I could probably write half a dozen posts on this topic and still have more questions than answers. And I’d probably leave it all alone and write about something simpler if I could. But we have this decision to make, and these issues are right in the middle of it.

This morning, just as I was getting up the gumption to grapple with this topic, I found comfort and wisdom in an unlikely place: the White House. Jodi Kantor’s profile of the Obamas’ marriage in the New York Times magazine is fascinating and intimate. She captures the ongoing negotiation behind the glossy fairytale that is their public image. Through this article, you see the hard work that it takes to sustain a marriage between two ambitious, uncompromising people. You see the cost of the tradeoffs that they have chosen, and you especially see that although Michelle plays her part with grace, she is not entirely okay with the sacrifices she has been asked to make. Which is reassuring to me, because I’m not entirely okay with what’s being asked of me either. And somehow it makes me feel better to know that as our family works through these issues, we do it in good company.

A bit more background here: I am about to become what you might call a “trailing spouse.” My husband’s career is specialized and geographically restrictive. He loves his work, and he’s good at it, and we have known all along that we would come to a point when following his career would be the only sensible option. I signed on for this and have had nearly a decade to get used to the idea. And still I’m not entirely okay with it.

I guess I have been spoiled by equality. Up to this point, we have made all major decisions on equal footing, so I have no experience in sacrifice, and my feelings about it are all muddled. One script in my head says that all kinds of people—men and women both—follow their partners’ careers at some point. (And probably most of them do it with a lot less angst than this.) Two careers cannot take equal precedence simultaneously. I believe that a solid marriage is built by striving for equality whenever possible and taking turns leading when necessary. I know that it is my turn to follow. But there is this raging feminist inside of me who is so totally not okay with that, and who rails against all the structural forces that have brought us to the point where this decision is inevitable. I don’t know what to do about her.

Let me be clear here: My husband has been tremendous through this whole process. He is wholly on my team and doing everything in his power to make sure that my career and happiness are well-served by any move we make. I have absolute veto power over any opportunity I am not comfortable with, and he would be okay if I used it.

I should also be clear that I’m not being asked to move to a godforsaken outpost. The opportunity in front of us is, in fact, quite romantic. (My friends get these quizzical looks when I express any doubts about it.) I’m fairly sure that this move would prove to be a great adventure for our family, and maybe in the long run a boon for my career too.

But I’m being asked to leave a good job in a city that I love to move to a place where most business is conducted in a language I do not speak. I have no guarantee of a job there, and in fact not much notion of how to find one. And I’m scared. I’m scared that my career will get derailed. I’m scared about having my identity revolve around home and family as I try to make friends and build a network in a new place. And I’m scared because this feels like a pretty major alteration in our life course, and I’m not sure when I will get my turn to lead on a decision of this significance.

But then I think about the Obamas and I feel better, because, jeez, if they can work it out, anybody can. As Michelle Obama said at the close of her New York Times interview, the equality of any partnership “is measured over the scope of the marriage. It’s not just four years or eight years or two. We’re going to be married for a very long time.”

A fascinating report from the Pew Research Center recently highlighted just how difficult it is to balance work and motherhood. Among their survey respondents, the majority of working mothers said that their own work-family balance was less than ideal and identified some other model as preferable. And 40% of working moms reported feeling rushed all the time, as opposed to only about a quarter of the overall public. Whether the moms worked part-time or full-time had no impact on how rushed they felt. (Interestingly, working dads and at-home moms were no more harried than everybody else.)

The fact that working motherhood is tough is no news to me, or anyone else I know who’s doing it. But here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough—my life is more joyful and fulfilling right now than I could ever have imagined. When my husband picks me up after work and my daughter catches her first glimpse of me walking toward the car, her whole face shines and she literally dances in her carseat. It is impossible not to be cheered by this welcome at the end of a long day.

My dad said an interesting thing to me recently. It was during a phone call in which I’d been running through the usual litany of daily chaos at our house—deadlines and chores and colds and decisions. He’s retired now, and he said that from his vantage point it’s clear that the stage we’re in now—just establishing our careers, and our family, and our home—is really the most compelling epoch of a lifetime. Other times are more restful, more settled, maybe easier, but never are you more deeply connected to the work of building a life than we are right now.

It’s true. I know what he means, and I feel it. It’s easy for that feeling to get swamped by the tide of everyday details, but I try to pay attention to it. In the midst of the clamor and the mess, I will sometimes pause and notice how happy I really am—how much I laugh these days, and how much hope I have. These moments fill me with gratitude and humility. I hope I can hold onto them, like photographs, to look back on in later years.

