Juggle career and family without sacrificing your sanity

By JULIE MIDDLETON

The clipping is recent, cut out of an English newspaper: "Superwoman is a myth", it thunders.

"Twenty-five years after Shirley Conran made millions by telling us that life was 'too short to stuff a mushroom', new British research shows women still cannot have children and a career without feeling stressed, exhausted and guilty," it says.

Philippa Reed laughs wryly and rolls her eyes: "It's true. Feeling stressed, exhausted and guilty just goes with the territory."

Reed, who is in her 40s, is the executive director of executive programmes at the University of Auckland Business School - that means MBAs, graduate diplomas and the like - and solo parent of 10-year-old Claire.

"The idea," she says, "is managing the stress and exhaustion and the guilt. There's a lot of focus on the two sides of the equation - work and family - but to do that you have to focus on yourself and your own needs."

You will not find this woman stuffing mushrooms in the kitchen of her secluded Westmere townhouse or engaging in unnecessary housework in an effort to keep up appearances. Way too 1980s.

What you will find the carefully spoken Reed doing, and regularly, is setting aside half-an-hour during the day for a coffee out of the office - often on the way back from a meeting - for time to focus on herself. Pilates exercise classes and walking the dog fit under the same heading.

"Inevitably, it's worth it - building in that time for reflection," she says.

"I have evidence for myself that if I take better care of myself and take time out ... I do develop a better ability to stand back and take a more strategic view, not getting too caught up in the everyday drama, conflicts and issues," Reed says.

"And taking time out lets you tap into other parts of your brain, tapping into your creativity in some way."

Reed's career started in academia: she studied humanities and completed a doctorate on a German writer, Hedwig Dohm, whom she had picked as the German Charlotte Bronte.

Reed admits that on that count she was disappointed - and also by academic prospects, despite universities' family-friendly outlook.

The job-for-life comfort of tenure, she says, started to lose its appeal, so she decided on a switch to commerce.

She paved the way by working right through Richard Bolles' job-hunting Bible What Color is Your Parachute, and appointed a friend to play mentor.

Then followed 12 years at KPMG and its predecessor, doing tax work and consulting, before marrying academic and corporate life with her business-school role.

Claire was on the waiting-list for a Law Society creche while still in the womb and started there at the age of three months.

Reed's family are out of child-minding range in Christchurch, but a network, including Claire's dad, who lives nearby, friends and paid helpers - plus the ability not to panic when things go wrong, as they inevitably do occasionally - have kept things ticking over. (Like many women, Reed reckons childcare should be tax-deductible.)

It has not been easy, but there have been moments of epiphany.

"A senior colleague of mine once said - and it was a new slant to me then on juggling work and family - 'You're very lucky to have your daughter because it will force you to have some balance', and that's true," she says.

"It's actually quite easy to stay at work and keep working until late evening, but if you have to stop and pick up a child then you can't, and it forces you to focus on other things."

It also forces her not to sweat over the small stuff: the idea the house should always be tidy (a cleaner comes once a week); the notion that after being a whiz in the boardroom you've got to do the biz in the kitchen. Pasta with something on top is good enough.

And ignoring doom-mongers: "As a solo parent, you have to figure out quite early that having a glass of wine alone is not the first step down that slippery slope," Reed says.

It's also about understanding that the personal and professional collide, and that embarrassment might need to be swallowed - "like going down to the creche at lunchtime to feed, and your zip pops because you're still squeezing yourself back in to pre-pregnancy clothes."

Work and life, life and work: constant risk assessment.

"There's a scale: there are school outings and sports days and things like that ... There's an ascending scale of importance to the child and you weigh that up against what it's going to do for your career and sometimes you have to say, 'Tough, this is the way I'm going to do it'.

"I think: I can afford to do this - it is not going to cost me my job.

"In terms of my personal values, my job is very important, and to my sense of who I am, and it's important to do the best job I can.

"But I don't believe I'm indispensable. And Claire's only got one mum."

However, Reed has never rued the day that women started taking the Conran message to heart. "There is a sense of achievement you get out of achieving something in the work environment, and I think that it's easier to create ... in the work environment than it is if you are at home with children," she says.

"I can see that, especially as Claire gets older, she has a very different world picture of what men and women are capable of from what I grew up with.

"Remember, we [women] got exactly what we wanted.

"We wanted to be independent, and wanted to be financially secure ... and we have actually achieved that."