A happy and organized two-career household, featuring Dr Gillian Goddard, endocrinologist & mother of 4.

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one twenty eight. Today we'll be interviewing Jillian Goddard, who is a practicing endocrinologist in New York. She's also the mom of four that she had at all different stages in her medical training and practicing, so we're excited to talk with her about how she manages her life and all that she's got going on. Of course, we're taping this ahead of time a couple, you know, weeks ahead of time, because by the time this is I may have actually had my baby. We'll see, maybe not, it could be this week. At some point. We'll post on Instagram when it happens. But you know, we we try to plan ahead for these things. It's a known deal, and we do not want to leave you hanging on a tune learning you hanging on a Tuesday morning, like, where is best of both worlds? I could handle it if you were a later, I could do an episode, you could record an episode. You'd be fine. It would be all good. So that's good to have in place. But no, Laura is not really planning on any specific maternity leave from the podcast as of now, and we are hoping and maybe it's already aired, depending on the timing of everything, to do a sort of live not live, but no, you don't want this live. No, not a live, like a fairly immediate post baby update so that she can just pop in, tell us how things went, tell us I don't know, some quick details, and then maybe I will take over from there and she can feed a baby. Yes, exactly, so weird to think about. It's surreal in many ways that there will be diapers and bottles and things like this around the house in a couple of weeks in fact, from when we were recording that. Yes, I should get on that. Yeah, you know, I mean, we did record some episodes while you were right after Genevieve. Yeah, and you never forget what we did, what was our plan. We recorded a few ahead of time. We did a couple ahead of time, but I think only a couple of weeks worth, and then I knew I would have or nanny to help me, so I sort of figured that I would just jump on while I was feeding. And I think there were a couple episodes early on where I literally like had Genevieve right there or she was in the wrap while we were recording. And I did kind of look forward to that, because you know, you do kind of enter this vortex of like, oh my god, I'm thinking about is when is the baby sleeping? And what am I, you know, feeding, and all that kind of stuff. And it was nice to just do something. You know, I wouldn't have been able to go back to work work three weeks out, but I was pretty ready to speak on the microphone for thirty minutes. And now that you and I are pretty seasoned at this, it's not like the recording or the preparation takes hours and hours, so I bet you'll be ready to jump in pretty quickly after. But I think it's still nice to have a buffer. Yeah, nice to have a buffer. And well, this is the thing of working for myself and working from home most of the time. Is the sort of line between being on maternity leaves such as it is, and like just continuing to do whatever you were doing is somewhat gray. I don't know, there's there's a lot of motioniness in there. And that's one of the reasons I've never taken a real maternity leave. You dial a lot of stuff down for a while, but there's no one hundred percent off. And the one difference this time around is that my speaking schedule is a lot more intense than it was for any of the other children, and so because of that, I've actually had to say I'm not booking anything for a certain period of time so I don't wind up with a late January trip to California, which is just not going to happen. And so I did have to turn stuff down. So I was like, WHOA, this is crazy. I don't It's not a comfortable feeling to turn stuff down, but probably necessary. And you've reached a point in your speaking career that I don't think you're going to you know, you know, from a logic standpoint, like the offers are going to continue to come even if you do either postpone some of them or have to turn some of them down. In fact, it me force you to pick and choose a little bit more where you kind of cherry pick and decide, oh, this one's worth it, or oh I would be happy to do that, but it has to be in September or something like that. Yeah, And the good news is that it's only at the end of the sort of time I've identified as being off that it starts to be a real issue anyway. I mean, I would say that in the last two years, the number of speeches I had between mid January and mid March were minimal because most people don't do their conferences during that time, either because of the holidays or because you know, half your company is stuck in O'Hare overnight when the winter weather cancelations of flights. It's just not a good time. I've done some you know, people have very sort of all everyone's in the south, so it's all good, but you know, it's less of it. So the timing actually worked out great that when it picks up in late April through June, I'm ready to be back in. So yeah, that's what it's going to look like. Awesome. Well, listeners, we will keep you posted, I'm sure you'll see on our Instagram and we have our exciting announcement and again we'll pop in with an update as soon as more can give one. Well. Sarah and I are excited to welcome Jillian Goddard to the program. She has been a commenteror on both of our blogs, so we've got to know her a little bit virtually over the years. But this is exciting to have our first conversation with her and we put a face with the name. I know you can't if you're listening to the podcast, but we are as we have the conversation here, So Jillian, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Sure. My name is Jillian Goddard, and I'm a full time adult