Some years ago, I was going through a stack of hastily packed boxes of my parents’ memorabilia. Even though I had no idea what they contained, I was surprised to find what appeared to be a fragment of a denim apron. It was torn at the waist, with a pocket on the right side and metal rivets with bits of twine that likely once tied it in the back. I had no idea where it came from, or, honestly which of my parents it belonged to.
However, as I dug through the box, I found a photo of my mother wearing what I realized was the full apron. Though I’d never seen the setting of the photo, it wasn’t tough to figure out that it was the factory where she worked.
When my mother reached her 18th birthday, she left her parents’ home in rural Michigan and moved to Battle Creek with a friend to begin her life as an adult. She landed a job at Rich’s Manufacturing, making valves for engines. It was the place where years later she met my dad.
It was September of 1942, and the United States would have entered World War II the previous December after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Because so many young men were being drafted for military service, and because the country had shifted to a war economy, women were welcomed into the workforce.
When I was growing up, she proudly told me about her years at that factory. She was happy to have the job and the work seemed to suit her. It required dexterity, speed, and precision, and she didn’t mind at all that it was repetitive.
But most important, it allowed her to be independent – and if there was anything my mother prized it was her independence. Earning her own money meant that she could make decisions about where and with whom she lived, where she went, what she did. She couldn’t imagine her life any other way. She had no intention of giving it up for something that might restrict her like, say, marriage. But that’s a story for another time.
Years later when I announced that I was going to study to become a minister, my mother was shocked, and likely even appalled. It was fine to be religious, if that’s what I wanted, but to be a minister? Why would I throw my life away like that? First of all, it paid next to nothing, and second it meant that I would probably be working all of the time. Ministry is something you just can’t get away from at 5:00 pm.
Long after Mom had willingly traded her factory apron for the kitchen apron that most people would remember her in, she explained to me that work is something that should support the things in your life that are most important to you. Some jobs are fulfilling and can even bring meaning and purpose to life. Others aren’t. Either way, your work shouldn’t become your life.
Once I was ordained and had settled into my first pastoral call, Mom was obviously worried that my work was creeping into every area of my life and beginning to take over. While her job had supported her independence, she feared that my job was robbing me of mine. She wasn’t completely right about that, but she also wasn’t wrong.
The truth is that as much as I loved my work in parish ministry, there were many times when I felt that it was overwhelming the rest of my life. Since it wasn’t a nine-to-five, shiftwork job – and because there was rarely clear and immediate feedback about the quality of my work – I had a terrible time setting limits and establishing boundaries.
I know that I’m not alone in this experience, and that it’s hardly unique to ministers.
For the longest time I believed that the antidote should be to create “work-life balance.” However, the more I think about it, the more I began to question that idea. The notion of work-life balance suggests that the weight of the work portion of our lives should equal all of the other portions – relationships, caring for our health, rest, and relaxation, tending our spirits, etc. It calls to mind a picture of a scale with work on one side and everything else crammed onto the other. That seems silly to me now.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate my mother’s perspective. Our work is important. But it’s only one piece of our lives. It should support us as much as it supports those we work for. And, like my mother surely did, at the end of a workday we need to take the apron off and fully enjoy the other aspects of our lives.