Second Thoughts on having it all

by TONY SCHWARTZ

WICE during the past month, colleagues approached 38-year-old Rebecca Murray and volunteered identical assessments of her life: "You are the woman who has everything," they told her. The notion staggered Rebecca. "I have never, ever thought of myself that way," she says. But it's not hard to see what her co-workers had in mind.

For the past eighteen years, Rebecca has been married to the same man -Robert, now 42 - and their marriage remains strong. Their five-year-old daughter is pretty and bright. Rebecca works as a records manager for a large financial institution and earns $40,000 a year - with plenty of potential to move up. Robert makes $43,000 a year as the business manager for a publishing house. Freelance writing brings in another $5,000 a year. He is a novelist, and although his advances have been small so far, that could change with a single success. The Murrays' combined income of nearly $90,000 is more than four times the salary earned last year by Robert's father, a construction supervisor in Florida, and a lot of money by nearly any standard. What's more, they pay just $450 a month for a rent-stabilized apartment on a pretty street on the Upper West Side. Among other things, they can afford the $8,500 a year it costs to send their daughter to a private day-care center where the ratio of children to teachers is four to one.

But none of this compensates for what Rebecca feels is missing in her life. "Time," she says. "I don't have enough time for my child. I don't have enough time for myself, and I never have enough time for my husband. He gets whatever I have left at the end of each day, and usually that's nothing. I don't want to leave my child in the mornings - and she doesn't want me to go. I'm fine once I get to work, but once the day starts winding down, I get very anxious to rush to my kid. I can't wait, I want to be there in a second, and sometimes the subway is interminable. At the same time, I'm aware that I'm looking at an evening that's not going to be relaxing. Realistically, I'm facing three more hours of work — the child care — and I've already put in a full day at the office."

Rebecca reached her breaking point on a subway during rush hour last summer. "I was standing on this miserable, crowded, hot train," she remembers, "coming from a job that doesn't give me all that much pleasure, to pick up my child, who'd been away from me the whole day, to go home to an apartment so small that my husband and I sleep in the living room on a futon mattress." That night, Rebecca made a decision. "There's such a thing as quality of life," she told her husband, "and this isn't it."...

THE CHANGING ROLE OF WOMEN 133

©The Choices That Brought Me Here

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26