Parent and Consultant

The particular ways being a consultant makes being a parent challenging

It’s spring break week in New York City, and I am thinking a lot about the balance between work and parenting. It’s hard for parents everywhere. But independent consulting makes it hard in a different way.

Is it a zero sum game

Any parent knows the math: anything I do is taking away from something else, because there is no spare time. If I go for a run, that’s time I’m not spending with my three-year-old Marlow. If I meet a friend to see Project Hail Mary (which I recently did, and it was an awesome movie — thanks for going with me, Charles), that’s an evening I’m not spending with my partner, Amy, or helping get our family ready for Passover, or doing any of the million small things it takes to keep everyone fed, clothed, and reasonably happy.

That’s everyone’s story. But for an independent consultant, those same minutes are income. I don’t get paid by existing. I know that’s not quite how salaried work functions, but it can feel that way from the other side. The only way I get paid is if I do the work; the only way I have the work is if I build the pipeline. So the zero-sum game cuts in a second direction, and now I’m balancing being a parent, a partner, a person, and a business owner — all at once, all the time.

I struggle with guilty feelings about this, because all of it is my choice. I can’t offload my guilt and convert it into anger at a boss who made me stay late at the office. When I stay late, it’s because I chose that over pretending for the 500th time that I’m Elsa and Marlow is Anna. (Actually, maybe I will stay late. (I hate Frozen so much.))

So instead it’s a series of trade-offs that are all — every one — on my shoulders. If I leave at 5pm to be home for dinner, bath, and bedtime, I think about the client work that didn’t get done, and I wonder if I’ve damaged the relationship. When Amy and Marlow go to the playground and I stay home to get ahead on a project so I’ll have time for new client outreach later in the week, I think about the fun they’re having and I feel the absence. I wonder if Marlow is sad I’m not there.

So much good

For the first few years of having a kid, I took stock of my life and liked what I found. I loved my child more than anything, and spending time with her was the best part of every day. Amy is an amazing person. She has the courage I wish I had, a way of seeing things that constantly gives me new perspective, and an emotional intelligence that makes me feel like I just put on my glasses (my eyesight is very bad). Work was full in a good way: I loved my clients, my projects, and my day-to-day activities. I was challenged and stretched.

It wasn’t all roses, of course. I don’t think my heart rate got above resting for the first 18 months of being a parent (unless inadvertently). I barely saw friends. My semi-regular board game night went out the window. I hardly watched any Liverpool soccer matches with my buddies, I didn’t see many new movies.

I told myself this was fine, because my life was filled with nothing but good things. My days were engaging, novel, full of love and joy. How could a stretch of days with so much good in them be anything other than perfect?

In retrospect, there was a trap here, and I could not see it. Because the things being pushed out were being pushed out by other things I loved, I didn’t register the loss. Every time I checked, all I saw was good. How could so much good be bad?

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the whole picture. Aristotle (I studied Ancient Greek language and literature in college) described the Golden Mean: a well-lived life involves many things, not just one thing, even if that one thing is incredible. The Golden Mean is about balance and moderation. The parts of me that weren’t being nurtured — the friendships, the body, the solitude — needed attention.

It didn’t become a crisis. But it’s been a long, slow project to reintroduce some balance.

One thing consulting gets right

One of the things I appreciate about consulting is that it builds in a version of this lesson by default. Because I spread myself across multiple clients and projects, my professional identity isn’t a single thing. That’s different from my previous life as a Chief of Staff and de facto COO/CFO of a large nonprofit, where I threw myself into the role so completely that it became my whole sense of professional worth. My social network, motivations, and beliefs about what I was doing all rested on one foundation. When it ended (as everything eventually does), the transition was wrenching. It was healthy in the long run but harder than it needed to be.

Consulting has built-in bulwarks against that kind of collapse. The work is spread out. No single client or project carries the full weight of my identity. I didn’t expect to need that structural resilience in my personal life, too, but here I am trying to apply the same principle to fatherhood, partnership, friendship, and the rest of it.

Still at it

I have a therapist. I meditate. I write. And these are still hard things, every day — the guilt, the trade-offs, the nagging feeling that I’m always taking from somewhere and giving to somewhere else, and always coming up short in at least one direction.

I’d love to hear from anyone wrestling with some version of this. These are the kinds of things that get easier when you talk about them with people who understand the particular shape of this life.