and a chronologist in private practice, and i am an adjunct assistant Professor of medicine at NYU Langone Hospital. My husband and I have four children and their ages twelve, nine, six, and just a couple months shy of four, and we live in southern Westchester County, just outside of New York city. Yeah, and so you know, one of the questions we sometimes get from people, you know, younger women who are entering professional fields and stuff, is thinking about how they're going to space and time their children based on various professional things. That I know that one of the questions with medicine is always a win, is the right time? And with you, the answers seemed to be all of the above. So why don't you talk a little bit about the when in the course of building your career you had your kids and sort of that experience. Sure, so I had my twelve year old during my third year of medical school. I had my nine year old at the very beginning of my second year of my residency, so just after intern year, I had my six year old the last week of the first week year of my fellowship. And then I had my almost four year old a couple years into joining my practice. Oh my god, you've literally had a child during every stage. Well, that's what I said, all of the above, right, that I literally have. That is amazing. Well, among other things I would love you to talk about. I don't know, how how have your philosophies changed and how did you you know being a parent in those early years must have been so different the resources you had available your focus at work compared to now. So tell us more about your journey. I think that it is interesting to kind of think about this question my So, I was a non traditional medical student for people not in medicine. What that means is I didn't go straight from undergraduate to medical school. I actually worked in the pharmaceutical public relations industry for about three years and then decided to go to medical school. And because I was not pre med undergrad, I then had to do a couple of years of prerequisite courses before I could even apply to medical school and take the MCAT. So I started that process about years after I graduated from undergrad and about six months into that process, I met my husband. He is about twelve years older than I am, and so when I started medical school we had just gotten married and I was twenty seven and he was thirty nine. So when I started medical school, he was actually old enough to be the father of the students that had gone straight from undergrad into modle school who are in my class. But he also had an established career in law, and so I had some resources available to me, particularly financially that I would say the typical medical student does not. But because of both of our ages, we really decided that we didn't want to wait until I had gone through nine years of training to think about starting a family. So even when I was interviewing for med school, I did sort of look around at the different schools and what they had to offer, and who was having kids during medical school in those programs, and how was the school handling it. Did It seem like the school was fairly friendly to it. So my medical school really liked non traditional medical students. There was a decent handful of us in the class, and as a result, they were pretty well versed in how to accommodate medical students having families. And that doesn't mean that it was super easy, but they'd seen it before. You were not the first person to do it. No, not at all. There were four women in my graduating class who had kids during their time in medical school, and at all different points from second year of med school through fourth year of med school. People, I think traditionally think that if you're going to have kids during med school, you should wait till your fourth year because it's a little bit of a less intense year. I really felt like I didn't want to start internship year with a baby under the age of one. I thought it would be a little easier to start internship year with a child that was slightly older, So I actually started my internship year with a two year old. And I would say the things that have changed the most are that there's been a big shift in both my time at home but also my husband's available time at home. So my oldest was born in August of two thousand and seven, and about three weeks before he was born, my husband and I had this argument because we ran into each other in the hallway in our apartment building. We lived in New York City at the time. It was like four forty five in the morning, and I was leaving for work and he was coming home from work, and we had this huge argument because we were supposed to have dinner with friends that night, and he kept saying that we had dinner with friends tomorrow night, and I kept saying, no, no, it's tonight. And it took us like five minutes to figure out that we were talking about the same night. It was just I was starting my day and he was coming home to go to bed, and we had really not given a lot of thought into how we were going to deal with adding a baby to this, because because you didn't Best of both worlds podcasts had not yet started. So I'm just kidding exactly. But my son was born, and the economy went into a huge recession and my husband was basically under employed for about two to three which essentially meant that he didn't have a lot going on at work and he had much more regular hours, and I had a lot going on at work and predictable most of the time, but pretty irregular hours. We also managed to find ourselves a really fantastic nanny who really kind of fell into our laps, and she helped smooth a lot of these transitions for us. Yeah, Julie, one of the things you've commented on our blogs, which I think is so fascinating is because of the timing of the