Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO
It’s 4:47 on a Wednesday afternoon and you are parked at the soccer field with your laptop propped against the steering wheel. You’re finishing a client deck using your phone’s hotspot while a dozen seven-year-olds chase one ball around a field that feels far too large for their little legs.
You already took a conference call from the carpool line this morning and watched your phone blow up with a text exchange from the 1st grade moms – right as you were in the middle of a big presentation.
If you’re a working mom, it’s a pretty typical day. You kind of always do it all. You are the repository of all the information no one else even knows.
You know practice ends at 6:15 and that the cleats are getting tight. You know spring registration opens on the first, which is also the due date of your quarterly report. You know the pediatrician’s after-hours number by heart. You know which teacher prefers email and which one will only respond to a text.
You know your childcare bill is bigger than your mortgage, because you’ve checked. Twice. Hoping you were wrong.
You are balancing an impossible number of things every single day, at a level of excellence most people never achieve.
But, instead of feeling like the superhero you truly are, you go to bed every night feeling like a failure. Like, there’s never enough of you going around – and something’s gotta give.
You Are the Rule
In case you’ve been wondering whether it’s just you, it isn’t.
Nearly three out of four American moms with kids under 18 are in the workforce. Working moms are the rule – not the exception.
While we contribute meaningfully at work, we also carry most of the tasks in the home, as well. In one study of mothers with young children, moms handled about 73% of the planning in their households and 64% of the doing.
That planning load doesn’t shrink as the paycheck grows, either. Moms earning more than $100,000 a year do less of the physical work, but just as much of the remembering.
Meanwhile, the average parent spends about 20% of their income on childcare. That’s significantly above the federal government’s definition of “affordable” – which comes in around 7%. (Care.com)
So you are working like you don’t have kids, parenting like you don’t have a job, and paying for the privilege.
No wonder you’re tired.
Mind the Glass Balls
It feels impossible and overwhelming so we try to come up with some tactics that will help.
At some point, I guarantee someone has given you the glass ball advice. Maybe a mentor or panelist at a women’s leadership luncheon. Maybe a well intentioned family member or friend. But, we’ve all heard it somewhere.
It goes like this. As a working mom, you’re juggling a lot of balls. Some are rubber and some are glass. No matter what you do – you’re going to drop some. Now, the rubber balls bounce. But, the glass will shatter. So, when you have to drop a ball – try not to let the glass ones go.
It sounds wise. “Don’t drop the glass balls” fits nicely on a coffee mug. People see themselves in the story and it makes sense, so we all nod in agreement.
But, it irks my soul to no end.
I have questions about this little analogy. Annoying ones.
First of all, why is one person holding all the balls? Like, who decided it was a good idea to give everything to one human?
Also, why is the help we offer her a guideline about which of her “too many” responsibilities she should drop? Why has no one in the history of this metaphor ever walked over and said, “Here. Let me grab some of those for you”?
Read the glass balls advice again. It starts by assuming you’ll fail. Then it offers you a strategy for failing more gracefully. “We expect you to drop things, sweetheart, so here’s how to drop the right ones.”
That’s not wisdom. That’s a design flaw.
Anybody who has ever run operations will tell you that a system with a single point of failure is a badly built system. We would never run a company that way. We would never run a hospital or an airport or a lemonade stand that way.
But, families all over the country are succeeding within this broken model every day.
Helping moms fail better is not a strategy. And, we have to stop accepting it as one to begin to get better results.
Put Down the Rubber Balls
I don’t have a cute story to help you visualize how to fail more effectively. But, as someone who has been solo parenting for nearly a decade while working full time, I can share a few things I’ve found that actually help.
First, stop holding on to the things that can bounce.
Take an honest inventory of everything that lands on your plate in a normal week. All of it. The big stuff, the tiny stuff, the stuff you do on autopilot at 10 PM without remembering you did it.
Then look at each item and ask whether it can move into one of two categories.
Outsource. Or, apathy.
Outsource
The year my son was born, I was working full time, solo parenting an infant, and running on the kind of sleep that’s technically legal but probably shouldn’t be. And I was still planning to cook a multi-course Thanksgiving dinner from scratch for my entire family.
Why? Because that’s what you do, right? That’s what my mother did.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom who loved to cook. She would pore over recipes for weeks. She would spend hours wandering the grocery store and even longer in the kitchen, and she loved every minute of it. That meal was her art.
I was a sleep-deprived new mom with a laptop, a baby, and a family with very strong opinions about what does and does not belong on a Thanksgiving table. I was running myself ragged to recreate my mother’s joy, and getting none of it.
Then a colleague mentioned in passing that her family loved the pies her caterer made every year. And, I was gobsmacked. That’s a thing you can do? You can cater a holiday meal?!?
If you didn’t know about this – welcome to the rest of your life, friend. Because, this little piece of knowledge has saved my bacon – literally. I haven’t cooked a holiday meal from scratch in years. Whole Foods creates the turkey and most of the things everyone demands to eat. And, I happily heat it up.
Thanksgiving still happens. I make one or two things I actually enjoy. Everyone still eats too much and winds up napping on the couch. But, instead of brooding in the corner, I actually get to enjoy seeing my loved ones and sit at the family table long enough to eat.
I always share with my clients some of the best advice I received early in my career. As soon as you can afford it, outsource everything that doesn’t need to be done by you.
Do you need to clean your own house? Do you need to cook every meal? Do you need to be the one who folds every towel? Or did you just inherit these jobs and expectations from someone who had more time, more help, or an entirely different life?
Help costs money, and most of us are already paying a mortgage-sized bill for childcare. So start where you can. Choose one thing; the thing you dread most that someone else could do just as well. Or, enlist your loved ones to help. But, start outsourcing something STAT.
