The COVID-19 pandemic got all of us reckoning how we organize family and work. Now and in the foreseeable future, most of us will likely continue our jobs while simultaneously homeschooling our kids, caring for the sick, and attending to the elderly or those with special needs.
This is a lot of work, even for the most fortunate among us. For the less privileged, the stress may be even greater, as questions begin to arise how to feed, clothe, and protect their families.
The idea of work-life balance isn't new at all, but the challenges are more emphasized these days. For so long, many of us led our lives, pretending that our family lives are irrelevant to our careers.
Sociologist Joan Acker in a 1990 study, observed that businesses "assume a disembodied and universal worker" in which the male is automatically the sole provider of the family's basic needs while the female is tasked to care for the children and her partner/husband's personal needs.
Women as homemakers and men as breadwinners -- achievable but impractical. In recent years, humanity has drifted away from this ancient model. Families with two parents, where one manages the household and the other is employed, are in the minority now.
Work and domestic life have collided the least we expect, and COVID-19 has exposed that we haven't really mastered this whole work-life balance thing after all. We have stacked up the various elements of our lives like a teetering mess in a kid's closet. All it took was for someone to thrust open the door, and all the puzzle pieces came crashing down.
The coronavirus has made us realize a lot of things, but perhaps the most eye-opening implication concerns the people closest to our lives -- we must start acting that we have families and for real this time.
Maybe a few of us are starting to get the hang of it, but many others still find it difficult to see their way out of the tunnel. For the moment, there's no end in sight for the coronavirus crisis, but our hope lingers even in the darkest of times.
Once this is all over, we must stop pretending that we can all live our lives without our family affecting our jobs. We are not merely employees -- we're human beings. Let's destroy this facade once and for all, and maybe, just maybe, in the future, work-life balance will stop becoming a myth.