recession, your husband wound up doing things that he might not have had the situation and the timing been different. And maybe your residency would have forced some of that anyway, but because it coincided with him finding some extra time because of the bad economy, he wound up being more of an equal partner than it might have automatically happened, and so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, because obviously most people don't want to engineer a recession for that to happen, but it was an unexpected benefit of how you guys have then planned things going forward. Sure, so I would say that during my end of medical school and during my residency, because my husband had more time, he really was the primary parent. He was the person who met the nanny in the morning. Oftentimes he was the person who sent her home at night. He was the person who took our son to doctor's appointments and went to his first day of nursery school. And I think that because he spent so much time on his own with my son, Because the other thing you have to remember is I was working a lot of weekends during this time, and he was home at night by himself with our children. I think because he spent so much time with my son and then also with my daughter by himself, he developed his own expertise and sort of how to get things done around our house and how to manage our kids. I also think because he's a man, he had many fewer issues and hang ups around outsourcing. He had no qualms about talking to our nanny about doing laundry, He had no issue finding the dry cleaners that picks up and delivers. He was really set to think about outsourcing absolutely everything that he could during that time. And he also had no issues about using childcare outside of his work hours. So if he felt like he really needed a sitter on Saturday when I was going to be at work for thirty hours straight, he had no problem getting a sitter and going out with friends on Saturday evening. And I think that as a result, he sort of set the tone in our household for how we were kind of going to utilize a lot of these resources. The other thing is that that meant that when our time availability shifted a little bit, because he has definitely now ramped way back up and is working typical big law partner hours again and I am in a little bit more of a predictable outpatient role, the balance and how we take care of things around the house has shifted, but it's shifted to an equilibrium, not to one person really being a primary parent. We definitely have our specific roles, but I think that we've found a good balance because of that awesome, Well, I want to hear more details there. We are just going to take a quick break and we will be right back. Hey, listeners, the new year is about growth and change. We've got lots of resolutions, many people looking to do big new things in their lives. And if you're a business owner looking to grow your business, LinkedIn can help you find the right hires that can set you up for a strong year. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills you're looking for, so you can hire the right person fast. Things like collaboration, creativity, adaptability. LinkedIn looks beyond the work skills and puts your job post in front of qualified candidates who match your business requirements perfectly. That's how LinkedIn makes sure your job post is seen by the people you want to hire, people with the skills, qualifications, and other intro that will help your business grow. It's no wonder that a person has hired every eight seconds with LinkedIn, and why companies rate LinkedIn jobs as the number one hiring platform for delivering quality hires. Find the right person for your business today. With LinkedIn jobs, you can pay what you want and get the first fifty dollars off. Just visit LinkedIn dot com slash best of again that's LinkedIn dot com slash best of to get fifty dollars off your first job. Post terms and conditions apply. We'd like to share it a little bit from our sponsor, door Dash. DoorDash is one of my favorite things to do when I am stuck at work and I really want to treat myself to a nice lunch, whether that's sushi or a burger or any kind of a local place. If you have a long day at work, a top day at school, or end up stuck at the office, you can treat yourself to the meal you deserve on demand from your favorite restaurant. The restaurants come to you with door Dash. The platform connects you to your favorite restaurants in your city. Ordering is easy. Chose the DoorDash app and choose what you want to eat and a dasher will bring it to you anywhere you are. Not only is that burger place you love on DoorDash already, but over three hundred and ten thousand amazing restaurants are too. Door Dash connects you with door to door delivery in over three thousand, three hundred cities. It's a lot of cities, all fifty states and Canada. You can order from your local favorites or choose from your favorite chains like Chipotle or Chick fil Ay or the Cheesecake Factory. So don't worry about dinner. Let dinner come to you or lunch in my case. With DoorDash. Right now, our listeners can get five dollars off their first order of fifteen dollars or more when they download the door Dash app and enter promo code best Of. That's five dollars off your first order. When you download the door Dash app from the app store and enter promo code best of. Once more, that's promo code best of for five dollars off your first order from DoorDash. Well, we are back with Jillian Goddard, who is a practicing endochronologist mom of four. She's been describing how how she and her husband got things done during all her medical training and such, and how they found an equilibrium with all of that. So let's talk about your schedule now, Jillian, and how you guys manage your household now sort of the