Driving Happily Down The Middle

Last week, I spoke to the happiest working moms I've ever found -- and I found them in a most unlikely place. The women, all mothers, worked for a New York based fashion designer. But they didn't work in the glamorous, high powered, perk filled jobs at the fashion company on 7th avenue. Instead, they worked on the other side of the river, tucked away in a very unglam warehouse-filled town in New Jersey. The women held the company's nuts and bolts positions: human resources, pay roll, distribution etc. Unlike their New York colleagues, not one of these women carried a BlackBerry. A few had cell phones, but that was so they could reach their families, not their bosses or clients. The women started their workdays at 8 am or 9 am and ended them between 4 PM and 5 PM. No one mentioned taking work home with them, staying late or working weekends.

One woman was married to a truck driver. Another was married to a teacher. And still another woman's husband, a former construction worker, currently held the job of Stay-at-Home dad, choosing to stay home after his daughter was born last year. The truck driver dad was also the resident chef, cooking dinner as well as coaching every team sport imaginable (the couple had three kids.) The former construction worker reveled in his parenting and also prepared dinner (he and his wife also alternated teaching spinning classes at the local gym at night). The schoolteacher did the daycare pick-ups at 4 PM and managed to do a couple loads of laundry once a week as well.

These men defied conventional stereotypes. They had traditional blue collar jobs and yet were the most renaissance and evolved of husbands. Of all of the women whom I've spoken to in the past few years, these women were the happiest and most balanced. Because their husbands really split the household and childcare responsibilities, these women were not stressed and exhausted as they tried to negotiate a career and family. And because their careers allowed them the time to have a life, they were fully enjoying their lives.

The topic of career and family is often discussed as an elitist one because the issue simply turns into a lightning rod for choice -- that is, women choosing to be at home or choosing to be at work. Choice is not the reality for most women. But the issue of balancing career and family is a reality, one that's not elitist but entirely middle class.