Home Is Where the Office Is

There's a bus to the elementary school, but not to the middle school. This had been my most terrifying realization over the course of the summer. I was in desperate need of finding a carpool. It was the only way to survive, as far as I could tell. However, all of the carpools I knew of in our neighborhood were already full, or schedules were different, or neighbors had forgone the 3rd row seat when they bought the new car. In any case, desperate times call for desperate measures, so after hauling the middle-schooler the 40-minute, 1.5 miles to and fro for the first week, I got creative. And brave.  I remembered my daughter's classmate from last year who had rode the elementary-bound bus, searched piles of not-yet-filed/purged paperwork, and cold-texted the boy's mom with this slightly stalker-ish text message: "Hi K---. This is Jen, E--'s mom. She was in M--'s class last year and they took the bus together. Would you be interested in carpooling to the m...

“I really see this as an opportunity to have better work-life balance.” I’ve heard this more times than I can count from newly initiated home officers. My usual response is to smile and nod. No need to rain on anyone’s parade. But it’s a topic that unfailingly pops up within a few months – sometimes within a few weeks. “Why does it feel like I’m working even more ?” Here’s the thing.   While many companies claim to value the importance of work-life balance for their employees, the reality is that no one seems to have a solid definition of what that means. That’s one of the most difficult things for a working parent – especially a work-from-home parent – to discover: the fallacy of work-life balance. Small Business Trends put out a nifty infographic that breaks it all down, and one little nugget that stood out to me like a neon sign was that out of the 38 countries studied, the U.S. ranked 30 th in work-life balance. [1] (The Netherlands ranked #1, by the way.)...