tricks and things like that. You have to make two big career, four kid life work. Sure, so I would say. The first thing we do is that we definitely each have our allotted sort of time of day that we're responsible for. So typically my patient day starts at seven o'clock in the morning, three days a week, so I am up and out of the house before anyone else is awake, hopefully unless something has gone terribly wrong. I here, well, there's definitely been years where we've had early rising babies and all of a sudden, I'm getting ready to go to work with an infant crawling around my legs in the bathroom. But our youngest is four now and tends to sleep past my departure time at this point. But what that means is that my husband is completely responsible for the mornings, so even if I'm there in the mornings, it is really best for me to stay out of the way. He's responsible for making lunches, He's responsible for getting everybody dressed and up and ready to go. He's responsible for making sure that the backpacks are packed. I don't know how lunches get made in my house, and I don't care to waste any brain space knowing it gets done. Everyone eats every day, and so that is just not within my purview. I then tend to get home earlier, and some days I'm home even before my kids get home from school, and so I take on more organization around the after school time. I help our ow pair drive. If i'm home, I am one of the many people in our house who's responsible for getting dinner on the table. I definitely have some homework supervision. And then my husband typically arrives home on good days around six forty five or so, and we will actually have a late family dinner three times a week usually. And if you had told me when my oldest was two that we were going to be having family dinners at seven pm, I would have laughed at you. But it works for us at this point. And then we do the bedtime routine and that we sort of divide and conger on. It's become. It started out as something where we had a bunch of kids to put together put to bed all at once. It's morphed into a little bit of a rolling bedtime as our older kids have hit puberty and suddenly want to stay up till all hours of the night. And then, you know, our other jobs around the household kind of center around that type of thing. So we split up grocery shopping. I do all the online grocery shopping. He goes to the farmer's market and to the regular grocery store. Our OH pair will go to the regular grocery store. We keep a very complicated family calendar so that we know when we need extra help in the evenings. I typically am responsible for making our O pair schedule, but we definitely if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't exist. And don't assume you have coverage for it. And do you use a Google calendar for that or what is your preferred tool? Sure, so we actually use the Cozy app. And the reason we like that is because it's easy for to integrate our OH pairs. So you can easily add, ad and remove a member of the family, and you can change their privileges as far as what they can add and not add to the calendar. And so as we have OH pairs come and go from our household, that's a really useful feature. My husband does use Outlook at work and it does sync with his Outlook calendar at work. Yeah, I know that that is a common stumbling point for people trying to figure this out. If they can integrate the work thing because then you could automatically see if like, oh, there's a work dinner he's accepted, and so I mean, yes, he should tell you as well. But it's like worst case scenario. At least it's on there. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the O pair situation and how you arrived at that as the right one, what the rules are about that, and the scheduling, And I love what you just mentioned if you still need another you still need a second adult, Like you've got four kids they're driving to you know, six different activities on a day doesn't work with one driver anyway most of the time, So talk about how you manage all of that. Sure, So we have had O pairs for about three years now. Before that, we had two nannies. Our first nanny we had for six years, and then our second nanny we had for about three years. And then when our youngest child was about a year and a half hold, we decided to switch to a situation where we actually have a part time sitter who cover and kind of housekeeper too who covers mornings. She works from seven thirty to eleven every day, and then an a pair we really couldn't do just an O pair because we need too many childcare hours, although in the future, when our youngest child start school, that will no longer be the case and we'll be able to just have an O pair. Theaon we switched just because we were finding we needed a lot more flexibility, particularly in the afternoons as our kids got older. So until we had our fourth child, I really only had childcare coverage when I was at work, and that was probably a rookie mistake. Quite frankly, I really probably should have gotten more childcare much earlier, but I didn't, and it was around the advent of our fourth one that I really realized that I couldn't be handling the afternoons on my own. My oldest child also started a travel soccer league get around that time. Yeah, that'll kill you. So one he's in is not so terrible, but it definitely involves more driving than the rec league did. And so the other thing is we knew we needed someone who could drive, and we found that for us we had the spare room available, and so we felt like we could leverage that in a more affordable option, so more hours but a little bit lower cost. Because the O pair is set to forty five per week as the condition of the visa. That is true and o pair can work forty five hours a week, they can work up to ten hours a day, and they need at