Escaping To Work It Doesn’t Mean You’re A Bad Parent If Your Job Sometimes Gives You Welcome Relief From Household Stresses

Kay Marchant White spent one stormy weekend in May driving her children to nine different soccer games. The commotion didn’t let up until she walked into work Monday morning.

White manages The Hidden Cottage at NorthTown Mall. There, the scent of a gardenia potpourri wafts through the air, Chopin plays over the sound system, and prints of English stone houses glow on the walls. “It’s a nice, quiet haven away from the chaos of home,” White says.

White, 40, appears to be the perfect example of parents who find their workplace a refuge from home. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described this phenomenon in her new book, “The Time Bind” (Metropolitan Books, $22.50).

A professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Hochschild spent three summers conducting research on the lives of the employees at one Fortune 500 company. She dubbed this company, known for its innovative approach to work-family balance issues, Amerco.

Hochschild found that, like White, many Amerco employees described their work as emotionally satisfying and peaceful, a respite from the stress of raising children.

“At work, ‘No’ means No,” White says. ” ‘No’ never means No at home.”

White’s staff quietly does as she asks. Her four children, however, say, “Wait a second, that’s not fair.”

But there the similarity between White’s experience and Hochschild’s research ends. White logs 30 to 35 hours each week at The Hidden Cottage, scheduling her work around her kids’ activities and making her children her top priority.

At Hochschild’s Amerco, the company offered family-friendly policies, such as parental leave, job-sharing and part-time work, but few employees actually took advantage of them. Only two fathers took parental leave in seven years. Part-time schedules were adopted by fewer than 1 percent of the employees.

Children’s needs were ignored, or carefully time-managed into unsatisfying segments of “quality time.”

Money seemed to be the logical motivation for working long hours, yet Hochschild found that clerical workers were more likely to request part-time hours than highly paid professionals.

Slowly, a metaphor for Amerco’s corporate culture began to emerge for Hochschild: It was a cult.

She noticed that the corporation, despite preaching a family-friendly message, actually rewarded employees for fervently devoting their evenings and weekends to work. Employees didn’t want to neglect their children, but they felt a steady pressure to do so.

“They were going to work in a workaholic cult,” Hochschild concluded. “That does something to your brain.”

The employees’ work-lives became serene havens of managed cheer and upbeat praise, while their home-lives became increasingly chaotic and rigidly scheduled. Although their children longed for more time with them, these employees responded instead to corporate expectations.

Hochschild began to see herself as “a time deprogrammer.” Her new book, and the hours of interviews she’s granted since it was released this spring, have been her attempt to penetrate the carefully controlled thinking of the American business world.

To Hochschild’s disappointment, the national news media managed to cast her research as a conservative condemnation of parents who work.

Newsweek’s cover story was called “The Myth of Quality Time: How We’re Cheating Our Kids. What You Can Do.” U.S. News & World Report called its cover piece “The Lies Parents Tell About Work, Kids, Money, Day Care, and Ambition.”

“The media can only pick up ideas with its own gloves,” Hochschild said in a recent telephone interview.

But Hochschild’s perspective on these issues is actually feminist.

“I think it’s important for us to name a problem and then move to solutions that don’t blame women,” she said.

Hochschild is also the author of “The Second Shift,” which examined the tension over the unequal division of household chores in the lives of working women.

“The message I want to get out is, ‘Hang in there in the struggle to get a workplace that fits us,”’ she said.

“We’re in a stalled gender revolution. Women have gone into the labor force, but their partners have not altered their notion of manhood to reward sharing the care at home. And they’re going to work at a workplace that was originally designed for a traditional man. … It’s no good to paste over that and call it normal.”

It’s no wonder, says Hochschild, that domestic relationships are so strained.

At the request of The Spokesman-Review, several Spokane women recently examined the “workplace as refuge” idea.

One woman, who left a voice mail message at the newspaper and asked it not to use her name, said, “If you’re a parent, your brain is fractured in all different directions. I’ll never forget the shock it was to sit down at my desk and think of one thing at a time.”

This woman found work incredibly restful.

“I also remember pulling up to the house and not wanting to go in because I knew then I would be fractured again,” she said.

Another mother, 41-year-old Kelli Graves, worked as a psycho-educational therapist at Spokane Mental Health until last spring. She quit to stay home with her 9-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.

Suddenly, her well-ordered life disappeared.

On a recent afternoon, as her daughter was dipping her hair into the dog’s leftover bath water, Graves said good-naturedly, “This is the summer of my midlife crisis.

“I used to think that to stay home would be the luxury,” she explained. “Now it feels like the luxury was working.”

Graves already has applied for a part-time job, a solution that researcher Hochschild would endorse.

In her book, Hochschild recommends the adoption of a 35-hour work week, which is common in Norway, Sweden and Germany.

Across the country, working mothers and fathers have been privately struggling with a lack of time for work and family. Some have successfully negotiated satisfying work schedules. But others have failed.

Hochschild said she believes the answer is an organized “time movement.”

“We have to dare to want to change,” she writes. “Feeling that we are always late and low on time, trying to adapt as best we can to the confines of our time prisons - these are all symptoms of what has become a self-perpetuating national way of life.”

A coalition could launch this effort in the same way other groups have successfully banned smoking in public places or cracked down on drunken driving.

This coalition might be made up of labor organizations, feminists, child advocates, and even the federal government, Hochschild said. She envisions this group pressuring companies and politicians into action.

In Sweden, a similar lobbying group exists. Working women who fight on behalf of pro-family issues have named themselves the Support Stockings.

Hochschild imagines Americans campaigning for public policy that supports secure jobs and shorter workweeks. In future elections, she’d love to see politicians called to give their stand on the U.S. family’s “time bind.”

White, The Hidden Cottage manager, has worked her way out of that bind. Work remains refuge.

These days, White greets customers at a cash register surrounded by deep-green lattice work and pink silk camellias. A purplish-black eye glimmers beneath her right eye - the result of a backyard game of Pickle with her four kids.

White just grins.

“I have the best job,” she says.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos