Blurred Lines
One year at the Women’s Basketball Coaches’ Convention that annually surrounds the Women’s Final Four, I was asked to be on a panel at one of the seminars about “Work-Life-Balance”. I was a head coach, and I had a husband and two kids, so I suppose somebody assumed it was something I should know about. Assumptions can be dangerous things.
The panel was composed of a male coach, another female coach, me, and two esteemed female administrators. We sat formally in front of a room full of mostly women who were looking somewhat hopeful we might offer up the Holy Grail. The discussion was led by a moderator who tossed us a few ethereal questions like fat, slow change-ups that we each, when it was our turn, popped out to center field. Then they turned it over to the audience for some dialog and lit up the comatose room.
Work-Life Balance is a conflicting conversation and wrestling with “how to do it” is the last thing you have time for when you’re in the trenches trying to get it done. And, yet, what everybody in that room wanted more than anything was a game plan, or at the least a bare-bones scouting report. A cheat sheet about landmines to be on the look-out for or some tools for building bridges to get to the other side. The ethereal conversation we were having didn’t seem to be doing much of any of that. All I saw out in the audience were stretched out humans with earnest faces and gaunt eyes. There was even a coach in the back pushing a stroller around the room. I really thought we might all be better off if we could just turn down the lights for a minute and take a little nap.
But the people with mics soldiered on. After a little prodding, and a few more floaty pitches, a coach near the front threw a fastball that forced us to get real. She asked how we stayed connected to our children when our job demanded that we be gone so much, even when we weren’t far away.
My filter fell completely off.
I told her about dragging my kids with me all over the country recruiting and how they learned to sleep through shot clock buzzers because they were always in the gym. I might have even told them I put soda in their bottles on occasion, when it was late and we were desperate, to keep them going for just a little while. Admittedly, I was never up for mother-of-the-year. And I spoke openly about the halfway pull that always feels like indigestion because wherever it is you are seems like it’s the wrong place to be. And then I added, somewhat as an aside, that I often kept my cell phone on my lap (on silent of course) when I was in meetings so that I could check in on my kids. I explained that checking my phone allowed me to see if my kids made it home from school ok or if one of them had the measles or if a science fair project was due the next day and I needed to stop at the store to buy wax paper and pipe cleaners on my way home. It made me feel like I was being their mother even if my body was somewhere else.
I explained that checking my phone allowed me to see if my kids made it home from school ok or if one of them had the measles or if a science fair project was due the next day and I needed to stop at the store to buy wax paper and pipe cleaners on my way home. It made me feel like I was being their mother even if my body was somewhere else.
My sharer of the dais could not let that one go.
One of the administrators to my right, a woman who I deeply admire, immediately contradicted my practice and said that checking her phone during a meeting was something that she’d never do. (Perhaps the other stuff I listed was so obviously inane that no one found it worthy of challenging). But the air in the room got super thick. And my insides started to squirm. She said it was unprofessional and not a thing that she would ever consider, recommend, or tolerate. You should be committed to the room you’re in, she said. And the left half of my body melted. Because I didn’t disagree.
But the right half of my body said, “Oh really?” because it, respectfully, did. And a fissure ran right through me like the San Andreas Fault.
They say that the definition of an educated person is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. If that’s true, I was Einstein on that stage. My head knew all about the less than positive research that was out on multi-tasking, and about professionalism, and about how important it is to always be exactly where you are. But it also knew that the cell phone in my lap was a tether to another part of me. One I was not willing to abandon while I went about my work. The two contradictory schools of thought continued exchanging punches inside my body as they’d been apt to do since the day I first gave birth. One of the only things that’s clear about being a working parent is that the internal sparring never stops.
Work-Life Balance is a riddle at best and a myth at worst. We talk about it like it’s something we should master, but how do you balance two independently all-the-time things? Had I tried to divide my work and my life it would have excavated my soul. The guilt would have drowned me in minutes, if I didn’t succumb to my own FOMO first. So the answer for me was a simple one. I blurred all the lines.
Had I tried to divide my work and my life it would have excavated my soul. The guilt would have drowned me in minutes, If I didn’t succumb to my own FOMO first. So the answer for me was a simple one. I blurred all the lines.
I didn’t say it was the right way—my former coach would say there are lots of ways to skin a cat-- nor did I say that it was an easy way because it never was, ever. But blurred lines were very simply the only way I could make it work.
The great author, James A. Michener, once wrote: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.” I couldn’t ever separate being a coach and being a mother. No matter where I was, I was always also somewhere else at the same time.
There will never be a formula, no matter how badly we want one, for balancing our work and our life. Being a parent is all-encompassing, you’re never off the clock no matter what you do. But we would all, it seems, feel better if we could compartmentalize the responsibilities and put them on a scale. Film and practice plans in the plate on the right, baths and homework in the plate on the left. Check the needle, watch it waiver. A little less here, a little more there. Like plugging the right things into the right places in the right formula could somehow create fulfillment and ensure competence and, maybe as a bonus, extradite the guilt.
Unfortunately, however, insides don’t come with zippers that allow us to divvy up our best stuff, commit it to predetermined sides, and lock it in for parceled use. That’s just not how humans work. Not how they work best anyway. And despite the internal grappling, my experience has been that when one side bleeds into the other, both sides end up being better than they’d otherwise ever have been.
There’s a new show called “Severence” coming out soon, if not already, on Apple Plus. And the issue it tackles is Work-Life Balance. Its premise revolves around shedding who you are when you go to work. Non-work memories are separated from work memories the minute you clock in or out. In other words, you walk through the door and forget who you are. I guess that’s one way to solve the problem of trying to make it all work.
But I can’t even imagine.
My daughter learned to burp the alphabet from one of my players—a skill she still has and can use as a party trick if she’s ever so inclined, and one of my players went with me to buy shoes with Velcro for my dad when he was confined to assisted living in the latter years of his decline. Soupy all-at-onces are the stories of my life. The scales never really worked for me, but the blurring always did.
Sherri Coale
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