Do I support my wife and her business at her work dinner? Or do I go to an event to talk to a group of senior female executives about how to get their husbands to be more supportive?
Once I put it that way the decision was obvious.
But it started off as one of those double-booked working parent moments that makes all of us who have had to make a choice like this, say: Why couldn’t one of these events be on any of the other nights that I have open?
Alas, that’s not how the working-parent universe works. Too often it’s double-booked or nothing.
My wife had scheduled the offsite for her firm months ago. Ten people would be in town for two days of the type of work an all-distributed company does when people get together. She asked me to attend the dinner. I could meet some people I had never met and catchup with others who had been working for her for years. I loved the idea.
As for my work, the year had gotten off to a solid start. One of the first calls I had led to an invite to speak at an event in New York. It was for an organization I admired deeply, and its chief executive wanted me to be part of a conversation around how senior female executives with families could leverage husbands and partners to do more at home and be supportive of what they are doing at work.
This is what we focus on at The Company of Dads: how to call in working dads at the office to be allies while also normalizing the role of a Lead Dad at home and in the community.
I was thrilled – until she told me the date! Same as my wife’s offsite dinner.
When I told my wife, she said I should go, that it was important. She knew that a talk to 15 or 20 senior female executives could lead to some of them reaching out afterwards to do work for their companies. That corporate work is key to moving what we’re doing forward.
She pushed me to go. I wanted to go. It would be an amazing group to speak to, at the invitation of a company and CEO I admired.
Still, I wanted to be at the dinner for my wife. She has built a great company that is humming along and getting recognition from clients for the work it’s doing. She has a good team, with some recent additions who hadn’t met in person. I wanted to be there to show my support.
So, I wrote an honest email to the CEO. She understood immediately and said she’d invite me to a similar dinner later in the year. And my wife’s dinner was fun – catered to no clean up!
But getting to the decision? Sometimes saying things out loud makes all the difference.
