Working women still can’t have it all, Anne Marie Slaughter lamented earlier this year in an article in the Atlantic Monthly.
Leesburg’s Lori Mercer tells a different story.
(Katherine Frey/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Mercer laughs with colleagues at the school.
In her first year as principal at Belmont Station Elementary School, the mom of two is juggling back-to-school nights and staff meetings with football and gymnastics practice. It’s hectic, she says, but she is okay with that.
“We could have made some concessions for me not to work, but I never put myself in position to do that because I like to work,” said Mercer, who is 41. “I never thought about not working.”
Mercer’s mother worked as a medical transcriptionist. Most of her mom friends also work outside the home. It seemed natural to her to have both a career and family. With help from her husband, Chris, and from a support system in the school and the community, she says it’s working for them.
“I love my job,” Mercer said. “Even when I was teaching, without my own children, I worked in the summer because I craved that routine of having to get up, having to be somewhere, having something to do. I always found myself looking for things to keep that schedule. Being happy in what you’re doing makes it easier.”
So she gets up at 5:15 a.m. on weekdays to squeeze in a quiet cup of coffee and a few chores before dragging Charlie, 8, and Emily, 4, out of bed. She does at least one load of laundry each day, sometimes more. And she crawls into bed around 10 p.m., only to get up the next day and do it all again.
Like many moms, her office is a shrine to her dual identity, with family pictures and artwork scattered around, and a stack of Harry Potter books tucked away on a shelf. After a long day at school, she picks up the intercom and pages her children — one a third-grader at her school and the other in preschool at Montessori at Belmont Green across the street — to come to the front office to go home.
She and Chris, a financial manager at TASC in Chantilly, split the household chores, taking turns with cooking and kitchen clean-up. Whoever is not on clean-up duty handles showers for the kids and starts the bedtime routine. Lori takes care of the laundry and making lunches. When one of the kids has to stay home sick, they often split the responsibility so both can work for at least a few hours.
“It’s hard for either of us to take the entire day off if it’s not planned,” Chris said.
On a recent evening at their house, Lori put together a salad, broccoli and potatoes while Chris grilled the steaks for dinner and the kids played at a neighbor’s house. Then they gathered in the kitchen, Chris and Charlie at stools at the counter and Lori and Emily at chairs at the table, and talked about their day while eating.
That was an unusually calm evening, with no football practice or gymnastics, Lori said. Usually, on nights with activities, things are a little more hectic as Lori and Chris tag-team taking kids to practice and having dinner ready. Often on football practice nights, Chris said, they get carry-out and eat as soon as they get home, around 8 p.m.
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