A solid balance between serious and fun activities is something that many individuals make progress toward. However, the fact is that making a flawless timetable is difficult. It’s significantly more earnest for working parents, who need to show up for their kids and watch them grow. Having children, however, does not provide you a pass from employment obligations you would rather avoid.
Source: Reddit
I am a married 36 year old woman with no plans to have kids. I recently had an issue with a coworker where our boss emailed her/I to ask if one of us could cover an evening call (it’s a 9-5 job but we occasionally have evening calls due to collaborators in different time zones). The coworker asked me to do it because her son had a soccer game, but I said that I can’t do it because I had a volleyball game. She said that I should do it because the soccer game is for her kid and my volleyball game is just for me. I said that respectfully my outside-of-work commitments are not less important than hers because I don’t have children, and that she should take the call because I had taken the last two. She scoffed at me, and I know that other people around the office have been gossiping about me since and saying that it was super messed up that I made her miss her kid’s soccer game.
I think that it’s incredibly important to support working mothers. I am always more than happy to accommodate the schedules of the mothers I work with when it doesn’t cause a significant inconvenience to me – for example, some coworkers leave early to pick up their kids (our company is great about that), and I’m happy to work project schedules around that. I also would have taken that call if I hadn’t had a conflict as long as it wasn’t a pattern of me taking significantly more evening calls.
I talked to a friend about this (who is a mother), and she said that I should have just done it because people who don’t have kids really should have more empathy for working parents and we don’t understand how hard it is. I said respectfully that I do understand that working mothers have much more stressful lives than I do, which is why I decided not to be a mother. I also said that I can have respect and empathy for working mothers and also value my time/ choices equally. She similarly scoffed and said that I don’t understand.
Does the author have a valid point or not?
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