MANAGING WORK AND FAMILY

As a working mother, Leah Shrum has a lot to juggle.

There's her family, including her husband, Loy, and children, Andrew and Ahslynne. The children not only have homework in the evenings but also are involved in sports, which means getting them to practices. And Shrum and her daughter often ride horses on weekends.

She's on the go a lot for her job as a prevention advocate at Community 2000 Prevention Resource Center, an alcohol, tobacco, drug and violence prevention program, where she coordinates teen groups, goes to meetings and puts on programs.

She's taking nine hours of courses at Southeast Missouri State University, so she has to make time for going to class and doing her own homework.

Plus there are all those incidentals like exercise, shopping, housecleaning, meal preparation and laundry.

"It's impossible to get everything in," Shrum said. "You just have to do what's most important and let some things go."

Shrum's sentiment is a paraphrase of what Debbie Leoni taught in a recent Southeast continuing education class on "Managing Work and Family" that Shrum attended.

"Being a working mother is a big balancing act," said Leoni, manager of fitness and wellness at Southeast Missouri Hospital and herself a working mother. If you don't want everything to fall down, you have to concentrate on holding up the things that are most important to you and letting the rest fall away.

In the time Shrum has away from her job, she tries to devote as much as she can to her family. That means her house isn't as clean as she'd like it and she doesn't cook much, she said. Instead she helps her children with their homework, makes sure the family always eats together, even if it's not homecooking, and plans with her husband to get the children to their various activities. She also sets aside a little time for herself, dragging out of bed at 5 a.m. to go to the gym.

Leoni said it is important to set priorities and stick to them, otherwise frustrations can build when people feel overwhelmed by all they have to do. And those frustrations are often vented on family members.

"You typically dump on people you love because they are there," Leoni said.

Frustrations tend to build throughout the day, Leoni said. So something minor, like a child spilling milk, might set off the rage built up by having to take the kids to school because they missed the bus making you late for work, getting yelled at by a client for an error a co-worker made, learning you've been assigned three projects all due in three days and being reminded by a friend that you volunteered to help at a church benefit.

"The goal in keeping a peaceful home is not letting your frustrations build to the point where something minor causes a reaction," Leoni said.

This means dealing with things as they come up instead of letting them build up through the day.

Roadblocks to doing this for many women, Leoni said, include:

They often won't ask for help, either at home and at work. "Women tend to feel like they have to be everything to everyone and that no one can do the job as well as they can," Leoni said. They need to learn that other people are capable, too.

Women are afraid of being disliked. Women often won't bring up problems because they are afraid a co-worker or family member will take offense. But if there is a problem, it is better to deal with it when it is small than when it has grown into a huge problem you are furious about.

Women won't say no so end up with more than they can do. Before you say yes, ask yourself if it is something you really want to do, if someone else can do it or if life will go on if it doesn't get done, Leoni suggests.

It helps, Leoni said, to set priorities for yourself and put them in writing.

"Times goes so fast that if you don't keep your priorities in front of you, they get lost in busyness," she said.

In setting priorities, Leoni suggests writing down the many things you do during the week, which could include playing with your kids, the tasks you do at work, housework, meal preparation, teaching Sunday school, exercising, cuddling with your spouse, helping with children's homework, talking to friends, working on a hobby, etc.

Arrange them in order of how important they are to you. Then go back through and arrange them in order of how much time you spend on them.

If you are spending a lot of time on things that aren't very important to you, you need to reset your priorities, Leoni said.

There's only a certain amount you can do in a day and you should be devoting the time to things that really matter to you, she said.

"If your family and relationships are suffering, then it's not worth doing it all," Leoni said.

SETTING PRIORITIES FOR YOURSELF

*Put your priorities in writing

*Include in your list the many things you do during the week

*Arrange them in order of how important they are to you

*Compare this arrangement to how much time you spend on each item

*Reset your priorities so you're spending more time on things that are important to you