Work-life balance is impossible when you’re a work-from-home mom

It’s January, 1999—1 am. With my three-week-old son finally down for the night, I’m dialing in. Pushing away dinner crumbs, stacks of bills and partially folded onesies to make room on the worn kitchen table for my laptop, I reach down, yank the phone cord from the receiver, plug it into my computer and I’m ready to work.

I open the grant application that’s due in 18 hours, aware I have about 6 to work on it before my colicky baby starts screaming. Staring at the digital boxes I need to fill in, I flash back to how quickly work has changed. Back in 1995, I called offices to ask for applications, printed them out and then drove across town to hand the finished product—neatly stapled in triplicate—to a receptionist. I used to break tasks down into days; now I parcel out hours.

At 4 am, I finish a decent enough draft to justify a two hour nap before my son wakes up needing food. At 9 am—after three hours of diaper changing, laundry and coffee—I plug the phone cord back into the receiver and wait for my boss to call with line edits, which I enter while nursing the baby on my lap.

The internet allowed me to blur the lines between family, mothering, housekeeping and professional work—every minute of every day and night. No boundaries. No hard stops. I started a freelance business before the birthing stitches had even healed. I avoided day care because I could—combining work life and motherhood into one seamless, multi-tasking mess.

My career and my kids grew without day care, but I suffered. Alone in the house with babies and deadlines and laundry, with meals to cook and client demands to meet, I got sick a lot: breast infections, strep throat, bronchitis, walking pneumonia, pulled back muscles. One night, I lay beside my snoring husband while my body shook with fever and infection. I willed myself to make it through the night because going to the hospital wasn’t an option—who would nurse the baby if I left?

As the kids grew, the pattern solidified and normalized a constant, dual purpose. Too often I bribed my kids with cartoons and a box of Cheerios so I could participate in a video call. I once cleaned up an exploded diaper while on a conference call with a phone cord (when I still had a landline) that stretched just far enough to reach the changing table. Chaos doesn’t even begin to describe it: poop on the phone, poop on my clothes and wipes everywhere. Those first few years were a blur of desperate, questionable decisions. I laughed out loud when a fellow mom told me the television shouldn’t be used as a babysitter.

The internet gives us choices—maybe too many. It deludes us into believing that opening one more tab—children, home, marriage, another client—won’t break us.  But for me, the price was too high. When boundaries disappear between work and home, when nothing shuts down, when no one turns off the lights and places a closed sign on the door, then the burden is always on us to say enough—and setting boundaries was never my forte.

In 2001, the internet felt new and empowering, especially with a newborn and a toddler. I did a lot of writing in the middle of the night while the house and my family slept, and I made it work for a long time before I recognized how exhausted and lonely I felt, before I acknowledged that every muscle in my body was clenched against the weight of the tasks. Every 15 minutes I required myself to accomplish at least two: a load of laundry and a quick email, breastfeeding my infant daughter while writing an invoice, talking to a client on the phone while pushing trains on toy tracks to keep my 2-year-old occupied.

I lost myself under the heaping mounds of it all. I never looked in the mirror. I never looked down at my own body. I just kept going. I would stand on the second floor at the top of the stairs, balancing my two-year-old on one hip and cradling my newborn in the other arm, and I would think about how I was going to make it down all those stairs. If I fell, no one would be there to pick us up.

Twenty years later, the pandemic sent most everyone home. Parents worked online with young children beside them and older kids in virtual school. As I watched them juggle during our zoom meetings, I felt a mix of condescension and relief. Parents could turn away from the screen to help a child with a math problem, pour a glass of milk or scoop a toddler off the dining table where they had climbed.  All this in full view of a professional work meeting. No clandestine bags of Oreos hurled at the preschooler to stave off an impending tantrum,or so I assumed as I watched mothers and fathers turn from the screen to visibly soothe a child or offer a snack—all in plain sight.

Part of me would get annoyed when young parents complained about working from home with kids because I had lived through it so alone. Why were they complaining? They didn’t have to hide their kids from the screen’s view. They knew their coworkers were doing the same and so had a community, albeit a cyber one. They had an entire nation in tandem to empathize.

But then I realized that real progress was being made here. It took a life-threatening plague and widespread physical isolation to expose the façade and impossibility of separating work-life and parent-life. That the mess of it all flows into each other, and that we all have, by necessity, multiple tabs open all the time.