WoMo Word #18: Malibi

July 29th, 2010, posted by Aimee, Tags: Colleagues & Coworkers,Guilt: The Bad G-spot,On The Career Track

Malibi:  noun; a male excuse to avoid blame, especially at work: “Sorry, car trouble.”  (as opposed to female, sincere explanations that evoke little to no sympathy from male superiors or childless coworkers, i.e., “Sorry, puking toddler,” or “back to school night.”)

Lying would have been so much easier. After all, hadn’t I been popping Vitamin C and Zycam for days hoping to stave off the flu that had downed everyone else in the office this year? Would it be that hard to simply call in the morning and beg off from the evening baseball game with claims of a nasty cold that I actually kind of had? But no, I decided to fess up with my coworkers, mistakenly thinking the appeal of a working mom asking to skip out on the team outing so that she could watch her three-year-old son compete in his first ever swim meet would fall on sympathetic ears. Wrong.

Less than five minutes after sending  the email to my coworkers explaining the predicament (mom away for three days just learned her son’s sporting event conflicted with the team baseball game that had been planned for three months) I received a response from one of my employees chastising me harshly for bailing on my team and the demoralizing message my decision was sending to the junior staff.

To say I was sad and disenchanted would be an understatement. For what seems like the millionth time since becoming a working mom, I felt like a failure at this ridiculous juggling act. Who was I fooling that I could somehow continue to be super executive/super manager/super PR flak while somehow also stumbling through the motherhood thing?

It’s funny how in the movies, they make it all so black and white. When Michelle Pfeiffer bails on her boss and the new client meeting to take her five year old son to his soccer game in “One Fine Day,” for example, the audience cheers! Yah! That’s what a real mom does – puts her kid first. Workaholics are always the villain on the silver screen. But in real life – even though 99.9% of people asked will agree that “family comes first,” few other than other working parents truly support what that saying means when a coworker or boss puts it into practice.

It’s also funny that even people without children of their own seem to conveniently forget all the experiences from their own childhood when they felt slighted, sad or disappointed with a parent who failed to show up at their game or missed a play because they were too busy “working.”

By the way, I’m as guilty of this as the next person. My own dad has lived for too many years under the label of workaholic, and my perceptions of him growing up were of the guy who was always traveling or staying out late entertaining clients, not coaching soccer games or meeting with teachers.  But the other day when I was crying to him about this situation, he told me that he was once severely criticized by a manager for not being a true team player since he dared to scoot out the office door everyday at 5 p.m. in order to get home to my brother – a troubled teenager living with my dad after a 30-day stint in drug rehab needing tons of guidance. Sad to hear that so little changes in the PR agency world after so many years, but I digress. The bigger point is that even though we always thought of my dad as the one who put work ahead of family more often than not, even he was struggling with these issues and conflicted just as I am.

[+] SHARE| SEND TO A FRIEND| 1 Comment| Leave a comment| Tags: Colleagues & Coworkers, Guilt: The Bad G-spot, On The Career Track