Getting Ahead on the Mommytrack

Joyce Leavitt Boudreaux '84, like many of her classmates, is twenty-eight years old, married, and working long hours as an associate in a large law firm. But sometimes she can only marvel at the additional, often clamorous responsibility tugging at her namely, four children. "I get home from work and get their dinner without thinking," she says. "But sometimes I sit back and think, 'what are all these kids doing here?'"

Boudreaux and her husband Greg began dating early in high school, and have been married since they were freshmen in college. At a time when college-edu- cated Americans tend to have smaller families later in life, the Lafayette, California, couple is a blip off the chart. Their children, Brett, Eric, Todd and Nikki, range in age from six months to eight years.

"People at work say, 'God, you have four kids and you're always smiling. I don't understand it,"'Joyce says. "I guess I don't get ruffled easily."

It's a good thing she doesn't. Joyce had to delay finals at Dartmouth to give birth to Brett, and she had to miss the first week of law school to have her third boy, Todd, who was supposed to come before classes began. Greg was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts when their first child was born, and they spent their undergraduate careers moving back and forth from Hanover to Amherst. They got by with a lot of financial aid, especially while Joyce was studying law in San Francisco. To minimize child-care costs, they split baby-sitting duties. Nowadays, Greg works nights, raising money to start a pub and brewery in the Bay Area.

"Having a family forced me to focus a lot earlier on what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go," says Joyce. "I had to sit down and think, 'OK, this might mean I have to drop out of school, or that my social life is shot to hell.'" Children have not derailed Joyce's career or social life, however. "Now," she says, "I think we're ahead of the game."

The Boudreaux's balance of work and family seems almost ideal. "Law school or working in a law firm can give you tunnel vision," she says. "It becomes everything. But kids provide a nice balance; they help you keep your sense of humor and your perspective. At work, I'm the low man on the totem pole, but when I come home Todd says mothers know everything!"

Starting a family so young has its benefits, she claims. Obstacles seem scalable; limitations, malleable. "Since we were younger when we started," she says, "we didn't have any expectations about what people can and can't do. I know that's helped us. 'Sure, let's have another kid. Sure, I'll go to law school.' We just went along and said 'OK, how can we do it?' It seems to be working."

Does the couple plan to have any more children? The answer is a flat "no."

"This is just fine," Joyce says with a smile.

The Boudreaux Bunch: Eric, Greg, Nikki, Brett, Joyce '84and Todd.