Boundaries & Setting Limits - by Darylynn Starr Rank
November, 2006

My husband recently went into business for himself.  This means he works out of our home.  Which is exactly what I do as well.  We work together on some projects.  Separately on the rest.  But this  means not only that we don’t go into an office every day, but we also don’t have a group of co-workers with whom we interact on a regular basis.

We’re kind of ‘it’.  For each of us. 

Now we both love our work quite a lot.  We care about, think about it.  We’ve even been known to worry about it, one or two million times a day.  So we talk to each other.  Advice and support.  Suggestions and reassurance.  Ideas and, well, pretty much everything you can think of related to work, from each other.

Did I mention my husband recently went into business for himself?  It’s a new business with all the attendant things one has to deal with: lawyers, accountants, Revenue Canada.  It’s a new life for us.  New timing, new issues, new topics, oh my gosh, new paperwork.

Does anybody want to guess what started to happen in our lovely cozy home???

We’d usually wait until we got out of bed in the morning, at least!  But from then on…  Work talk as we fixed our breakfast.  Work talk as we ate our breakfast.  We’d end up on the phone from his office to mine, usually within half an hour.  E-mails back forth.  Calls back and forth.  “Knock, knock, can I ask you a question?”  standing at the door, with one of us having made the trip across the house to the other’s office.

Friday night dates (we try and do it every week) consistently echoed the following phrase.  “Okay, I just want to talk about this for a minute, then no more work talk.”  Note the ‘consistently’, not only across the weeks but within the same dinner, two or three, four or five times.

We’d even sit out in the middle of English Bay in our little rowing shell, “Can I just ask you one more thing about that report?”

We finally figured out we were going to lose our minds if we didn’t figure out ways to draw some lines between work time and the rest of our lives. 

And hey, it’s a real struggle.  Work takes up a lot of our lives.  But we’ve got a few rules now.  Some lines in the sand. 

No work talk ‘til after breakfast!  Date nights and the ocean – work free zones now.  Office doors closed off from the house after 6.  If one of us has to be in one of our offices, okay, but the other person doesn’t have to look at it.
We’re trying to take care of ourselves in this busy crazy world that everybody seems to be in these days.  And it’s hard.  Drawing lines in the sand is really difficult.

Setting boundaries, taking care of yourself in the face of all of the demands of life, spouses, kids, other family, friends, work, and all the other stuff is hard.  Difficult.  Challenging.  Not getting nuts, angry, frustrated, and overdone, seems almost impossible some of the time.  But it’s one of the most important things we have to do for us and for our kids.  Best for us and best for everyone around us.

And our Friday night dates are better now.

Take care, all

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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