I approve 100% of the no weekday engagement policy. It’s just too disruptive, aside from the occasional Thursday evening thing.
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If Kreider is writing 4-5 solid hours a day, that’s actually a whole bunch. Nothing lazy about that, actually.
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I see a lot of people living the Shell Smith model in academia (and we’re well on our way). People missing out on TV references or late night boozers is sort of the norm. When I clicked through I was surprised how it didn’t come across as *that* bad to me. But then again, before I had kids I always kept myself ridiculously busy.
I honestly believe that some people just live at different frequencies than others, and this is a great example. I think the challenge is to make peace with the lifestyle that suits your personality.
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Great, I’ll make peace with my frequency, but the world outside my skin is using a particular frequency and lifestyle to decide how much I’m allowed: how much money, how much respect, how much protection by laws. Society’s standards for what women can/must do have changed considerably since I was born in the early 1960s, as have society’s standards for men. Just like standards for clothing and home cleanliness rose due to the devices that were supposed to be labor-saving, and therefore resulted in more work to meet the higher standards.
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Heartbreaking? Wow, I loved that piece. I think many career-oriented parents would be less stressed if they just accepted that career + small kids sometimes means that’s all you do for awhile and let go of the imperative to do a million other things. I wish I had! I regret, a bit, the volunteer and extra-curricular stuff I did when my kids were smaller. I have plenty of time for all that now and I wish I’d hung out with them every chance I had.
I suspect she gets her social needs met at work, as Amy says. That’s cool. You can’t model everything for your kids – she’s modeling sanity, prioritization, and passionate involvement in an important job.
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“I think many career-oriented parents would be less stressed if they just accepted that career + small kids sometimes means that’s all you do for awhile and let go of the imperative to do a million other things.”
But they’re tweens now, and she doesn’t say she has any intention of letting up.
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I also didn’t think her description was at all horrifying. Say, not having seen a movie in years. Neither have I. For me, it’s prioritizing. It’s the same as chores or reading a book. People who say they don’t have time for each are prioritizing, deciding one thing matters more than another. The time to worry is when *you* think you’re giving up something important, not when other people do.
I was frustrated by the article, though, because it still didn’t give the details I’m looking for in how people manage the schedule (so, ok, no weekday scheduling). But, who does the laundry? who cleans the bathrooms? who does the dishes? who schedules the doctor’s appointments and camps and kids’ activities (an answer is no camps & kid’s activities, but that’s an answer, too). I’d like to see that questionnaire; there must be some data out there, no?
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“But, who does the laundry? who cleans the bathrooms? who does the dishes? who schedules the doctor’s appointments and camps and kids’ activities (an answer is no camps & kid’s activities, but that’s an answer, too.”
She’s been a foreign service officer in the Arab world–I expect she has ample help for the more mundane tasks of life. (A friend of mine had both a nanny and a housekeeper when she worked in Egypt a few years back–of course my friend had a bunch of little kids and her husband was elsewhere much of the time. Of course, she’d occasionally discover things like that the nanny was giving the baby black tea in the baby’s bottle.) DSS should have mentioned her household help in more detail.
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Having more full-time help brings more complications, too. At some point, my friend had to let go one of her household employees because of a nanny-housekeeper feud. She hired the cousin (or some other relative) of the surviving employee to fill the empty slot and there was peace and harmony once again.
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When she mentions not having seen a movie in a decade, I wondered how much time she had with/for her husband. I wondered if she was saying “we never have a date night” or “we don’t watch movies.” I’ve looking down the road at an empty nest in five years and I have heard from friends that the adjustment to ‘just the two of us’ is particularly brutal for people who have neglected their marriage for years while focusing on work and kid stuff. I do know that when we were at the height of full on craziness with 2 full time jobs, both of which involved travel, ill family members, kids with various diagnoses the thing that was completely neglected was our marriage. Maybe she’ll be one of the lucky ones whose marriage does OK despite not having time to put into it — but it’s a risk to just assume it will all work out.
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This was a great article, much better than Slaughter’s. She seems like an incredibly dedicated public servant as well as a good parent. Maybe it’s the dedication to public service – the fact that she considers things like whether she had a moral obligation to go to Iraq or Jerusalem – that impresses me so much. She doesn’t seem at all heartbroken about her choices, so it didn’t seem heartbreaking to me.
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