BALANCING WORK AND FAMILY
“I was a person that was always going to be a mother. I'm just a nurturer. I remember when I had my first son—I was in my fourth year as an elementary school librarian and I remember for the first time I had to start saying ‘No, I can't volunteer for the PTA event tonight’, and I couldn't. I remember thinking, ‘How will I do this?’ Another teacher told me this wonderful [thing]—a teacher I looked up to. Mother of four, she's the perfect 1st grade teacher, and she said, ‘Greta, you spent the last four years volunteering for everything. It's a cycle. It's your turn to be a mom and do your mom things, and you'll figure out how to balance it out as you go.' Those were such good words for me to hear, because I was always a pleaser.”
“I'm going to be fifty this year and I've really learned how to prioritize. But I'll be honest, the last nineteen years (…) my priority was my children and my job, and my husband too. I love him. He knew what he was getting into when he signed on for this this train. But I was able to figure out a balance between doing all of it. Family is everything to me. I love being with my family, and every minute that I had that was not at school was with them.”
“I love to camp and hike and be outside. It's easy to incorporate my kids into that. They're also campers and hikers, and they do it all—they snowboard and ski and all the things. Sometimes it was harder than others to balance all of that, especially when I was making a total shift from elementary to high school, but at the end of the day I just made them a part [of it].”
“It helped to get a job [in a school] where they were students, because now I could be a part of their everything—which I also had to work on (…) What 12th grader wants their mom chaperoning the prom?”
‘YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE JOY IN YOUR LIFE’
“The other thing is, you've got to have joy in your life. Like I said, the last nineteen years I have pretty much dedicated all of it to my kids because I loved being a mother. Obviously, I'm not done being a mother, but being a mom to those little nuggets was my favorite thing that I've ever done and that brought me a lot of joy. So for me, motherhood balanced it out. For other people, it might be rock climbing. It might be going bowling, being on your bowling team, or your fantasy football. Whatever it is, you’ve got to find it and you have to be able to turn it off. You've got to be able to find that switch.”
“You got to figure it's gonna be okay if the lesson plan doesn't get done and the lesson sucked for that day. The next day is a new day. It's okay. It is okay. But you do have to have your joyous things. For the years that I worked in [one district] there was a Y.M.C.A. I took forty-five minutes after work every day and swam because that's what I could do. My kids still had aftercare. I could let the endorphins or whatever get released. That's what did it for me for many, many years. And currently, other than like working out after school—which I do enjoy a lot—I make sure I walk with one of my (…) three very close friends. And if I walk with them, if once a week I get a couple of miles in with those ladies, it's the best therapy in the world. You’ve got to find your joy and you've got to make time for it, and if you can't do that you're going to be grumpy and sad. And you're not going to want to show up to work.”
“If I don't exercise, if I get in a streak of like a week or two where I don't do that for myself, I can feel the humdrums or whatever. Now that I'm older, my kids are older, so I don't have to do as much. I come home and work out, and they can make snacks [for themselves] until dinner, whereas when they were younger it wasn't like that. As long as I made some time for the things that I loved, and even if it was just a little bit of time, it kept me—keeps me—happy and going to work every day with a smile on my face.”
“It's hard to turn it off, but you have to at some point figure out—or someone has to say to you—turn it off is okay. I remember—I was going to take maternity leave when I was pregnant for the first time. I'm like, ‘How [is this going to work?]’ And a colleague told me, ‘The school's going to run without you. The library is going to work without you. It won't be the same, but it'll be fine.’”
“I had to swallow that pill—it was huge. And I didn't like it, and I didn't like that March was going to happen and the sub was not going to turn the library into a castle—because every March the library was a castle. But I was like, ‘Okay, she's right. Those kids will be fine. They'll survive. And you know, you can't be perfect and awesome and amazing for every single kid every single day, every year of your life. You can just be as awesome as you can be.”