Sara

Sara works full-time as the head of analytics for an ad agency, and is the mother of two young children, one of whom has physical and intellectual disabilities. She works both of these jobs, paid and unpaid, from home and finds difficulty setting boundaries between her work and personal life – taking conference calls at school drop-off, and working late, missing dinner. Though her husband is supportive, even encouraging, of her need to decompress, Sara admits that her passion to do her best at work and for her family often overrides her best intentions to find balance.

Parenting a daughter with multiple disabilities is, as Sara puts it, work that never ends. In an average week they have 9 therapy appointments (on top of their son’s baseball schedule). Getting around town requires a wheelchair van and a surprising amount of physical labor, now that their daughter is around 50 pounds. On top of that, Sara sometimes feels guilty that she isn’t able to do more at-home physical therapy with her daughter, and is learning to deal with the emotions that come with allowing that to be.

The time, money, and health pressures that families normally face are compounded by caring for a child with disabilities – a situation that 1 in every 26 US families experiences. 32% of parents of children with disabilities spend 40+ hours per week caring for that child – equal to a second full-time job. It is not surprising, then, that mothers of children with disabilities are significantly more likely to experience depression and anxiety.

In Sara’s sculpture, a solid golden chain links represents an hour of paid work, an open silver chain link represents an hour of unpaid work, and half-open links represent hours when Sara worked at paid labor and unpaid labor at the same time. Spaces in the chains represent hours when Sara was not working.