Hardship is always easier to talk about than joy, and working motherhood is no exception. It’s not easy to stay afloat in this busy life of ours, and there are times when I gripe about it, but I know just how lucky we are, and I wanted you to know too.

Hat tip: Nataly of WorkIt, Mom! for the Pew study.

But what do you do when confronted with a real whopper of a decision—one whose scale justifies all the angst that you could possibly devote to it?

Welcome to our life right now. We have been offered an opportunity, and we have a decision to make. It will dramatically shape the future of our lives. It is complex, with many variables and many unknowns. It’s exciting and scary, and I am completely at sea. I usually cobble together some combination of logic and intuition to guide me in big decisions, but neither my head nor my gut is serving me well right now.

Rather than spending another evening running mental laps around this issue, I thought it might be helpful to consult the internet and share any useful findings with you. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of info about decision-making out there in the ether. Depending on your preference, you can use complex mathematical functions or a spiritual visioning process, or anything in between.

Here are a few tips that I found helpful for this particular decision. (You will note the prevalence of clichés in this list. As a writer, I am a bit sheepish about this, but as a human being I’m not. Sometimes the most important advice is overlooked because it is too familiar.)

1. Don’t try to do it all—Big decisions often get tangled up with lots of secondary decisions. This gets messy really fast. Trying to anticipate and optimize so many outcomes at once is paralyzing. Keep the focus on the core decision at hand, and gather as much information about that decision as you possibly can. You can figure out all the other stuff later.

2. Imagine the worst case—This is age-old advice, of course, but it’s useful to stop and actually do it. Fear is a driving factor in decision-making, and this exercise helps you factor it out. Often the worst outcome is not nearly as bad as you’d think, and having considered it gives you confidence as you make your choice. (This is especially helpful if you are leaning toward a particular option but hesitating because of fear.)

3. Trust your gut—Research shows that 90% of decision-making is intuitive. Leaders in business, medicine and the military have all acknowledged the importance of intuition in decisions. This is hard for me. I’m a pretty analytical person, but I’ve realized that going through the rational part of my decision-making process often just clears the way for me to discern what my heart is telling me.

4. About that fork in the road—We all know the Yogi Berra-ism: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Partly, of course, this just means that you’ve got to stop dithering and make up your mind. But to me it also implies permission to be bold. I’ve never totally bought into the business about regretting the things you don’t do more than the things you do, but I do believe that you build an interesting life by seizing the opportunities that are presented to you, even if they’re a little scary. Given the choice, I’ll err on the side of adventure every time—but only after I agonize about it first!

All of which is a big preamble to tell you that I am about to write a post about my daughter.

She will turn two this winter. Like all parents, I am completely smitten. I am constantly amazed and amused by her antics and accomplishments. But the most magical part for me is her language development. Since her birth I have felt like we were in one of those sappy movies where the characters, although besotted with each other, speak different languages. We developed rudimentary ways to communicate. (The first time she pointed to the cupboard, said “ca-ker” and made the sign for “please” I felt like I had made contact with Mars.) It worked. We got by. But now that we speak a common tongue, our relationship has progressed to a whole new level.

Words are important to me, so I guess that this should come as no surprise, but I am completely blown away by watching this little person learn to speak. I’m talking about open-mouth, wide-eyed wonder here. The kind you associate with childhood Christmas mornings, or disturbing astronomical phenomena, or religious experiences.  I know that the process of acquiring language is mundane and universal, but I cannot shake the feeling that there is something miraculous about it.

Being a word geek, I am fascinated by the pure mechanics of it—watching when verbs started to show up, and prepositions, and when she graduated from two-word sentences to three. I’m intrigued by the things that are confusing (pronouns) or physically difficult (the ‘L’ sound). I love that vocabulary grows exponentially—she acquires new words too fast now for me to even keep track. And I love what her language tells me about her mind. When she busts out a classic like “No, this MINE polar bear,” I think about all the concepts that went into forming that little sentence and I stand amazed.

Here are three things I love about being able to converse with this daughter of mine:

1.  Practicality–It is indisputably useful to be able to ask her what she wants to eat for breakfast, or where she put her shoes, or which part got hurt when she fell down, and expect to receive an answer.

2. Play–Words have opened up whole new avenues for amusement. We take turns singing songs now, and while away the hours consuming endless combinations of pretend cake and coffee. She is often intentionally silly. Asked what her toes (which were in her mouth) tasted like, she giggled and replied, “Bananas!”

