Daily Archives: July 15, 2009

My mother’s mother was a schoolteacher. Every morning, she woke up at 4AM, cooked breakfast for her six kids, packed them off to school and then taught school herself. My mother was also a schoolteacher. Then she got married and stayed home. She was the best stay-at-home mother a kid could have. June Cleaver? Martha Stewart? Pfft, amateurs. Growing up, I sincerely thought my mother was superwoman. She would sew all of the dresses my sister and I wore. She made tortillas from scratch for elaborate Sunday dinners. Carpentry? Check. Husbandry? Check. She did it all.

Then, when I was 13, she went back to work. It took her a couple of years and a couple of promotions, but eventually, she was asked to fill the highest supervisory position at her company. She turned it down, instead choosing a less-stressful position in which she was responsible for fewer employees. I know one of the reasons she didn’t want to take it was because she wanted to make sure she spent time with her kids. She likes to come home every day and make us dinner.

I thought about her this week when I read this Wall Street Journal article in which Jack Welch, former chief executive of General Electric said the following at a conferences of HR managers:

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in New Orleans on June 28.”There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” Continue reading →