Is that a virtue or a flaw?

One of the things that might need to get cut from my life, may never have been in my life if it weren't for a basic personality trait of mine, which begs the question of whether it's a virtue or a flaw (or both given context?). This pretty unassuming email came across my desk that they are re-instituting a formerly dead group called GradMoms. The name is mostly self explanatory, it's a group of graduate moms at MIT and they were hosting a lunch. Sounds good to me. During maternity leave, and now beyond, I really enjoyed talking to other people in a similar situation. So I went. Somehow, by the time I had left the hour lunch, I was now in charge of setting up a wiki to keep track of tackling a large issue at MIT, the lack of affordable daycare and support for graduate students with kids. How does this happen, that I go to a lunch and come away with a task. Another layer of things in my life. I'm fascinated and really want to help the cause of bettering support for graduate students with kids at MIT. I understand that change won't help me since I'm graduating, but change here translates to change other places. When I started graduate school, MIT was the only school with a graduate student maternity leave policy. Did that affect my decision? Definitely. I knew I would be hitting my thirties before I finished graduate school, and it was nice to know there was support should I decide to start a family while there. What's happened since? Other schools (like Stanford, Harvard, etc.) have instituted similar policies. So a change at an institute that has to compete for the same pool of graduate students can propagate. When you create a better situation for families in graduate school, you inherently create a more diverse pool of candidates at the faculty level and hopefully then you'll see change at the faculty level for support of work-life balance. So on and so forth, the domino effect of improvement.

Those are my reasons for wanting to be involved, however, already I have cut out exercise to attend more meetings and cut out my own work I do in the evenings to get this stuff up and running. I don't have enough free time anymore to simply add new projects..new projects take away something from my life. So does helping create change when it comes at the expense of my own family and health worth it? Or is it better for me to try and survive my own trials and tribulations? One would think I could do a little bit to help, but this is where my personality conflicts with such a thought. At a second meeting this week, it was clear no one was really in charge..so guess who took charge...yup, me. I saw inefficiency where there could be decisions..so I let my bossy side take over and steer the group to a hopefully productive outcome. The outcome for me? More work, less time.

Done with pumping session #2 for the day.. see you later.