Apathy
Apathy gets a bad rep, especially among high achievers. But when you choose it on purpose, it’s one of the most strategic tools you have.
When my son was in kindergarten, there were roughly two birthday parties a week for his little classmates. I spent entire weekends in loud crowded venues, standing awkwardly with other parents, watching our children eat sugar and play with kids they had just seen YESTERDAY.
Now, I’m all for my child having fun on the weekends and enjoying his friends. But, it has to work for our life.
So, we attend the birthday parties that do. I’m not playing elementary school politics and keeping a ledger of whose kid came to whose party so we can make sure to return the favor and repay the gift.
If it works to go to the trampoline park for the third time this month – great. If it doesn’t, we will make you a very nice card & get on with our lives.
Sometimes, apathy allows you to eschew expectations in favor of making something work for your life. Sometimes, it’s about just deciding not to care at all.
For example, every July, I get a letter from my HOA about a weed in my yard that has grown so large it’s visible from the street. Even my weeds are ambitious – how on brand.
Anyway, when the letter comes, I call a friend who owns gardening shears and they stop by and trim it down to an invisible size. Then I go back to my life and wait for next year’s letter.
Annual landscaping is simply not in my budget and I’m not spending any weekend of my one precious life weeding away all the unmanicured nature. I grew up on a farm, you guys. We didn’t edge our lawn. We let farm animals graze on it. I have no problem letting nature do its thing.
It’s not like my house is Grey Gardens or anything, but if you look closely at my landscaping, you will see I have simply decided not to care.
The difference between dropping a ball and setting it down is your control over the decision. So, take control of what you can.
When you drop something, you feel like a failure. When you decide you’re done carrying it, you feel lighter.
Hand Some to Someone Else
The balls that are left still need hands. Ideally, more than your own.
When I make the suggestion to share the tasks, I hear the same thing from almost every working mom I coach. “I can’t trust anyone else to do it as well as I do.” And honestly? They’re usually right. No one is going to pack lunch exactly the way you pack it.
No one will load the dishwasher to your unique specifications. And, you’re definitely not going to find another person who will color code the family calendar like you do, you little control freak.
But when you only ever hand off specific tasks, you retain all the ownership and most of the mental load. You stay in charge of the noticing, the reminding, the checking, and the fixing.
Everyone who “helps” has really just signed on to be your backup. But, you don’t need backup. You need someone else to take ownership. (I wrote a whole piece about this called You’re Not Asking For Too Much, if you want to go deeper.)
Ownership can come from a partner or a co-parent, a grandparent, someone you hire, or even the tiny humans who live in your house.
Give the people in your life a chance to own something. It won’t get done the way you’d do it. But, with a few weeks of practice, it will get done. And, that’s one less rubber ball for you to worry about dropping along the way.
Check the Balance
When I start coaching with a working mom, one of the first things we do is a ruthless inventory of her calendar. We’re looking for two things – debits and deposits.
Debits are everything that asks something of you. Deposits are the things that pour back in. Your energy works like a bank account, and you can’t keep taking out more than you put in. At least not without consequences.
Most of us build our calendars backward. We put in all the outputs first (work, appointments, practice, the dentist) and then try to squeeze a life into whatever’s left. My advice? Flip it. Put the deposits on the calendar first. Then make your withdrawals against them.
And watch for imposters. The massage you spend stressing out about your inbox. The dinner with friends who leave you more drained than when you sat down. Some deposits are debits in disguise. Plan accordingly. (Want to go deeper on this topic? Check out Permission to Begin.)
We Were Never Supposed to Hold It All
You can get very good at all of this. You can outsource and embrace apathy and share responsibility and rebalance. And you should, because it helps.
But it’s probably not going to be enough.
We can trade priority hacks forever. But, what working moms actually need is a village. Partners who take ownership. Parents who pitch in. Neighbors who see what needs to be done and just help.
And, you can start building that right now – by getting honest about what you have and what you need.
My social life these days looks very different than it used to. It’s talking to a friend on a park bench while my son tears around the playground. A friend chilling on my couch while I do the laundry and my kiddo plays nearby. Or a colleague helping me think through a complex business problem while I shove a harried lunch into my face.
It looks nothing like the stylish brunches I enjoyed in my twenties or the late night conversations I had in my 30’s. My life is very different now. And, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But, I’ve learned that I can’t handle the same inconsistently supportive, lackadaisically connected, and intermittently demanding relationships that child free me rolled with all the time.
The truth is that I need different relationships, better accommodations, and more support from the friends and family on this leg of the journey with me.
If we aren’t honest about what we need, we can’t put the systems in place to actually get it.
And the world puts the whole load of life on moms while doling out advice about how they should handle their inevitable failure. It’s just too much to ask of anyone. We have to live differently.
All of us.
Because you can have a beautiful life and still be suffocating inside it. Not because you don’t appreciate it. But, because you are carrying too much of it alone.
So, this week, set one ball down. Tell another mom you see her and invest in one relationship that truly sees you. Then, allow someone to support you in a real and tangible way.
Put some big deposits on your calendar this week. Let your kids see you pouring into yourself and enjoying yourself. Because you are the model they’ll measure themselves against for the rest of their lives.
Give them the tools to build a life that loves them back by showing them exactly how it’s done.
If you’re ready to look at everything you’re holding and figure out what can bounce, what someone else should carry, and what’s actually yours, come talk to me. We’ll go through it together.
We offer coaching and community for the ones no one even thinks to check on – including the mom sending emails from the sidelines. Maybe, her most of all.
