At Your Funeral No One Reads Your Resume

Welcome to the Tuesday guest blog. Every Tuesday "On Balance" features the views of a guest writer. It could be your neighbor, your boss, your most loved or hated poster from the blog, or you! Send me your original, unpublished entry (300 words or fewer) for consideration. Obviously, the topic should be something related to balancing your life.

By Erin Armendinger

To go to business school sponsored by my employer, I worked full-time and went to school full-time for two years straight with no breaks. I married my college sweetheart while I was in school. (I postponed our honeymoon to take mid-terms.) After school I changed careers and entered the retail field, which is the industry where I currently work.

My husband and I wanted children but were always waiting for a "better" time -- after the next promotion, after school, after I established myself in my new career. As a type A personality, it seemed like there was always something else that I wanted to accomplish before we settled in and had kids.

When we finally decided the time was right, we did not get pregnant. After a while we ended up at an infertility specialist and went through a list of tests and surgery until the culprit was discovered -- severe endometriosis. My doctor advised that we attempt IUI to give us the best chance of conceiving because endometriosis normally returns. We did and got pregnant, but soon after miscarried. Two months later we started the whole process again and got pregnant, this time with twins.

Today I am 25 weeks pregnant with twins. My pregnancy is considered high risk and I am monitored by both a regular obstetrician and a maternal fetal specialist. Every two weeks, my cervix and the growth of the babies is thoroughly monitored. Given all of this, I have tried to get as much stress out of my life as possible.

I have cut back my work schedule and no longer check work e-mails at night or on the weekends. In fact, when I leave the office, I rarely even think about work. It will all be there tomorrow. If I don't feel "right," I stay home. My one goal right now is to get to the end of this pregnancy and give birth to two healthy babies.

Needless to say, I have found this journey to be miraculous and also incredibly stressful. The experience has caused me to re-evaluate what is important in my life and what I can and cannot control. When I become a parent, I think I will want to be very involved in my children's lives, perhaps to the detriment of my own career and personal wants. I am not sure that this wish causes an intelligent woman to feel "unfulfilled" as so many working moms say.

So many discussions about combining children and a career only present the "work" half of work/life balance. In all, I think older working moms give many young, impressionable women the idea that work/life balance means nannies, travel away from home only 50 percent of the time and working only 6-8 hours on the weekends. If this is true, I wonder how far we as women have really come in the workplace.

A friend recently reminded me that nobody reads your resume at your funeral. I think we all need to keep this in the back of our minds. I am relatively sure that my children will not measure me based on how much I earn or how successful I am in my career.

Erin Armendinger lives outside of Princeton, N.J., and works in New York City. She is expecting twins in early 2007.

By Leslie Morgan Steiner |  November 28, 2006; 9:00 AM ET  | Category:  Guest Blogs
Previous: Rally for Breast-Feeding Rights | Next: A Success At Work, A Failure At Home

Name:

Comments: