Finding balance as a working mother requires examining your boundaries and beliefs

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Business coach Rachel Morris says in working motherhood everything can feel up for grabs: Your body, your time, your focus and your energy.
“You are in demand, you are needed. Your child needs you. Your partner needs you. Your friends might need you. Your wider family might need you. Your work needs you. Your line manager probably needs you. Your colleague might need you,” she writes in her book Working Mother.
You are being pulled in every direction as financial necessity, your strong desire to work and your strong desire to be a mother seem impossible to fulfil.
“My head used to vibrate,” she recalls. “I knew the cause of it was because I never, ever stopped. From the moment something (or someone) broke my sleep to the moment I rested my head on the pillow again.”
She now specializes in helping other working mothers and urges them to address boundaries. Those can be emotional, intellectual, physical or related to time. Perhaps you need one hour a week to be alone without the baby. You may be willing to attend meetings at the office while on maternity leave, but need to set a limit of not doing so for the first two months. Boundaries may occur at home or at work, and need to be carefully thought through.
Behind those boundaries lie your beliefs – what you feel you need. “For example, if a woman believes she is wrong to say ‘I need an hour to myself now’ then she’s undermining a need she has and is less likely to ask for the time. In contrast, if she believes she has a right to an hour of space, she’s showing an increased sense of self-worth and is much more likely to say, ‘No, I’m taking this time for me now,’” Ms. Morris writes.
She adds that the belief will ultimately reinforce itself. If you believe you have the right to ask for that hour alone and get it, you confirm it was right to ask. The same happens if you don’t believe you have the right to that time alone.
Some beliefs help you more than others. She holds a belief that “I can rest when everything is done.” But everything will never be done. Her attempt to follow that belief drives her and her family around the bend. You need to decide which beliefs to keep, which to ditch and which to reframe so they will be more positive.
She also warns that the things you are good at aren’t necessarily your strengths. In fact, sometimes they can leave you feeling anything but strong because they drain you. They may be seductively easy, but not something you like to do. So, give more attention to strengths that energize you – that give you happiness – and minimize the drainers.
The notion of flow is well known these days – periods when you can focus fully on things and time whizzes by, with a lot accomplished. “I don’t know about you, but in my two main roles in life – a professional and a mother – I can’t think of many opportunities when I get an uninterrupted 90 minutes to focus on something that has meaning and stretch for me,” she says. Time tends to get shredded bit by bit into small, unfulfilling moments.
Still, with intention, boundaries and self control, she says you can increase flow times in your life. And with that, you need to consider the tasks before you to make sure you are allocating mechanical and other tasks that fit with shredded time to those periods and saving the bigger, more challenging cognitive tasks for flow time.
Perhaps your head will vibrate less.
Quick hits
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.