3. Politeness–It’s funny how hardwired we are to respond to polite verbal cues. Some of her more civilized expressions are surely rote—“Salud!” for a sneeze or “Thank you, Mommy!” for more snacks—but they evoke genuine gratitude all the same, and smooth out the edges if we’re having a hard day. And some of them express things that I don’t actually need to be told—things that we covered way back in our non-verbal days.  But “Love you, Mommy,” still gets me every time.

But there is a cost to choosing such an ambition-drenched environment. It is a cost that means little when you’re eighteen and itchy, a cost whose full measure I am only learning now. It comes from consistently choosing opportunity over community, among peers who all do the same.

My husband and I both left home and family to go to college. (We met at the aforementioned Ivy League institution.) It was what was expected of us, and what we expected for ourselves. We were smart and eager, with no experience saying no to something that was within reach. As promised, we received top-notch educations and made lifelong friends. But here is what no one told us.

No one told us that those friends—amazing people all—would scatter to the corners of the earth, following the same winds of ambition and achievement that brought them together in the first place. No one told us that we might want to go home again, and that once you have chosen an elite and specialized field, going home is a whole lot harder than you would think. No one told us that by following our academic destinies we would end up in the middle of the country with our immediate families planted firmly on both coasts. And no one told us how much this would matter once we had a family of our own.

This is all a little raw for me right now. Last weekend I went to the wedding of a college friend. She is a doctor, tethered to the rigorous demands of her profession. She lives on the east coast now, and is probably headed to the southwest soon. I haven’t spent much time with her in years, and had forgotten how deeply she is my friend, and how much I miss her. I have no idea when I’ll see her again, and no expectation that we will ever settle near enough to really be part of each others’ lives.

As I write, I am on a plane somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, headed to visit my parents. This is the second of six trips our family has planned for this fall. (Work travel excluded.) Travel is the second largest line item in our household budget, behind our mortgage. And yet it’s nowhere near enough. We usually manage to show up for the important life events of our nearest and dearest. We spend major holidays with one set of family or another. But this hit-and-run version of connection is no substitute for the true closeness that comes from geographic proximity.

At the risk of being maudlin, it is too late for us to solve this problem now. It is structural and impossible, and one of the most profound sources of sadness in my life. We could (and may) choose to settle near particular family members, or a beloved set of friends. But we have forged connections in too many places to knit our loved ones together into anything like a real community.

I wish that someone had painted this picture for me when I was eighteen and setting my sights on the horizon. I wish someone had told me what I was choosing. I wish—in hindsight—that I had gone to a solid but unremarkable state school close to my home and befriended people who were closer to theirs. My education would surely have been more ordinary, and my opportunities might have been diminished, but right now I would take that trade in a heartbeat. I have no idea if I could really have been persuaded to make this choice at that moment in my life, but I know that if I ever take my daughter on college tours, we will visit every decent school within a hundred miles of home, and I will tell her why.

Our family works pretty much this way and I can’t imagine doing it otherwise. We never consciously decided that we wanted to use this model–it just came naturally to us. We’re philosophically committed to equality and fairness. But we are also both opinionated and bad at ceding control, which hints at the flaw in this system. In our house it is exemplified by the Stroller Incident.

When our daughter was a few months old we traipsed out to baby big-box land to buy a stroller. And we stayed there for over three hours. We tested every model in the store. We debated the merits of their size, steering and storage capacity. We agonized over price and portability. Six different sales associates tried to help us, and all, eventually, gave up. We didn’t really argue, but by the time we finally chose and purchased one we were completely fed up with ourselves and each other. It’s just a stroller, for heaven’s sake!

But that clarity of perspective is rare for us. Sharing responsibility for household tasks opens every one of them up for discussion. How often should the baby get a bath? Should we have spaghetti or linguine with dinner? Where should we take the car to have the tires rotated? At best this is a waste of time and at worst it’s an invitation for acrimony. Since the Stroller Incident we have tried to more consciously streamline decisions, especially for small things. But we still have a hard time letting the trivial be trivial.

Recently we visited some friends whose household is much like ours, and they proposed a simple but revolutionary solution–taking turns. Not some loose and friendly version of taking turns–think Middle East peace deal here. Every day one person would be in charge of making all insignificant decisions, and the other would not be permitted to argue, object, suggest, question, or otherwise interfere. Decision-making power would alternate between spouses according to a predetermined formula–each gets 3.5 days/week, for example, with a power handoff at lunchtime on the seventh day. Or one gets 3 days and one gets 4, with rotating control of the extra day. There would be strict guidelines about what qualified as an insignificant decision, and when consultation would be required.

