Juggling career and family, Baltimore style: or the saga of how a session made it into the conference program

Information Outlook, April, 2006 by Elana Broch

You may remember me. I wrote an Information Outlook article last year titled "How to Have a Great Time in Toronto" (you can find it online at http://www.sla.org/pubs/serial/io/2005/apr05/toc.htm). Yep, the article with the photo of the unshaven man. No, I didn't pick that. And I have to say that I was unhappy with that photo. Very unhappy. So unhappy that I vowed never to write for Information Outlook again. So much for that. As the saying goes, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade."

[Editor's note to graphic artist: Please don't use any pictures of unshaven people with this article.]

Yes, I'm the one who doesn't like to travel. That was how I began last year's article. And I did make the trip to Toronto and I did have a "great time." Did I mention the fact that I took my entire family with me?

It seemed to make sense at first. I thought my children (ages 6 and 9 at the time) would enjoy being in another country. We were heading to northern New York state for a family vacation, so Canada didn't seem that far out of the way.

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Obviously, none of this would have been possible if my wonderful husband, who does like to travel, hadn't agreed to come along so I could attend sessions (I was presenting on Tuesday) and the Social Science Division (DSOC) board meetings. I was particularly intent on attending the DSOC planning meeting because I wanted to propose a session for Baltimore 2006 on "juggling work and family."

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Juggling work and family: My interest in a session on this topic was spawned at the SLA Annual meeting in 2004, the result of two encounters I had in Nashville. (If you read my article in last year's Information Outlook you may remember that to me the whole point of going to conferences is to network.)

You probably don't remember that Nashville was my first SLA meeting. I met Karen Shaines, a DSOC member, early in my stay. We hit it off immediately. We started discussing the lists we left for our husbands so they would remember which kid got which snack and who had gym on which day. In the course of our conversation, Karen mentioned a great video she had seen with some of her neighbors, Juggling Work and Family with Hedrick Smith.

We talked about how much fun it would be to do a session based on the video at an SLA meeting. You know, bringing together other people who were dealing with the same things we were dealing with, regardless of which SLA division they were part of. One glitch was that Karen already knew she wouldn't be in Toronto, because her son would be graduating from high school the week of SLA in June 2005 (what are mothers, if not planners?).

The Idea Grows

So the seed was planted on my first day in Opryland. It germinated the next morning. I was up at 6 a.m. (remember I'm the mother of young children and was in a different time zone) frantically searching for coffee when I met another SLA conferee (also an Easterner and the mother of a young child). Emily Poworoznek and I struck up a conversation and really hit it off. In the course of talking about family and career (and as mothers, talk of career quickly switched to talk of children), I mentioned the video that Karen had told me about. Emily thought it sounded like a great video and she agreed to broach the idea of a "juggling work and family" session with her division (Physics, Astronomy, and Math). We kept in touch after Nashville, got together in Toronto, and now we're organizing this session together.

Fast-forward to spring 2005. Before leaving for Toronto, I contacted Pauline Steinhorn, the producer of the video that Karen had spoken so highly of. She was very willing to come to Baltimore and share her video with us. I also touched base with Karen and Emily, who were still interested in making it happen.

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I was all set to bring my idea to the Social Science Division. As I mentioned in my last article, they are a wonderful, embracing, supportive division, and I hoped they would be excited about the idea. Since I am now chair of the Public Policy Section within Social Science, juggling work and family certainly seemed like something that could be within the purview of DSOC.

Then came the glitch. My husband was going to have to be in New York on the day of the planning session. Was I really crazy enough to bring my children with me to the meeting? Is there anything that can entertain a 6-year-old boy quietly for 90 minutes, if you're philosophically opposed to owning a Game Boy?

I thought my session "Taking the Sting out of Statistics" had gone really well, in spite of the fact that I had completely (and I mean completely) lost my voice. I decided to chance the DSOC planning session. I figured that if things didn't work, I could always leave.

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It worked! My children behaved beautifully (believe me, it doesn't happen often). Linda Richer, the president of DSOC, asked everyone to give a round of applause to the "guests." In retrospect, did I give the session my undivided attention? No. Did I worry that the calm would be shattered at any moment by an urgent bathroom request or a missing Lego piece? Yes. But most important, "Juggling" got the green light.