How do you balance work and home life?
My post yesterday about sacrifices talked a lot about my work and home life balance. To summarize, when I was a teacher, there was no balance. Now that I’m not, there is. I don’t do any work at home.
This made me think of a time during my teaching years when that balance was not just zero, it was well into the negative numbers. And that time was Covid. Particularly the spring of 2020 when everything initially shut down. Teaching virtually was something we made up and learned as we went. When we first went home in March of that year, there was no precedent for what we were supposed to do. We educated the kids the best we knew how. Ultimately, we were successful. We got through until the end of the school year in May.
But what ultimately happened is that we had no boundaries. We didn’t know how to turn “school” off at the end of the day. What was the expectation? We didn’t know. My principal didn’t really know either. Like I said, we made it up as we went along.
That ended up looking like answering student and parent emails well into the evening and continuing with checking their work and creating assignments for the next day. There was no coming home at 3:00 and being home for a while before getting to work on the usual paper grading/lesson plans I would do in the evening. I was already at home.
My husband and I lived in a one bedroom apartment at the time. A very small one bedroom apartment. We didn’t have an extra room that I could use as an office. That would have helped me set a boundary. Being able to close the door on that room and be mentally done with the day would have helped. Instead, our kitchen table became my work space. I took a picture on the first day of remote learning and then a picture a few days later. The few days later picture became the norm until summer break.
Looking back at the caption I included on Facebook with this side-by-side is very telling of how I felt about it.
“…for my own sanity”. I didn’t find my sanity again until at least two years later when things began to return to normal. When school opened in the fall, we had students in person in our classrooms, and also students joining us through Google Meet at the same time. It was literally double the work to pull that off. Any materials I had for the in-person kids had to be scanned and uploaded and posted for the virtual kids. It’s possible that that first year back was worse than the three months we spent teaching from home.
But like I described yesterday, I did it because I was a teacher. And I was dedicated to my job/career/vocation/calling.
It’s kind of funny to think how productive I tried to be then. This year, in my new job, we had a remote working day a few months back when there was winter weather that closed our school. I now have a separate room that I use as an office/library/craft room. So I easily sat at my desk in there and worked. But not whole-heartedly and certainly not without lots of breaks and distractions and just plain inattentiveness.
I learned my lesson from being a teacher. That work/home life balance is a real thing and it’s sacred. It is absolutely necessary. I don’t condemn anyone who has a career where they have to be on call when they’re at home. My husband has a job like that. But it’s really up to the individual how much they are willing to respect that balance. My husband hates getting called at home. He has to check his email frequently on the weekends. He hates it. But, he’s invested in what he does and he’s close to retirement. So he tolerates it because that’s part of what he gets paid to do. I do know though, that I am counting down to his retirement as much as he is. I can’t wait for him to turn in his work phone and experience those first few days at home where there is not a single work thing that he needs to think about, because he’ll be retired and done with it. It’s a freedom that can’t be fully understood until it’s experienced.
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