When my mom met my dad, she had three requirements for their relationship: She would never get married, have children or leave New York. She held firm to two of those terms. But it’s her “no children” rule that I like to revisit — something I distinctly admire in the person who taught me most about how to live.
Shaped by her bookshelves full of 1970s feminist thinking, my mother, Shifra, initially thought that having kids would narrow her life’s focus. There was too much she wanted to do for the world, too many injustices she felt should have her undivided attention, too much organizing work she believed in that didn’t involve passing on her DNA.
Talking with my mom about these beliefs taught me at a young age that conversations about work are necessarily personal. Examining work means examining identity — what shapes a person and occupies their time, what might consume them as fully as family. We spend so many hours of our life at work, yet often the best measure of its value isn’t assessed in hours. We measure it in convictions, trade-offs and what we’re able to do for the people around us. Talking about work means looking squarely at our ambitions — and that doesn’t just have to mean getting ahead, but deciding what we want to achieve with the blunt force of our energy and our time.
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