least one weekend off per month and at least a day and a half off per week, although that doesn't have to be on the weekend. So we typically utilize all forty five of those hours, and we probably have our pair work about fifty percent of the weekends. On the weekends, we mostly use her for a Saturday night date night, and on the weeks where she has the weekend off, we usually will do it date night on a Thursday or a Friday, ending on what other things are going on, whether there's a local charity event. We tend to be very involved in our community. It's a community that tends to be very involved, and so that's what we do. And when she works on we can have her work on Saturday night because she has Sundays off and she has Mondays off, she has the first half of the day off. Excellent. So I wonder about it just your parenting, you know, things you've learned over the course of having four children, you know, any any things that work really well for you as you manage a larger family. Things you know, to do with the fourth that were rookie mistakes for the first. Younger children definitely benefit from a fair amount of benign neglect. I think that, you know, we really started parenting trying to be the parent who made all the baby food and read all the books and bought all the really great, you know, educational toys. My son never viewed a screen that had anything going on in until he was about two years old, and you know, I feel like we kind of micro managed to the degree that we could kind of every little milestone and change with him. My fourth child basically lived in a car seat. He slept in a device that is now discontinued because it got him through the night. He started helping set the table when he was two years old, and he can get his coat and shoes on and do all kinds of things for himself that my oldest definitely could not do at that point. I also just think we are so much more relaxed, like nothing, nothing gets us anymore, and there is I think a certain disadvantage in Sarah. I don't know if you agree with this or a certain disadvantage your kids might say. To being a physician, my kids say they basically have to have a fever of one hundred and five, or have be bleeding, or have like bones sticking out before they get taken to the doctor for anything other than a well child. Visit pretty much to the point where I had to forcibly write a doctor's note to allow my third child to continue attending school even if her runny nose was yellow or green. I was like, I will do let search. There is nothing the important part, she's going to school. She's fine. I actually once wrote my own doctor's note because I was the physician who removed the stitches from my son's eyebrow, and they wouldn't let him return to Pe without a doctor's note. Well, it's good that you were able to get those out for him. But speaking of things you do for fun, Jillian, you mentioned you and your husband do a lot in your community, and I know you run, you do stuff with friends. So how do you how do you make space for that? How does that? How does that fit into everything? So it goes on the cozy calendar basically like your workouts go on the cozy calendar. Really, the workouts probably don't unless I'm planning to do something unusual. So I have a set Saturday and sometimes Saturday and some excuse me, and sometimes Sunday morning run that I do with a friend locally. So we run from seven to eight in the morning on Saturday mornings, pretty much rain or shine, and we do it. She always talks about how her kids aren't up when she leaves the house, and I think, my kids haven't been up when I leave the house at seven, like once in the three and a half years. So we've been doing it. But so we do that. I don't see patients on Wednesdays, and so I typically work from home on that day, and so I work out on Wednesdays. I always work out on Sundays, whether or not, whether or not I work out with my friend. So those things are just sort of set in my routine. But recently a friend of mine and I were talking about we're going to start doing taking tennis lessons together, and so that's going to have to go on the calendar. My husband plays tennis. He has a weekly tennis date, and that goes on the calendar. Book club goes on the calendar the minute it's scheduled. I a so we have a very active community. So we moved to our town because it has an excellent public school, and so did everyone else who lives there, basically, but it tends to be a very active, involved town and so those types of things. So I have sat on a board that helped select school board members currently serving on the vestry at our church. All of those meetings and obligations just go on the calendar the minute that they happen, and we do definitely meet in person a couple of times a month or more often at this time of year because things tend to get really busy, just to sort of sort through the calendar, make sure we're going to have enough childcare to get us through the week, and sort of troubleshoot. Essentially. The other thing we don't have that I think a lot of dual career couples have is neither of us travels much for work, and so that does simplify things a little bit. I'm guessing there's like maybe a couple times a year and that's it or not. Even My husband travels a couple of times a year for work, and more recently a little bit more often to deal with aging parents. Neither of us live close to our families, and I travel once or twice a year for conferences. Yeah it makes sense. Well, Jillian, we always end with our love of the week, as you know, as the best of both worlds listener. So Sarah and I can go first, so you can think about it. Sarah, what are you thinking about this week? Well, this month I get to attend a very fancy wedding and I haven't gone to a wedding in a while, and I was just thinking how weddings are