People you love. Work you care about. Time to kick back and have fun. An impossible dream? Not if you commit to it. Bonnie Schiedel tells how she and four other women took a fresh look at their options and created the lives they wanted.

Last year at this time, I was in my office in downtown Toronto, watching the street scene unwind below. Jennifer Lopez was filming a movie right outside and bike couriers were bobbing and weaving through the traffic. If I could have opened my sooty window, I would have been blasted with the cacophony of city noise and the fizz of energy that lights up an urban centre.
And this year? This year, I am in Ignace, Ont., a northern lakeside town of 1,500 or so. It's 245 kilometres west of Thunder Bay, which, I believe, officially puts me in the Middle of Nowhere as far as my friends and family are concerned. When I look out my window now, I see a trim red-and-white church and a graveled sweep of land spiked with jack pines and wildflowers. I watch the ravens. One flies full tilt at the window and veers up at the very last moment, landing with an audible thump on the roof. I know how he feels--sometimes you get going so fast that you have to make a radical change in direction. I had a good life in Toronto, but it wasn't the life I needed. So, I changed it and I'm starting to find that elusive balance between work and everything else that so many women seem to be seeking.
Achieving work-life balance is tricky - you know when you've got it and you know when you haven't, but no one can give you a map and show you how to get there. That's because a sense of equilibrium is as personal as a fingerprint. If you're a single workaholic, maybe it means choosing one night a week when you refuse to work late and have popcorn for dinner so you can attend a conversational Spanish course instead. If you're up to your eyeballs in motherhood, perhaps you get there by making a trade with your neighbour: she watches your kids for an hour and you and your partner walk her dog and grab some couple time.
Being balanced isn't a permanent state either - subtract a colleague at work, add a renovation at home or multiply chicken pox by two kids and your life changes so fast you can get whiplash. I'm not talking about a static existence, where you have every last detail figured out. (Booor-ing.) On the most basic level, balance simply means finding time for yourself, the people you care about and your job, without sacrificing one for the other.
For me, finding that harmony meant moving from a city of four million people to a town that doesn't even have stoplights. But it does have the person I want to be with. He's a wildlife and fisheries biologist, and the caribou and spruce trees he's responsible for are scarce in downtown Toronto. After eight years of the long-distance-relationship tango (I once flew 2,000 kilometres and he drove for four hours so we could have a romantic weekend in Winnipeg), we decided it was time for one of those life-altering choices you make when you're young and brave. I was tired of weeping in airports. I was going north.
The hard part - even harder than saying goodbye to my friends and family and giving up my cute apartment - was quitting my job as associate editor at Chatelaine. My boss, Rona Maynard, called me into her office and ominously shut the door. "Have you really thought about what you're doing?" she asked. "You can't want to walk away from this." The words "throwing away your career for a man" were not actually used, but they hung in the air between us.
She had a point. I had worked hard to get that job. But what I think I liked most about it was that I got it when I was only 26, when so many of my former classmates were stuck doing joe jobs and struggling to erase the stubborn "assistant" from their titles. What kind of person would I be without my "oh wow" career?
As it turns out, I'm a happier, more relaxed person. The energy that comes from big-city living invigorates many people but it drained me. There seems to be so much more time now, great helium balloons of minutes and hours I can call my own. That's partly because as a freelance journalist, I now have a five-second commute to my home office, but mostly because I'm able to sock work away in a compartment of my life that's important, but not as important as, say, throwing my snowshoes in the back of the truck and taking an hour on a weekday afternoon to volunteer coach the Special Olympics snowshoe team. There's a fishing licence in my wallet where my subway pass used to be, and the knots of muscle in the middle of my back have finally smoothed out.
Sometimes, of course, I feel like there's a cartoon bubble above my head that says, "Dear God, what have I done?" There are days when I would kill for takeout Thai, a crisp national newspaper delivered to my door or, I shallowly admit, a chance to wear my funky city clothes. I had a rough afternoon last spring when a friend and colleague called me up to tell me about her raise, her big promotion and her new projects. I was genuinely happy for her but I still spent the rest of day under small grey clouds drizzling self-pity over me. I hadn't realized how hard it would be to give up the ego massage that comes from those kinds of recognized accomplishments.
Despite the compromises, I know that being able to take myself off the fast track has been a luxury. For one thing, I rank pretty low on the responsibility scale, without kids or elderly parents to care for. And although I left a steady paycheque behind - not an option for many women - I happen to be making more now and spending less.
Still, moving to the boonies isn't for everyone. So, I talked to four women from across Canadian who are managing their own balancing acts in different ways. They are working every day to fill a combination of roles - employee, artist, partner, mom, whole person - without losing their minds while they're at it. What works for them (or me) may very well make you crazy. But with any luck, learning about our choices will inspire you to dream big, take a risk or two, and create the life you want.

