In the Struggle to Balance Work and Home Life, Here Comes Baby No. 4

The rare tranquillity aboard a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles highlights for me how much my life has changed since co-founding my nonprofit organization, and it occurs to me that I may not be ready for my fourth child, scheduled to be born in mid-June. This is my last overnight trip before I sit grounded in Boston, waiting for the next blessing in our already hectic lives.

I realize that my wife and I have in many ways already been living with a fourth child for years, Jewish Family & Life. The organization began seven years ago as a child-rearing magazine and book by the same name, and we vowed to live the values we preached. My kids were 3 and 1 at the time. Our office has maintained a very family-friendly orientation, although that has applied more in theory than reality for me, its CEO and the person who carries the primary responsibilities for fund raising. After all, Jewish Family & Life has to eat, and I am its primary breadwinner.

As my paternity leave nears, some of my colleagues are apprehensive. I fathered many of our key enterprises and new ventures, and there are many proposals in play that carry my name. My leave will be two weeks, which on the surface doesn’t sound like a long time. But my longest vacation has been two work days, much to my board’s chagrin, so the organization has had no experience with a prolonged absence. Beyond this, I have a fear that until now has gone unarticulated: After my return, how will I be able to catch up and stay on top of my work when I will have fewer hours to put into it and less energy?

I realize that as an organization matures, what it needs from its parents evolves as well. And just as growing children are encouraged and free to make their own decisions, so now do most of the staff members at Jewish Family & Life. But some responsibilities necessarily still fall to me. My challenge is to figure out how be a good founding father and dad as the needs of both the institution and my children become far more complex and multidimensional.

While the organization has seen my family grow once before, there were significant differences. Our third child, Adar, whom we adopted from Ethiopia three years ago when he was 9 months old, miraculously began sleeping through the night as soon as we brought him home. I was spared the exhaustion that will accompany this new baby. Our organization then was also half its current size, the economy was hot, I was younger, and foundations were pitching us to consider taking on new projects they envisioned.

The pressures on me and my organization are greater this time around, and we have tried to prepare everyone as much as possible, notifying our top donors and organizational partners. And this baby is arriving in the summer, a time when much of the office’s external work slows down, as donors vacation and our organizational energies are focused internally on getting ready for the fall High Holy Days and the beginning of a new cycle.

Also, we have a strong chief operating officer in place to manage most of the internal operational tasks.

I even have fantasies of writing our next strategic-vision document and an essay about the future of Jewish life during my two weeks of leave, with a sleeping baby by my side.

But scaling back my outside obligations in anticipation of the baby’s birth has been hard. I recently received an invitation to accompany Edgar M. Bronfman, one of our key supporters, on an important World Jewish Congress mission to Israel to meet with the prime minister and many top officials. These opportunities are among my most favorite parts of my job. For nearly 20 years, Edgar has served as a father figure for me in nonprofit life and has been nurturing while continually raising the bar. I think I have made him proud, but I had to tell him that I could not join him in Israel because of the imminent arrival of our new child.

“Mazel tov!” he said, and I knew there would be future trips.

My travel schedule has been the biggest flash point in my relationship with my wife, Susan. As lead fund raiser for a national institution with national backers, I am most successful when I meet our donors face to face and have them introduce me to their friends and contacts. New England is notoriously ungenerous in comparison to the rest of the country, and there aren’t in Boston the kind of staffed Jewish foundations that exist in Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Foundations in these cities have been the bread-and-butter of our organizational life and growth.

In addition to concerns about finding time for travel in the future, I wonder how I will be able to take on new challenges and help identify ways for the organization to grow. I recently asked my first board member and spiritual adviser, Elie Wiesel, for guidance, and he gently commanded me to write every day, even for a half-hour. I would love to start, but do not yet have a vision of what I can sacrifice to make that time.

“Do it,” says Susan, seemingly unmindful that it will likely affect both home and work. But Mr. Wiesel has credibility with her. Three years ago I had to be in Los Angeles for a series of meetings that conflicted with an important parent-child event at our children’s school. While in L.A., Mr. Wiesel and I were on the phone, and when he realized I was skipping the event, he commanded, “I am your teacher, you are my student. Go home.” I changed my flight, took the red-eye, and surprised Susan and Aliza by slipping into the event within seconds of when the parental presentation of a prayer book to our daughter began. In retrospect, I don’t even remember which meetings in L.A. I missed, but I remember vividly the ceremony at the school.

Nice story, I think to myself, but I know it has been the exception lately and not the rule. The only way to change the balance is if I can find a fund-raising partner and if we can raise more general support rather than project support. Project funds, which even in this economic climate are plentiful, require more of my time and energy because I need not only to raise the money, but also to ensure that my imprint is on the new products.

This is not just the narcissism of the CEO, but the expectation of many of our donors.

Having children who span many years mirrors the varied maturity of many of our organization’s projects. The older endeavors are usually more autonomous, yet still somewhat needy (the parent’s hope for continued usefulness). The newer ones are still heavily dependent and often in need of extra care and feeding.

My board keeps reminding me of my responsibilities to the more established programs even as I am constantly seeding new ones. My wife, too, reminds me that greater simplification at work should enable me to spend more time at home, and when I am home, not to be too exhausted or distracted to be a good parent and partner. I have lately been more successful at work than at home. And here comes the baby.

Our board is not unmindful of this dynamic. Indeed, they encouraged me to take my first vacation this past year. More important, we are on the verge of hiring a senior development director who ultimately will also travel and share some of the burden with me.

Being the dad of both birth and adopted children I hope will provide me with a model in my evolving role as CEO. My birth children not only reflect my values, but they also resemble my features physically. My adopted son doesn’t look like me at all, but I see my values reflected in him as he grows up.

Over time, our donors may have to accept that some of our new programs are going to reflect our organization’s values without having my direct imprint. And I have to accept that reality as well — something I’m working on, although I’m not ready for that just yet. I gave birth to this baby. It by no means has the same hold over my loyalties as my flesh-and-blood children. Yet both, in their own way, reflect my dreams.

But in the fight for my time, this charity is about to have another sibling.

Yosef I. Abramowitz is chief executive officer of Jewish Family & Life, a charity in Newton, Mass., that seeks to stimulate interest in Jewish culture among Jews. He can be reached at CEO@jflmedia.com.