We finished our book, Getting to 50/50, on the day the stock market fell about 900 points. The economy isn't getting better anytime soon and our anxiety, like everyone else's, keeps rising. As we worry about what layoffs and falling home prices mean for our own families and friends, we keep going back to a motto we've learned talking to hundreds of dual career couples: Two bets are better than one. When both spouses have jobs, it's a little easier to weather the storms. (Even if it feels like you are still getting drenched!)
Our hope for this blog is that it will give us all MORE hope. Writing our book, we've loved hearing the clever and quirky things we all do to keep it together as working parents. We discovered so many things that have helped us with our own families and jobs. We don't want that to stop and we hope you'll help build the community of people who want to make working parenthood easier - and more fun for all of us. One of my favorite sites is www.mommytrackd.com where no one pontificates and women freely share their personal stories and find connections. We hope we can be the same for couples who want to share it all to have it all like we do.
Also, like many working moms, Sharon and I know that the hardest things to maintain while working and family-ing is your friendships. I find that even my closest friends and I barely see each other, and the only time we can even talk on the phone is during our commute, or through Facebook posts. But through this project we have met a large number of amazing women and they have become our friends through common experience. I am hopeful that perhaps this blog can become a place to maintain those relationships as well.
Getting to 50/50 is written for people who want to combine work and kids. That said, some of our best friends are women who've left the workforce and we hope that some of what we learned will be useful to them too (for example, whether you work or not, if you're husband does more housework, your odds of divorce are lower and couples have more sex - how's that for a motivator). We all have the same hopes for our daughters, that they'll have better choices that we've had and will get to reach for their dreams with as much optimism as our sons. And we're finding that some of our at-home friends are looking at the market nose-dive and making plans to earn an income again - and wanting to know they can do well by their kids at the same time. We believe there's no need for Mommy Wars and that cultivating some Mommy Peace will let us laugh together -- and maybe even relax a little.
Have a wonderful holiday season, we look forward to connecting in 2009
JStrober
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