Dear Mom: How Do You Balance Work and Family?
Meditations on tech across generations
Dear Mom,
I used to have this reoccurring dream as a child. Everyone in the world was a piece of cardboard, crawling around on a flat expanse of gray dirt under an even grayer sky. Every so often a “person” would rise into the sky and become a star.
I can still feel the anxiety of that dream balled up at the base of my stomach. Born into a family of executives and entrepreneurs — my dad a corporate lawyer, you and my stepfather the joint CEOs of a startup — the pressure I felt to rise above the cardboard was immense not because you told me it was required, but because everywhere I looked I saw stars. I learned early that success is the norm, not exemplary.
Last month marked three years since I graduated college. I’ve found my own path and definition for success as a tech journalist. And yet I can’t shake that anxiety — that feeling that I always need to be driving, driving, driving toward something more, or I risk getting stuck in the dirt forever.
I worry what that feeling will mean for me over these next 10 years. Maybe I’ll get married and have kids, and then I will have to split my time with chasing a second star: ambitious mother.
I know you once found yourself with two stars. That wasn’t always easy; one of my earliest memories is sitting in my dad’s lap, feeling an intense sadness as I asked when you would return from negotiating a deal in China. Sometimes I wonder where I would be if you had sat with me night after night, goading me toward higher grades and aspirations.
But, overwhelmingly, my childhood memories are of you being there, of campfires in the woods as loons called across the lake and piles of books you knew any young girl should read. You forged your way to success not at the expense of, but alongside, the path you chose for yourself as a mother. You abandoned a life in Los Angeles and track toward partner at an international law firm so my brother and I could grow up attending a down-to-earth Midwestern public school, and instead carved out a way to lead a company and found a startup with us by your side. Even today, as you embark on your latest venture as CEO at a solar startup, I know I can call and you will answer.
June 29 marks my 25th birthday, the day I begin defining the second half of my twenties, and I’m looking to you to help find that balance. How do you combine a drive to do something great with being part of a family? I don’t know that I’ll ever leave that ball of anxiety behind, but I like to think that it can drive me to build a life that welcomes two roles, the way you have.
Love,
Signe
