We are loving this article in Macleans about how the focus on super cute kids with their parents at work memes are adorable and inspiring… unless they are your own children at your own workplace. As we finally end 3 weeks of various school spring break schedules we are reminded of the reality that working and parenting is hard… and combining them is mostly a losing battle. At some point over the past 3 weeks, many of our children have had to come to work with us and the experience is never as good as the idea might have seemed.
This is an especially good description of the experience of trying to work and parent simultaneously, “it’s like talking to one person while surreptitiously listening to another conversation behind you: you might be able to fake your way through, but chances are the person you’re talking to is getting a lot of vacant “Uh huh, uh huh, interesting!” from you. Afterward, I felt proud of myself, like some come-to-life working-parenthood meme, but the accomplishment was doing many things at once, not doing any of them especially well.”
These memes are popular because it’s something we can all relate to and they are funny because they are true. What isn’t funny is that issues like lack of affordable childcare, lack of flexibility, unequal pay, few female role models and executive decision-makers are just some of the things that drive women from the workforce–remember Diane Keaton in Baby Boom? The same issues from 1987 are still real today… just with less shoulder pad.
Now that our kids are back in school full-time it is easy to go back to our regular routines but let’s not forget one thing… summer vacation is around the corner. One of our co-founders who will go nameless (rhymes with penny) recalls a recent moment when she brought her 8-year-old to work and was trying to focus on a meeting while her child was simultaneously trying to steal Cokes from the office fridge and play games on her phone, “the reality is having small school-age children and full-time work are basically incompatible for four months of the year if you factor in summer, winter and various vacations. That is a lot of time to be distracted, dealing with schedules and logistics without the safety and routine of school.”
That’s why we are here, to provide opportunities for women who at various stages of their personal and career journeys and why we say #makeworkworkforyou!