really fun, especially when you're not in that wedding season where you're going to one like every other month and you kind of get fatigue. Now it's much more rare. I'm sure as our kids get older and we end up in the like barmuts fora circuit, it's like going to be not that fun again. But right now we're in a lull, so I'm super excited, and there's parts of this wedding where the family's invited, and I've already reserved my gown on rent the runway because it's black tie and a very fancy venue in Miami, So weddings there you go. Yeah, that sounds great. Winter weddings are kind of I guess in Miami you can do it whatever, you should do it whenever. That's yeah, Well, I got to say, like, I actually kind of like the whole bar mitsva thing. I mean, I'm not really getting invited to them. It's my kid who's getting invited to them, right because he's in seventh grade and so that's when they are all happening. But it's just sort of a fun evening activity for them. And since since we're not Jewish, there's somewhat of a limit on it, so there's not going to be so many, which I'm sure if you are, you know in your synagogue you have them then every week and have to in fact coordinate with the other parents so that it's every week as opposed to like two on the same night that they would all be expected to go. But you know, it's fun to see the kids get dressed up and have them go have a semi adult party. I'm just enjoying seeing this right now. So that could be my love of the week. So along the lines of getting older kids out of the house in the evenings, I would say that my love of the week is an event that takes place at my in the middle school where we are called teen Night. I used the word teen pretty loosely because the kids are eleven, twelve, thirteen. We're there, but each grade gets a couple of Friday nights during the school year where the PTA organizes a teen Night for them at the school. They have food, they have a DJ there's like a karaoke room, a room where there's just a bunch of boys playing video games, and it feels grown up to them. They feel like they're doing something kind of fun and cool, but without the pressure of like a dance kind of situation. And so my son recently went to his first one. He's in the sixth grade, and had a really great time, and we're looking forward to many, many more. That sounds way more fun than a dance a middle school, especially if you're an eleven year old boy. All right, well, Jillian, thank you so much for joining us. We've learned a lot from you, so thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. All right, Well, now that was a great interview. We've enjoyed hearing from Jillian. And now we have our question, our listener question. So shall I read it? Sarah? Yeah, this was kind of like a like. My heart hurt a little bit when I read this one. So yes, so I don't get all tierry. You can go okay, good thing. We're recording this ahead of time, so I'm not going to get all tierry. The baby so this This person wrote in that my husband and I work with full time in well paying, demanding jobs. We both work about forty hours a week, so normal full time, but full time, although his occasionally includes the odds Sunday for a few hours. Anyway, they commute one hour each way every day in separate directions, and she says they looked at places to live closer to work, but the places in between just weren't going to work out for all sorts of reasons, probably related to a school and location and things like that. They're both pretty committed to their careers. However, we are finding the daily grind quite overwhelming. They have two kids, ages eight and six, who do extracurriculars, plus have homework and reading each night, and she says, by the time we get home and do the nighttime routines homework and dinner, we find we are usually too tired for exercise or quality time. Not to mention that I work super early to try to pick the kids up, and he does drop off, so it feels like we're almost living in different time zones. Anyway, all this is taking its toll. Neither of us has flexible employers to allow us to work from home or flex hours. Our kids are in childcare, so early care or aftercare on either side of school, and I feel like we are going through the motions. I've tried to pack in lots of fun stuff on the weekends, but then come Monday morning we are either exhausted or wishing away the week to Friday. Again. I just feel like there has to be a better way. We do want the best of both worlds, but she says, right now it feels like work is getting the best of us rather than family life. Any ideas, tips or perspectives would be greatly appreciated, So what do you have for there? I just I don't know. Maybe it was the mood I was in as I read this email, but I just felt a little bit of pain coming through this, and I was putting myself in her shoes and found that, Yeah, I think I would be pretty unhappy too with their current setups. So I do think, you know, as she wrote this email hopefully, but didn't you. I mean, I gotta say just yeah to interrupt play Devil's Advocate, this is kind of what you had, Like you were commuting forty five minutes when you were in Miami. I had time to ex right, and I had well, so why does it she it's a good I guess that's a good pride. That's what I think she's gone from. Like if she's working forty hours a week and she has an hour commute on either side, that's eight to six, right, or maybe it's seven to five in her care Well, actually, I think I think the main difference between my life and this person's life ding ding ding and nanny that's like, yeah, that's why I was happy in this person. It's not because you know, she talks about like doing nighttime routines and being too tired, and they're like dropping off early care and after care and again like somehow the not having time to answers like