I recognize that to those who do not share this particular brand of family madness this scenario surely sounds absurd, but I am drawn to it. Would it work? Could we respect the rules? Would it be sustainable? Would it teach us to let go? Would we eventually be able to abandon the formula and keep things in perspective on our own? And then the big one–would we really be happier that way? I don’t know, and I don’t know if we’ll ever try it, but if we do I’ll share a full report.

Back in college I was an outdoor education instructor–rock-climbing and camping and such. Outdoor educators are a singularly warm, nurturing and process-oriented bunch, and they taught me several important lessons about feedback that I have carried with me.

Upon reflection, these principles are applicable in other arenas too.

1. It must be consensual. Uninvited critical feedback will pretty much always be interpreted as an act of aggression. The purpose of feedback is to help someone grow. They can’t do that if they’re on the defensive. Constructive feedback is a delicate process and should be undertaken with care and respect, and only when all parties are in the mood.
2. There’s more to it than the climax. Good feedback isn’t just about dropping in and delivering a revolutionary insight on someone’s behavior or performance.  You have to work up to it, and you shouldn’t cut and run afterward. The G-rated outdoor-ed folks call this a feedback sandwich. You can call it what you like. But start out with something appreciative and genuine, do the deed, and then give it some nice satisfying closure. Needless to say, this is more likely to go well when you’re not in a rush and can give it your full attention.
3. It takes two to tango. If you expect to give feedback you have to be willing to accept it too. That’s how the game is played.

Here is a link to a good and thorough article about feedback in a work context, if you’re interested.

Happy Father’s Day.

I fear that I may call down the furies by putting this in print, but in the past several months our family life has reached a manageable and apparently stable level of chaos. This shift from crisis to normalcy coincided with two important milestones: weaning and a reliably decent night’s sleep. But I credit it primarily to garlic powder.

Also frozen vegetables, pre-sliced deli meat, paper towels, disposable diapers, and a hundred other mundane shortcuts. This is not an infomercial for convenience products. It is an admission that, for the first time, I’m really learning that isn’t possible to do everything well. Balance is a nice word, but the reality is not so pretty. I think what it comes down to is deciding what you really care about, and giving up on everything else.

Which sounds easy, and is, of course, the work of a lifetime. It’s surprisingly hard to know what really matters to you. I enjoy chopping garlic. I like its slipperiness, and the smell of it on my fingers long afterward. And I like cooking fresh, fragrant meals with it. I like being the kind of person who does this. But on weeknights, when all of us are hungry and harried, taking that time and dirtying those extra dishes just isn’t worth it.

Some of the decisions are pretty simple. Cleanliness in our house is at an all-time low. I’ve figured out exactly how much clutter and grunge I can tolerate without losing my mind, and that’s exactly how much cleaning we do. Our clothes are always wrinkled, our yard is always full of weeds, and our car is always overdue for some TLC. Which is fine with me.

But some of them are a whole lot harder. I care about regular exercise, and cooking from scratch, and tending friendships near and far.  I care about gardening, and reading, and sex. Everybody knows that life is a series of choices, but when discretionary time is narrowed to naptime and after bedtime the tradeoffs become comically clear. “What shall it be today, dear? An afternoon frolic, or putting in the tomatoes?”

The process of growing up is a gradual paring away of dreams, a pinching back of sprouts of yourself that never took off. For me, these tend to pop up in my New Year’s resolutions. I will learn an instrument. I will get really fit. I will practice yoga regularly. I will find a church community. I want these things, year after year. But I don’t want them badly enough–at this point in my life–to follow through on them.

I think this is less a failure of discipline than a failure of realism. I know what’s important to me right now–spending peaceful time with my family, building a fulfilling career, keeping in touch with a small circle of loved ones, and, yes, writing. The way I know is that, faced with lots of constraints, this is what I choose to spend my time on.

And really, that’s plenty. It’s easy to second-guess your choices in this whole balance game. Why did I spend another night watching “The West Wing” when I could have gone running, or prepped tomorrow’s dinner, or taken down that dusty flute that I still don’t really know how to play? But that time curled up on the couch with my sweetie is a haven these days. We don’t have to plan or think or even talk. I love that easy closeness in the tired twilight hours, and I think that at some level, we need it.

Sometimes I get greedy and want too much–why can’t I have a beautifully landscaped yard, and a sparkling house, and those slow-simmered meals that I hunger for? But my mission these days is to stay focused on that tiny handful of things that really matter and cheerfully give up on the rest, even if that means that there’s another bottle of garlic powder in my future.