A few years ago my husband got seriously ill.
I won’t go into the details – they’re his to share, not mine. But I will tell you what it did to my working life, because I think it’s something a lot of women will recognise even if the specific circumstances are different.
Suddenly I had two full-time jobs. One was the job I was actually paid for. The other was the unpaid, unacknowledged, relentless work of being the person holding everything together while someone I loved was in hospital.
And I tried to do both. Fully. Without anyone at work noticing that anything had changed.
The flexibility that wasn’t
My workplace was, on paper, flexible. I could leave early for hospital visits. I could work from home when I needed to. The language around it was understanding and accommodating and all the right things.
What I didn’t fully register at the time – what I only understood much later – was what I was agreeing to in exchange for that flexibility.
I became a 24/7 employee.
Not because anyone asked me to. Not because there was a policy that required it. But because the only way I could find to fit everything in – the hospital visits, the home responsibilities, the full weight of a demanding job – was to work at the edges of the day. Early mornings before the hospital. Late evenings after I got home. Weekends when things were quieter.
I thought I was managing. I thought I had found the solution.
I was checking emails at midnight. I was sending reports at 6am. I was available, always, because being unavailable felt like the one thing I couldn’t afford on top of everything else.
And I was exhausted in a way that went beyond tired. The kind of exhausted that doesn’t respond to a good night’s sleep. The kind that settles into your bones and starts affecting your judgment and your health and your ability to feel anything very much at all.
I nearly ended up in hospital myself. Not because of my husband’s illness – because of what I had done to myself trying to keep everything running as if nothing had changed.
What I Thought Was Balance
Here is what I told myself during that period. I have flexibility. I can be at the hospital when I need to be. I can be present for my family in a way that would be impossible in a rigid nine-to-five role. This is working.
What was actually happening was this. I had redistributed my working hours across every available hour of the day and night, squeezed my personal life into the gaps, and called it balance because I was technically present for the things that mattered – while running on empty for all of them.
That is not balance. That is the illusion of balance. And it is an illusion that costs women specifically an enormous amount – because we are so practiced at making things work, at filling the gaps, at being the person who holds it together, that we can sustain it long past the point where we should have stopped.
Checking emails at midnight so you can collect the children from school. Working at 6am so you can be home for dinner. Staying online until the rest of the household is asleep so nobody at work notices that your life has other demands in it.
I understand why women do this. I did it myself. I understand the logic of it and the love behind it and the genuine desire to be present for the people who matter.
But I want to say something clearly. That is not flexibility. That is trying to fit 28 hours of living into 24 hours of day. And the hours that get compressed, consistently, are always yours.
The Thing About Midnight Emails
When a woman tells me she checks her emails at midnight because it means she can be home for school pickup, I don’t hear “I’ve found a solution.” I hear “the problem hasn’t been solved, it’s just been relocated.”
The problem isn’t the school pickup. The problem is a working environment that expects full availability during hours that don’t account for the rest of her life – and a culture that has found a way to frame her absorbing that problem as flexibility rather than naming it as what it actually is.
Your children are worth the sacrifice of a few professional norms. I will say that clearly and without apology. Your family, your health, your presence in your own life – these things matter more than your response time on a Tuesday evening.
But here is what is not worth it. Destroying your health, your sleep, your mental resilience and your sense of self so that an organisation can have your full professional output during business hours AND your evenings AND your early mornings AND your weekends, while calling the arrangement flexible.
Work is important. A good role, done well, in an environment that values what you bring – that matters. But it is not more important than you. And any arrangement that requires you to be available at midnight to function is not a working arrangement. It is a warning sign.
How often are you checking those midnight emails? Photo by Anastasiia Nelen on Unsplash
What Midnight Emails Are Actually Telling You
If you are regularly working at hours that belong to your personal life, the question worth asking is not “how do I manage this better?” The question is “what is this telling me about the environment I’m in?”
Because sometimes the answer is temporary. A crisis period. A project with a genuine deadline. A moment that will pass. Those happen and they’re survivable if they’re genuinely temporary.
But often the answer is something else. A culture that doesn’t actually respect boundaries, it just doesn’t enforce them explicitly. A workload that has been allowed to expand because you keep absorbing it. An implicit expectation that your availability is unlimited because you’ve never demonstrated that it isn’t.
And occasionally – more often than it should be – the answer is a role that was simply never designed to be done in the hours it’s supposed to be done in. A job that requires sixty hours of work but comes with a forty hour contract and a flexible working policy that makes the gap your problem to solve.
That last one isn’t a management challenge. It’s a structural problem. And no amount of midnight emailing is going to fix a structural problem. It will only make you sicker while the problem stays exactly where it is.
What To Ask Instead
If any of this is landing – if you recognise the midnight emails or the 6am starts or the working-at-the-edges-of-everything – here are the questions worth sitting with.
Is this temporary or is this the actual shape of this role?
If I stopped being available outside contracted hours, what would actually happen? Would the work not get done, or would someone else have to do it, or would it turn out it didn’t need to be done at all?
Is the flexibility I’ve been offered genuinely two-directional – or does it only ever flex in one direction?
What would I need from a working environment to not have to do this? And does this environment have any intention of providing that?
These questions don’t always lead to leaving. Sometimes they lead to a conversation. Sometimes they lead to a boundary that turns out to be more survivable than you thought. Sometimes they lead to the realisation that the role could work if the workload was actually manageable.
But sometimes they lead to the clear-eyed recognition that you are in a role that will take everything you give it and ask for more, indefinitely, and that no amount of creative scheduling is going to change that.
And that recognition – uncomfortable as it is – is worth more than another year of midnight emails.
Your career matters. Your health matters more. And the organisation that requires you to trade one for the other is not offering you flexibility. It’s offering you the privilege of doing the extra work yourself.
If you want to start getting clear on what you actually need from a working environment – what genuine flexibility looks like for you, what you’re no longer willing to trade – the Engineering Career Clarity Guide is the right place to begin.
[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]
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