Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 11, 1993 TAG: 9301090148
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY NEWSOM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE TIME OF OUR LIVES
IN October 1991, I had an 8-pound 15-ounce baby girl and began a year's leave. As the year ended, friends would ask whether I relished or dreaded returning to my job.\ My answer usually rambled, something like: I'll be glad for the paycheck and to return to a job I enjoy and feel good at. I'm not looking forward to missing my daughter, Margaret, or to juggling job, parenting and household tasks or to losing the time to try new recipes or read The New Yorker.
But as I've immersed myself again in daily journalism, I've faced another loss, one I don't mention much. I'm not even sure what to call what I'm talking about - maybe "community," maybe "connection."
It's deciding to cook supper for friends and remembering to call a high school buddy on her 40th birthday. It's having neighbors over for coffee and chatting with people in the grocery checkout line and sharing homegrown tomatoes or peach cobbler.
Not one of those things takes so much time that I couldn't have done it back when I worked at a job comically described as "40 hours a week" - more like 55 hours many weeks.
Time - or lack of it - seemed to dominate my life. But time was not really the villain. The problem was that I burned up the emotional energy I needed to interact with other people.
I'm not alone in that.
A friend who returned to work after months of leave described her first weekend off: "All I did," she said, "was stare at the walls and sleep."
That scares me.
It scares me for my own sake, because my life is so much richer when I exert the effort to be a better friend, neighbor, daughter and sister. Yet despite my good intentions, I know I'll revert to many of my old ways as I settle back into my work.
And it scares me for the sake of all of us. I worry about this collective exhaustion of the spirit. How can we have a community if we don't have the time or the emotional reserves to engage with one another?
How did I come to think that hard work, that most American of virtues, may not be the great blessing I grew up believing in?
The realization came in small ways - an hour here, a morning there - over many months.
As I recovered from the initial shock and fatigue of having a baby and staying home alone with a newborn, I knew I was acting differently.
At first, I attributed it all to the solitary confinement forced on new mothers in a suburban landscape, when families are distant and friends are at work. I was desperate for company. The telephone was my lifeline to the world. I babbled like a happy idiot to strangers in the grocery store who paused to coo at the baby.
I grew more outgoing. I began asking friends to lunch or dinner. I started to wave to, then speak to neighbors as I wheeled Margaret in her stroller.
Understand how unusual this was for me. I'm essentially a shy person who needs large doses of solitude, and my job requires a good deal of talking and interacting. It used to drain me of sociability.
In the pre-Margaret era, my husband and I rarely entertained. I had all but stopped writing letters, and I procrastinated on calling friends. Sometimes I would even avoid acquaintances in the grocery store because I didn't want to come up with small talk.
By simply having time and energy for getting to know strangers, I began to make new friends in the neighborhood.
But not until one warm April afternoon did I begin to understand what was happening.
A friend called from work, offering to drop by about 4:30. We sat out under the trees in the warm spring air, watching sunlight dapple the grass, and dandling the baby on our laps.
We drank white wine and talked of this and that: children, mosquitoes, ivy and her first date with the man she married.
The afternoon was palpably different for me than it must have been for her, as she stole a couple of spring-evening hours from work and home. Not once did I hear, droning deep in my head, the insistent buzz of tasks undone. Had I been taking time from work, I might even have ignored a twinge when she phoned, as I realized whatever I had planned that evening - laundry? weeding? - wouldn't be done.
The absence of that low buzz lent the afternoon true pleasure: Time had become a sweetly flowing river, not the downhill rapids I once knew.
A few months later, another afternoon clarified what I had begun to sense.
It was July. I got a baby-sitter and went for a haircut. My stylist had no customer after me so we took our time, talking about daughters, about her newest endeavor - raising goats - and so on.
After, I stopped at the store and was pleased to run into a neighbor, a friendly widow who walks daily and seems to know everyone within a 2-mile radius. She lamented that deep in July her tomatoes were still frustratingly green. She introduced me to another neighbor, a younger woman who chanced by with her infant son, born within a few weeks of Margaret.
Then I spotted a retired Observer reporter I knew. He hasn't abandoned his inquiring ways and asked eagerly about the latest office gossip, so I was happy to relate what little I knew.
That evening, as I took Margaret out for her after-dinner stroll, we delivered some ripe tomatoes to my neighbor. She hauled a toy from her closet to distract Margaret while we talked. As we arrived back home, the toddler across the street was out playing with his dad, so we visited some more before a belated bath and bedtime for the baby.
None of the day was remarkable. People in Charlotte do that kind of thing all the time. Or do they?
Before Margaret was born, I couldn't have had such a day. Even on a weekend, my circuits would have overloaded from all that interacting.
Only because I hadn't poured the last ounce of my spirit into my job was I able to make those simple connections with people. Nothing fancy, nothing noble. Just connections.
But those are the delicate threads that weave the web that is a neighborhood, and the larger web that is a community. We are all of different ages, occupations and beliefs. It's good, I think, to be part of such a varied world.
According to a Fortune magazine article a few years back, typical middle managers in their 30s or 40s go to work by 6:30 or 7 a.m., work 60 or more hours a week, including business-related travel.
How can those people have anything left of themselves for their families, much less their neighbors and community? They must be like the men and women I saw power-walking or running on late summer evenings, shielded from any encounters by tiny earphones plugged to pocket-size tape players.
My job - a newspaper editor - is high-pressure. But can it be more draining than teaching a classroom of 30 seventh-graders, or working as a nurse or as a nursing home aide? Certainly, mind-numbing factory work for eight hours a day could tire your soul.
Statistics on whether Americans are working more or fewer hours a week than 20 years ago are inconclusive. Yet many people - those lucky enough to have jobs - think they're working harder now. Maybe it's the nature of their work. Maybe they feel more pressure for "productivity" or maybe they're holding two or more jobs to make ends meet.
Has all that productivity produced a nation of fatigued, emotionally drained citizens? And if so, what can we do about it?
Simply working less hard is too simple an answer. Most businesses reward the hardest workers. American industry is struggling to stay competitive with other countries, some of which pay workers pitifully low wages. Huge economic and social forces push all of us toward hard work.
Quit my job to stay home and raise the baby? Most families make too little money even to consider that. We could, if we scaled down the way we live. But I don't want to stay home. I love my job.
So I'm back at work, wondering how long I can maintain my newfound amiability and worrying that too soon I'll have tucked my head back into my shell.
I've arranged to work a 32-hour week for a while, an option many workers either can't afford or aren't allowed to take. But is the shorter week enough to make a difference?
I don't have any realistic answers. All I know is that we all need each other, and we need not to exhaust ourselves the way we're doing. Our neighborhoods, our cities, need people with the energy and spirit to engage with each other. To be friends. To have fun. To help one another. To be human.
Mary Newsom, 40, is projects editor for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. She lived in Roanoke and worked at the Roanoke Times & World-News in 1976-78.