Welcome everyone to the new Motherhood Cafe motherhood website. It’s still the same content and focus, but with a much spiffed-up design and navigation system. You will notice the new header and logo as well. For this, I must extend a huge thanks to Marilyn Belsham of Cursive Web for this amazing bit of creativity and for coming up with those gorgeous butterflies!
There is certain significance to the new logo for the Motherhood Cafe motherhood website. When we were brainstorming ideas for the new look, I mentioned to Marilyn that I think of parenting as the process of giving our children their wings. That’s the meaning behind the butterflies. Hope you like the new look!
Cursive Web is responsible for the entire Motherhood Cafe redesign. I highly recommend her to anyone who’s needing or wanting help with their websites. One of the things that was particularly impressive about this project is that every aspect of our work together redesigning my motherhood website was done remotely; Ms. Belsham and I live in two totally different cities, 1000 kilometers apart.
I’m coming to appreciate technology for how it can help modern parents in the ever illusive quest for work-life harmony. Women have been searching for a long time now (remember those 1980s ‘working mom’ movies like Baby Boom?) for ways to find some semblance of work-family harmony, often with little or limited success.
While women without children now earn nearly equal to their male counterparts, mothers still earn less for comparable work (for a full discussion of this issue, read Ann Crittenden’s amazing book, The Price of Motherhood; Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued).
This is in part due to the ‘choices’ mothers make in regards to work-family balance, but it’s also a function of very real biases that still exist against workers with encumbrances. As discussed at length by Kristin Maschka in Revisioning Motherhood, the mainstream world of work is still very much structured to favour the unencumbered worker. Employers prefer employees who have someone else looking after the ‘other stuff’ of life. That includes –most especially — the responsibility for children and family life.
There is a recent comment to this effect on my adjusting to parenthood post, where a new mother is experiencing difficulties with her colleagues (and her boss), most of whom she says are unmarried and have little empathy and understanding for the needs and priorities of working mothers. Perhaps some of you have some words of wisdom or advice for her.
It’s no wonder that so many mothers leave the labour force, switch to the mommy track, start working part time, or change careers altogether. Burnout and excess stress is simply too common, work-life harmony too fleeting a hope. I’m certainly one example of someone who has opted for a slower-paced career trajectory for the sake of work-life harmony (with the exception of my work on this motherhood website, I’ve been out of the labour force for more than three years now) .
So many of my friends — and mothers I’ve interviewed — have experienced similar things. They’ve returned to their jobs ‘post-maternity’ only to realize their job didn’t fit with their lives any more. And instead of their jobs being flexible enough to accommodate their new realities and priorities, they found themselves needing to make some tough decisions and changes.
I’ve come to realize that making decisions about work – the need to find some kind of ‘fit’ between career/outside interests and motherhood — is not only one of the key steps of the adjustment process for new mothers, it’s an issue we find ourselves revisiting time and again, throughout our parenting careers.
Yet the ability to work remotely — and to work from home — is an important technological development for our ongoing work-life quandary, as it gives more and more families unique opportunities to better harmonize their career interests with their family life. Mothers everywhere are venturing out on their own, opening up consultancies, developing and selling beautiful products, working hours set by them, and offering their expertise to the world in new and creative ways. They are working more from home, becoming their own bosses, and are putting their skills to work in ways that fit with their priorities and responsibilities as mothers.
I love that there are so many ‘mompreneurs’ out there, and I love supporting them when I can. Cursive Web is only one such example — a work-from-home mother who often puts in hours well into the night, after her children are in bed. I would see her emails to me (logged as late as 11:00 or midnight the night before) when I would arrive at my home office desk in the early morning hours, before my kids were awake.
Working early mornings, late nights, or from home isn’t for every mother, but it seems to work for us…at least for now. I know there’s no formula for finding true work-family balance; the very notion and possibility of balance is simply too context-dependent, fleeting, and individualized to particular families. The thing I am certain of, though, is that mothers have more choices than they used to even explore opportunities for better work-life harmony. This is a progress for which I am grateful.
