Work/Life Balance
Throughout my working career, the subject of work/life balance was a constant. We all know the story of the workaholic that overworks himself to the point of ignoring his familial obligations. He comes home after the kids are asleep, he cancels vacations at the last minute. He leaves all the child rearing to his wife. And he always misses the baseball game or recital of his children. I occasionally suffered from all of those failings, but was aware enough to be sure not to have any of it occur too often. I always felt that those problems were the direct result of accepting an excess of responsibility, which to me was part of getting ahead. The reality was probably more likely that my obsession with achieving success made me want to be Uber-responsible or at least seem Uber-responsible to my superiors. I recognized from an early stage in my career that I was at the extreme end of the spectrum of caring about my image of responsibility. I recall hearing a peer tell a newcomer that I was someone that wanted to become Chairman. That was shorthand for saying that I was ambitious even though it had never occurred to me to aim so high as to think that far in advance about the top job.
During those early years, I used to have a bank car for visiting clients. It was actually a Division car, but I was willing to be the guy who drove it in every day for anyone in the Division who needed it to use. Strangely enough, the car we had was always the prior car used to drive the Chairman around. When his driver changed it out after two years for a newer model, we got the older one. To avoid traffic, I used to drive the car into Manhattan very early and then drive it home equally late. That was fine since that was the work schedule I chose to keep anyway, given my ambitious state of mind. One day, while driving home an older colleague who happened to live in my community and who had stayed to work late, he chose to psychoanalyze me during our drive home. He is perhaps a dozen years my senior and very much a tough guy who had served in Vietnam and had been severely wounded before becoming a banker. His analysis of me was to say that my ambition was the result of being a little boy who wanted a pat on the head from his father, but who hadn’t had a father around while growing up, so I wanted a pat on the head from my banking superiors. He was very sure of his assessment and I found myself without much to say in retort. Over the years, I have often thought about that assessment and concluded that it was more true than not.
The interesting thing about his assessment was that the very thing I had missed by not having a father in my life in my youth had as much to do with forming my patterns of behavior as a father as it did around forging my patters of behavior as a working man. Thus, if he was right, then the same dynamic that made me want to work hard and stay late was the dynamic that made me want to spend time with my kids and take my parental obligations as seriously as I took my business managerial responsibilities. My mother was the workaholic and achievement role model of my life. She bootstrapped her college education, pushed herself to take a foreign assignment with the Rockefeller Foundation when women rarely did such things, and then she went back to graduate school as a single mother of three when she was in her forties. That is pretty damn achievement oriented by any standard. On the other hand, my father faked his way upward as a pseudo engineer/architect construction development guy, took a free ride to the U.S. on my mother’s citizenship, and was quick to upgrade his family and leave us to fend for ourselves. He as the epitome of self-interest and lack of responsibility by any standard. If my mother was my role model, my father was my cautionary tale. It was a very simple conscious equation; be like mom, not like dad. Unfortunately, part of me was my mother and part was my father.
While I think I have more of my mother in me than my father, it is hard to deny some blend of the characteristics of both. We all like to think that we get the best of rather than the worst of our parents, but we often don’t get to pick and choose as we might like. We get what we get. The interesting thing for me is that my mother and father had such a vast contrast in the very elements of responsibility and drive that forge the work/life balance in life. I split the difference between my mother and father educationally (she had a Ph.D. and he was not only without degree, he pretended he had a degree he never had), and I got an MBA, which is as close to a blend of their backgrounds as I could get. I think that in many ways, that same blending occurs in most of my attributes, but good self-image forces me to suggest that the blend favors my mother’s traits in every dimension, whether that is the case or not.
When I did find myself more in my father’s mode, I would over-compensate to be sure not to be too much like him. For instance, when I first divorced and started living apart from my oldest two children, I was insistent that I would never miss a visitation day, weekend or vacation. I may have been an absentee father like my father, but I was the best absentee father one could be, being sure to connect with my kids in ways that my father never bothered to do. The same was true of when I got into my mother’s mode. My mother was so ambitious and responsible that she would write and rewrite a work document ten times to insure its perfection. I am prone to doing the same, but would never let my quest for work perfection interfere with spending time with my kids. My mother’s failing was perhaps an inability to demonstrably show her affection, so I would make sure to do just that by being highly affectionate with my kids at every opportunity, not unlike my father’s tendency. So, in a strange and alternating way, I would move between the extremes of my parental role models trying to be a lot like my mother and as little like my father as possible, but also try to avoid my mother’s few flaws while adopting the few positive I saw in my father.
The balancing act of life is always hard to notice and assess while we are in the midst of our lives, but as I get older and have more time to reflect on the past, I can parse the things that I feel were going on. My generally positive outlook causes me to think that I was very fortunate to have the juxtaposed role modeling of my parents and that I was able to find the happy medium that I feel I have achieved in designing and accomplishing the work/life balancing act that we must all find in our lives. I’m sure there is some degree of unbalanced aspects that I am overlooking and I’ll bet that my kids could recite those things far better than I can. What I am confident in saying is that at this point in life, I am finding it much easier to strike that work/life balance since the demands of both work and life are so much less. Maybe that’s the best solution. Worry less about work and life and balancing the two becomes that much easier.