Moms, Forget Work-Life Balance! Seek Family Flourishing Instead

It is 9:44 am on a beautiful spring day, and I am seated by the door looking into my backyard. My seven-year-old is doing laps around the yard on her scooter, all speed, occasionally also striking an arabesque with all the gracefulness of a ballerina. Her brother, meanwhile, has set up a hammock and is absorbed in a book. Once I finish writing this essay, I’ll call them both inside to work on math. At noon, I have a work meeting on zoom, then another one at 2:00. Tonight, we are bringing dinner to a local family that is going through a tough season, so our church has set up a meal train. Later in the evening, after the kids are in bed, I’ll spend time catching up with my husband, who has a busy day of his own. I also need to do some editing work and catch up on email. Every other free minute I have today, I’m reading two different books I’ve been invited to review. 

As I think about my to-do list, I’m struck that not one of the things on it feels like a chore. I feel profoundly grateful that I get to live this life, with these people, in this small town that is remarkably family friendly. 

It all might sound overly idyllic and perfectly organized, but it took us years to get here—and by “us,” I mean my husband and children as well as myself. We are, after all, in this family together, and we love spending our lives together—and that is one of the big reasons we homeschool. Life did not always look the same for us, and not every season was this lovely. But I truly love where we are in now, even as I know that as the kids grow, our family routine will change.

As a mother, I am not weighing my children (who bring me immense joy) against my work (which brings me joy of another sort).

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of shifting around in my career to prioritize my kids while still continuing to pursue a life of the mind, to which I have always felt called. My oldest son was born as I was beginning my dissertation in classics, and I went on to spend 15 years in traditional academia. By academic metrics, I achieved what I needed—I finished that career as a full professor of history at a secular state university. And all along, my husband (a fellow professor) and I homeschooled, juggling responsibilities and working very long—but thankfully flexible—hours to place our kids first. We had a well- choreographed routine by the end of that season: I would pull up to the building on campus where we both taught, and hand the kids off to my husband who was waiting. He would drive home with the kids while I ran in to teach other people’s adult children—albeit ones whose frontal lobe was still developing, which sometimes really showed.

And yet, that season decisively came to an end during the pandemic. A university that had previously been a joyful place to work became miserable. In spring 2023, I handed in my resignation. That summer, my husband signed a contract for a new academic position, and we moved half-way across the country. I did not have anything else planned, aside from continuing to write and edit as a freelancer. It turned out to be the perfect palate cleanser we needed as a family. Almost three years later, I am now writing more than ever before, editing for a small magazine, and directing an MFA program in Creative Writing for the same university that employs my husband. 

Too often, conversations about work-life balance give off a clinical whiff, their very language and interest in metrics reminding us of the balance we seek on those industrial scales—where you keep placing objects on one side and then the other, until they are perfectly even. Except, that is not what family is because it is not really balance that we are after. People, after all, are not objects to place on scales, and weighing work against persons is as crass as it sounds when put in those terms. There’s no scientific formula for work-life balance, no matter how hard some of us try to find one.

There is no real work-life balance in family life, and that's okay—so long as there is abundant, overflowing joy. 

As a mother, I am not weighing my children (who bring me immense joy) against my work (which brings me joy of another sort). Rather, each day I am reminded that I do not belong to myself—I belong, first and foremost, to these wonderful people whom God entrusted me. And so, we pursue flourishing instead—together, as a family. The paid work my husband and I do is part of this flourishing. But it isn’t our telos. 

Perhaps the writer who has been the most eloquent voice of sanity on encouraging the pursuit of human flourishing rather than balance is Wendell Berry—along with his wife Tanya, who remains his first editor and typist. As a promising young writer, Berry had opportunities all around the country. Faced with multiple open doors, he could have chosen to settle in a big city and live a successful career as a professor of writing, and a novelist, looking nostalgically at the farm life he had left behind. 

Instead, he moved his family back to his and Tanya’s small town of origin, and now farms on ancestral lands, refusing to rely on the most up-to-date machinery for the work of farming, just as he refuses to buy a computer to type his novels. His novels, essays, and poems reflect on the importance of human relationships—the joy we find in each other and in the land on which we dwell. Berry’s characters repeatedly find a delight in work done well, including heavy manual labor. And they find a special delight in doing that work together—with dear friends, neighbors, and family members. There is no work-life balance in Wendell Berry’s own life or in the lives of his characters, moms included. Rather, there is a hunger for a life filled with the true joy of family life. Do his characters achieve it? Not always, but some do, at least in some seasons. It’s not gravity alone, after all, that is a feature of life in a fallen world.

I am typing this essay on a computer, so I do not take some of Berry’s precepts to heart quite so literally. Indeed, it is this computer that makes it possible for me to live a life of joy and delight with my family, spending most of my days with my children even while working too. If you are a young mother struggling to manage it all, or if you are a young professional woman who wants to become a mother one day, I just want you to know: there is no real work-life balance in family life, and that is okay—so long as there is abundant, overflowing joy. 

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Books Editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock