Six months before his son, Skylar, was born in 1997, Bryan Levey walked into his manager's office at Wonderware Corp., the software outfit where Levey had worked for 14 years as an engineer. He asked his manager for a two-month paternity leave, and he added, "When I come back, I'm pretty sure it's going to be for four days a week." Levey intentionally didn't frame this statement as a request. He waited for an objection, but it never came. Rather, his boss welcomed his good sense.
Levey, 39, had just reengineered his own career. Now he stays home and cares for Skylar one day a week. His wife, Lisa D'Annolfo Levey, 36, normally works four days a week as well -- although she is putting in fewer hours and consulting on contract now that she is eight months pregnant with their second child. Like DeGroot and Lutzner, they alternate feeding, bathing, and playing with their son when he's not in preschool.
"We're a little weird," Lisa says. "We define our time carefully. If it's not your night to be responsible for Skylar, you can do whatever you want." But the Leveys think that the arrangement makes them both better parents, in part because it gives them time for themselves and for each other -- time when they don't have to be "on."
Lisa and Bryan are well-educated, accomplished professionals. They're in demand. Bryan just said no to an entrepreneur friend who was searching for a CTO for his growing company. "Wouldn't that be exciting?" Bryan muses. "But it would throw everything out of balance." The Leveys believe that there will always be opportunities in the workplace. They also think that more couples could live and work the way that they do, given the will.
But they understand why others don't. What they've accomplished has taken foresight and willpower. "We're very intentional about our lives," Lisa says. "We've been putting the pieces together for 12 years," ever since they were introduced at a football tailgate party. They have mapped out their life and career changes months or even years in advance, each time carefully calibrating and adjusting for the implications. "This doesn't just happen to you," she says. "There are trade-offs."
In order to work part time, they have lived below their financial means consistently and have saved aggressively. They certainly have abundance in their lives, but it is an abundance of time, security, and flexibility. So they live in a modest house with purple trim on a quiet street in Woburn, Massachusetts (by design, what they could afford if they chose to live on just one salary). Most of their friends have bigger homes than they do. Bryan will sometimes walk into a friend's house and marvel at the spacious dining room or at the great work room. He has to remind himself, "I like the way we live. That friend may be more successful financially, but what price has he paid for it all? You have to redefine success. I'd have to say that I'm successful too, because I'm enjoying my weekends and because I know how to burp a baby."
And yet when the director of development left Wonderware recently, Bryan decided at the last minute to put in for the job. He knew that he was qualified and that he could do the job well. He was annoyed when he learned that he had applied too late.
What troubled him more, though, was the response of the supervisor who was handling the search. "Oh," the manager said. "Your name never came up." Bryan was stunned. Had his part-time schedule taken him that far out of circulation? Was he suddenly less valued? Ten years earlier, he was a fast-track 28-year-old who was managing 40 engineers. And now?
He has mixed feelings about not getting the job. It would have forced him to return to work full time, creating tension at home. He wouldn't have been happy. Yet the supervisor's throw-away remark still haunts him. "It really bothered me," he says.
Can Jessica DeGroot save America's marriages? She dreams of creating a national network of ThirdPath affiliates to run workshops and deliver publications to help stop the insanity. Mostly supported now by private donors and by a grant from the Roy A. Hunt Foundation, she hopes that the organization will eventually bring in more revenue through workshop fees, royalties, and other related forms of income.
ThirdPath is challenging the intertwined inertia of history and economics. Men and women continue to resist any divergence from traditional, gender-based family roles, largely because organizations still reward employees who stick to the old way of doing things. And employers see no reason to change the rules until family roles force their hands. Egalitarianism loses in marriage. Women lose. A classic chicken-and-the-egg standoff.
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