I took that personally, like I'm like, oh, that would suck, Like you're driving an hour to work and you never get your work out in. But again, I mean you're awake for okay, seventeen hours a day. And you're gone for ten. There's there's some times I see what you're saying. I mean my thoughts were that they that they did need to look at maybe some of the big pieces, and maybe the answer is an O pair or nanny, like maybe that would take away some of kind of the housekeeping work that is what is making I mean, I don't know what's making them too tired to do anything else other than work because their kids are eight and six, and like, God help me, I think like if I just had Annabelle and Cameron, like it shouldn't it wouldn't be that terrible. And a lot of after school activities at that age. Hopefully you can find ones that are bundled, you know, with their schools to maybe minimize some of this shuttling at that age. You know, it's not like they're ten and in some very specific competitive thing. So I mean, yeah, the big things I think they should think about if they can or there are there another childcare option that would kind of give them a little bit more flexibility and that they could potentially then use to take a couple of nights to for themselves. Yeah, yeah, no, because if they didn't have to, maybe it's said, it's you know, getting up early in order to get to the kids to before care or something because they don't have this right exactly, that's a picture. You're getting up at six am, they're like packing everything up, they're doing lunches like it's all this stuff. Then they have to drive even earlier because the kids are in before and after care. And when kids are in before and after care, like then you're right, a lot of times they don't get their homework done, and then there's a lot of like you have five, you know, a backpack full of stuff and a half eaten lunch at six pm and nobody's made dinner. Like I'm stressed out thinking putting myself in this person's situation, and I do see why they're exhausted and don't feel like they have time. But I think they said they're both well paying, so the answer is going to have to be to get some help. Now. I guess if they were not in well paying jobs, that's not going to be necessarily, but they they said well paying, well paying, demanding jobs, so yeah, I think they need the support to allow this to work. I mean, I was reading in this that she feels like, you know something has to change if it doesn't actually have to change in terms of the jobs, and I don't think it has to change in terms of that or where they live. It has to change in terms of the amount of support they have on the home front, because yeah, I said, you could be gone from the house for fifty hours a week, but there's still quite a bit of time. So the question is why are they not feeling that way, especially when your kids are not toddlers right like that they don't physically require your presence every single second. So I think there's also narratives we tell ourselves, like and I worry that this listener is telling herself a story where it just doesn't work, like we can't have kids in before care and aftercare and have two big jobs and commute, like it just can't work. Well, yeah it can, but it maybe it's the before care and aftercare that needs to go in that you need another adult around who can do some of these things that you guys are currently taking on yourselves outside of that ten hours that you're gone each day window. So yeah, and I do think you know the grass it's going to the grass is gonna get greener. No, that's not the right phrase. But things are going to improve, I think pretty quickly, because eight and six is going to become eight and ten pretty soon. I mean, it should not be a hardship to put an eight and six year old even to bed. So that's something that perhaps just on the little things front, you could do an alternating with your husband where you know you're in charge of Monday Wednesday and he's in charge of Tuesday Thursday, and you completely compartmentalize it so that in your mind you know that like you get to relax or exercise or take a class or do your thing on the nights. Because again, like I'm happy. The thing I have a little harder time I get. I get the stress of the driving and the commuting and the thing. The thing I don't get as much the stress of is the the ages of the kids and sort of the the degree of involvement in the parenting, because I I do feel like maybe these kids could be capable of some more independent Yeah, yeah, time, I think that that could be the case too, And maybe look at the schedule and see where you can fit. It doesn't have to be daily exercise, like it's not going to that may not happen but yeah, certainly, like one time during the week and then two times on weekends and next thing you know, you're exercising three times a week and life feels a lot better. And turning the commute into me time too, like being very cognizant of doing fun stuff on your commute, whether that's listening to awesome podcasts like ours and various others you can do, or audiobooks or great music or whatever it is, but really kind of enjoying that time as you time and whatever it is that would would make you feel good about it. Yeah. So I hope at the time this airs that this person has already by writing the email, realized that there are opportunities for them to hopefully feel a little bit better and feel like life has more meaning and they're not so overwhelmed. Yeah, exactly. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with doctor Gillian Goddard about her life and then also addressing a listener question about how to make the two big career life work. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoebox on Instagram and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together