*****
When you think about the music business, certain images spring to mind: gleaming limos, two-martini power lunches, a glass-and-steel office in a 52-storey building. But for Teresa Doyle, a folksinger who runs her own company, Bedlam Records, the preferred mode of transportation is, well, a kayak. Lunch is likely to include the succulent fruits and veggies she grows in her large garden, and work takes place within her rambling house with grey cedar siding in the hills of Caledonia, P.E.I.
Married and the mother of a seven-year-old son, Doyle, 44, realizes that for her, balance means variety. "There's a single-mindedness among a lot of dedicated artists," she observes. "Most of the musicians I know live and breathe their work and often there's not much time for anything else. They're driven! But that's not how I want to live my life. I have a lot of interests and, in spite of the fact that I run this company on my own, it doesn't take up a terribly big chunk of my time."
The make-your-job-fit-your-life approach seems to be working: her last two albums, Celtic tunes for kids, Cradle on the Waves and If Fish Could Sing, won Juno nominations, and two others have won awards. An interest in watercolours - the cover art on her last two CDs is her own - helped ground Doyle even further. "I need creative things to feed me. Since I've begun painting, I feel much more in balance. When things get too lopsided and work pulls me too far away from the other things in my life, I feel it." In addition, Doyle says that being a parent fulfills her both emotionally and creatively. "When people think about having kids, they think about the incredible time commitment. But being a good artist is opening yourself up to the world, you know? And nothing brings you more in contact with other people than having a child. The whole experience is so rich."


As a stay-at-home mom of 13 years, Rochelle Reichert got plenty of that experience. But it was a recent shift from family to work that has helped bring balance to her life. Reichert, 44, was the kind of mom who could help out with school lunch duty, volunteer for field trips and take her kids to every dentist appointment. She was happy with her choice to stay home with her four children, now ages nine to 16. But after her divorce six years ago and all the kids were in school full time, she began to think about re-entering the paid workforce.
Today Reichert is updating her training to be recertified as a dietitian, a profession she last practised 18 years ago. It's a time-consuming effort - she needs to rack up 35 full weeks of practical experience within two years - but she still makes extensive volunteer work one of her priorities. It's that work, mostly within the Jewish community in Toronto, that helps keep her on an even keel.
"Volunteering is very satisfying; that's what gives my life meaning," she says. "Those are the values that I grew up with: you give of your time; you give of yourself. It's wonderful to be a good mom, but it's certainly not all that I do." Reichert also recognizes that time for herself is important, and makes a point of hooking up with friends for a coffee or a juicy book-club discussion. It helps that she's philosophical about her new time crunch too. "I don't go to the gym anymore. I'm active - I love to ride my bike and use inline skates - but this isn't the time when I'll have abs of steel."


For Bev Schmuck, rediscovering the gym has been an essential part of feeling centred. Schmuck, 38, has an eight-year-old daughter and lives in Bradner, B.C. She ran her first marathon last year and often trains by cycling the nine kilometres to her job as an insurance broker. The marathon was a turning point for her. "Being physically active makes me feel good about myself. I've pushed my body to limits that I didn't know I could reach and I think that confidence translates well to the rest of my life," she says. "When you're trying to do that whole juggling thing, where you want to be a good mom and a good wife and do the best that you can for the people that you work with, you have to have a certain level of contentment in your life."
A lot of that contentment starts at home, because Schmuck picked an amazing husband. Not only does he occasionally fill the house with incense and candles for a night of romance, he also cleans it on a regular basis. (The jury's still out as to which act is sexier.) "We've been married for 16 years and at that point in a relationship, things can get stale. You can get stressed out with everyday life; the mundane things can kill a relationship," she says. "We see it as a partnership. We work together to run our household and still find time together and for ourselves."

Deborah Richardson craves time to herself too and finds it in the sweat lodge ceremonies she attends at least a couple of times a month. "We forget that we're balanced by four things: the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. It's important that you try and do something for all those parts of you," she says.
Richardson, 32, knows that that four-way balance is tough. As executive director of the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, she spends her days and often a couple evenings a week hammering out funding proposals, speaking to a variety of different panels about aboriginal issues and connecting with local aboriginal artisans and businesses. She's also married and has a three-year-old girl. "When I first took the job, my focus was only on work. But you have to put things in perspective: if you're just doing one thing you're not a happy person," she says.
So, Richardson has learned to take time for herself. "Attending aboriginal ceremonies like the sweat lodge balances me spiritually. I'm able to pray about all the things that are going on in my life and I'm able to off load a lot of negative energy." Afterward, says Richardson, she feels "cleansed, purified, lighter."

In the end, figuring out what gives you bliss makes for a balanced life. But you have to devise your own special formula. On a recent trip back to Toronto, I did get to eat pad Thai noodles, pore over the newspapers and wear something other than jeans and a T-shirt. But I got back on the plane to Thunder Bay with no regrets. I love that my life is now big enough to include so many more interests and people. Deciding to meander off the fast track is one of the hardest things I've ever done but, wow, is it ever worth it.