Double Duty. One Paycheck.
Ladies Who Lunch
Right before the Christmas break, the ladies in my office decided to go out for a lovely lunch at a local Seattle restaurant.
Out of the seventy or so employees in my department, there were only four women at this “ladies only” lunch. (Oh yes, I work in a very male dominated field.)
While I assumed this lunch would be full of good food, I doubted that I would enjoy it. I mean come on, there ladies aren’t my friends. I merely work with them because I get paid to do so.
Like women do, we started to talk about our families. Now, mind you, all of us are different ages. We come from very varied backgrounds, religions and races. I mean really, you couldn’t find four more different women.
I was the only one that was a parent to a toddler. One woman is a step parent to two children. Another woman is a single mom to a teenager. Yet another of the women has a developmentally challenged teenager that her and her husband are raising together.
We discussed what pur kids would be getting for Christmas. We discussed our family holiday traditions. I listened while the step parent talked about how they were splitting the holidays and heard from the parent of the mentally challenged teenager talk about how kids can be mean to her child.
And slowly I started to realize something; although we were totally different on paper, we were the same. We all wanted our kids to be happy. We wanted nothing but the best for them. We wanted to give them the world.
And we wanted to be good mothers. We were all doing our best to be good mothers and to provide for the kids that we loved so much, even if we weren’t living the “traditional” life.
I also realized that while I’ve often thought that I am living the “traditional” life (both parents in the home, extended family nearby, religious), I wasn’t in the majority. I was, in fact, the minority. And you know what, that’s just fine. Because these women, they are all awesome examples to me. They have a lot to teach me.
And I have a lot to learn.
Isabel is a pseudonym for this Seattle-based blogger. She’s been working since the day she realized soda and lip gloss weren’t free. Isabel became a mom in 2006 and continues to work full time, outside the home, since diapers and mortgages aren’t free either. You can read far too much about her personal life at hola,isabel.
If you have questions, anecdotes, or topics for “Double duty. One paycheck.”, email Isabel at holaisabel [at] gmail.com.
Every time my coworkers and I go out to lunch or for drinks/dinner, I’m hesitant to go. But I always have fun, and then I kick myself for not going more often. Although we’re all at really different points in our life, it’s still fun to get to know each other better!
We DO have a lot to learn about each other, all of us. That’s why it is so important to take those judgement hats off and listen . . . I love this post!
I actually have a group of guy friends that I lunch with every Friday…I’m the only girl in the group, but I have learned so much from them. They are awesome and so not a group of people I would ever expect to hang with!
It’s amazing how much you learn when you stop focusing on differences. Some of my best friends are opposites to me in many ways but sometimes I gain a lot of perspective about my own life from people in different situations.
[...] case you forgot, today is Wednesday. Which means I posted over at SeattleMomBlogs. So go and read all about what happened when I went out to work with my female coworkers. [...]