I am what my brother calls a serial “planner.”  I already have a ‘to do’ list for my older daughter’s annual pool party in June, our summer vacation, and my other daughter’s birthday in September.  There are many of us.  We pride ourselves on our organizational skills and our ability to stay on top of it all, puzzled by the parent who forgot to bring a dozen filled plastic eggs for the preschool egg hunt.  After all, we bought ours as soon as the Easter items hit the stores right after Valentine’s Day!  OK, I did.  With all this organizing and planning, it’s easy to overlook the big picture. 

About a month ago, a friend in her 70s was invited to join a University board and asked to submit a c.v. so that she could be properly introduced at meetings and events.  The other board members include much of the city’s intellectual elite – lawyers, professors emeriti, and nationally acclaimed journalists, among others.  My friend didn’t have a career, yet she has led a busy life filled with international travel, French classes, water color classes, yoga, and reading groups. She raised three children and now has several grandchildren.  Never having written a c.v before, she composed it from scratch and sent it to me to review.  It was more fallacy than fact, replete with unreal titles at very real institutions like art museums and newspaper publishers.  Is this the life she wished she had?  What a pity, I thought, to be so unsatisfied looking back on your life, that at the age of 75 you feel compelled to fabricate accomplishments for your c.v.

On a recent business trip I had plenty of time to contemplate life without the sudden, piercing cry, “Mommy!” or being called into an impromptu meeting.  On the rare occasion when I have time to reflect, my mind usually drifts toward the recent past, evaluating outcomes and analyzing how things might have gone differently.  It’s a very business-like approach to reflecting on life’s events.  But this time, instead of reflecting on the past, I imagined myself 30 years into the future, looking back on my life.  Many questions came to mind: What would I look back on with pride, with regret?  What will have been my most important accomplishments?  Through which lens will I view my life – that of mother, sister, colleague, wife?  Will anyone ask me to write a c.v.?

As working mothers, we have many roles to fill and tasks to juggle.  Not every endeavor will earn an employee of the month award or mother of the year award.  In fact, it often seems like our most virtuous tasks, like refilling the toilet paper roll that no one else did or offering to take minutes at a committee meeting, go unnoticed.  In the grand scheme of things, however, if we were to look back on our lives 30 years from now, is it not enough to have managed a career and raised good citizens?  

When I imagine looking back on my life, a few key words come to mind: full, balanced, loving, healthy – and few regrets (alas, there will be some).  And as I turn my mind back to planning what I’m going to fill a dozen plastic Easter eggs with, I do it with all the importance of planning a business meeting.  Will it be jelly beans or mini chocolate eggs? That small detail may not matter to the children in my daughter’s preschool class, but it will matter to me.  Thirty years from now my c.v. may well be filled with career accomplishments, but I will have succeeded in life only if I have embraced both my roles of working woman and mother.  In the agenda of life, I want to be sure that I plan to do both.