In Praise of Failure

Work Wednesday

Apart from swearing off working mom studies, one of my chief New Year's resolutions - at least when it comes to this blog - was to write my posts in advance, or at least not wait until midnight on Tuesday nights. Unfortunately, that resolution's gone to the same place that my "healthful eating" resolution went when my wonderful colleagues surprised me with some fancy birthday cupcakes.

So, here I am on Tuesday night trying to find something new to say about working moms and the whole work-life balance thing. And failing. Thoroughly.

Wait, that's it! Maybe this post should be about failing and why, sometimes, it's O.K. for working moms to fail. Like right now.

Here's the situation.

I could spend the rest of tonight and the early hours of tomorrow searching the Internet for inspiration. Writing and editing draft after draft until I managed to produce a passable post. I wouldn't get much sleep and would be exhausted tomorrow. There's a strong chance that I'd snap at the kids, snarl at my husband, and feel funky all day at work. (That's just a theoretical prediction, of course. Nothing in this post is intended to resemble real life.)

Or, I could give myself a break, recognize that the world won't end if I don't manage to come up with a brilliant blog, hit the publish key, and go directly to bed. Sounds great, right? Good night!

Seriously, there might be something to the the idea of allowing yourself to fail. I'm not advocating, of course, that you simply blow off work deadlines or forget to pick up your kids. (Or that you eat cupcakes with abandon.) Failure, often, is not an option. But sometimes it might make sense to fail to live up expectations about what it means to be a good mother or a committed employee or even a well-functioning person. Especially when those expectations aren't rational or reasonable.

A few (admittedly cliched) examples might illustrate my point. Consider the hypothetical working mom who stays up late to make cookies from scratch for the school bake sale because she feels that she needs to impress the other moms. Or the hypothetical working mom who adds extra hours to her work day by rewriting her employee's memo because she's worried about how other colleagues perceive her commitment to work. It might be better for our mom to "fail" in these scenarios, i.e., purchase the cupcakes from a bakery and simply suggest edits to the memo and await the next draft, than to "succeed" at these undertakings.

Put another way, it's possible that a selective failure strategy could be a rational response to the types of indiscriminate and irrational expectations (whether they come from ourselves or others) that working moms experience. Then again, it could just be an excuse for me to eat cupcakes and go to sleep early, right?

What do you think? Do you ever let yourself "fail"?

Photo by Sugar Daze via Flickr.com.

 

Comments

[Julie]

Another great blog. It is all about making good choices with our time, setting priorities, not overcomitting, and just doing the best we can. And maybe setting more reasonable goals so that we don't fail.

[Karen]

The one place I always seem to fail is with my volunteer commitments. I try to take something on that seems reasonable at the moment, and children and paid work and family responsibilities always seem to crop up immediately after. I look forward to the day (or maybe I don't!) when I have more time freed up to do more in the volunteer sector.

[Chaton]

I fail too often with promptness. I all gets done, but not when I'd like it to be. I think I need to learn to "fail" on promising too much. Being overcommitted leads to failure. Either you let down others or you let down yourself. I think it's a constant struggle for teh overachiever. I'm still working it though! (http://chatonsworld.blogspot.com)

[Nikola]

I look forward to the day (or maybe I don't!) when I have more time freed up to do more in the volunteer sector.

[Springer]

But in her speech, titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” she told the crowd, “What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure … And by every standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”