Women in the workforce face a lot of challenges, and one of the hardest may be how to balance a career with the rest of their lives. Find out how these South Jersey women tackle the big question.
My mother shared a lot of pearls of wisdom with me. She was a psychiatrist in Cherry Hill, and she said there are three pillars: your career, your family/spouse/kids and your social life. She said you can have two at any given time. That doesn’t mean you can’t have all three pillars in your life. There’s a time and a place and a moment for each of the pillars. And it’s true, you can try and do all three halfway, but you can only do two exceptionally well.
Nikki Ariaratnam, Women’s Empowerment Series 2017
My mother shared a lot of pearls of wisdom with me. She was a psychiatrist in Cherry Hill, and she said there are three pillars: your career, your family/spouse/kids and your social life. She said you can have two at any given time. That doesn’t mean you can’t have all three pillars in your life. There’s a time and a place and a moment for each of the pillars. And it’s true, you can try and do all three halfway, but you can only do two exceptionally well.
Marla Meyers, Women’s Empowerment Series 2017
Work/life balance is a fallacy. It’s work/life integration. If you think you’re having a balance when you have a career, I don’t know what planet you’re on. It’s unbalanced, and you have to figure out how to put the pieces together.
Val Traore, Women’s Empowerment Series 2016
There’s always guilt, because you look at your child and feel an enormous amount of responsibility for their formative years.
One of the things I think about all the time and I try to tell my women executives is that 10 minutes isn’t worth it. You’ll never remember that meeting you missed. It may seem like the all-important meeting of the world, but you need to be where you need to be and where your child expects you to be, if you can.
Brenda Bacon, Women’s Empowerment Series 2016
When my son was in third or fourth grade, I was working in the governor’s office, and we were having a meeting with the governor and the heads of the legislature, and it was a pretty contentious meeting. I was going on a class trip with my son that day. I stayed in the meeting about 10 minutes longer than I should have, and when I got to school, they were loading the kids onto the bus. My son was crying like a baby. It broke my heart. I still hardly can talk about it without tearing up. I ran to him immediately, and I said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” And he said, “Mommy, I thought they were going to leave you.”
