My title, "That's All a Mule Can Do: The Ethics of Balancing Work at Home and on the Job," demands an explanation. Scholars, reporters, and working parents attempt to describe the balance between work on the job and work at home with many different metaphors. Indeed, the word "balance" is itself one of the most common.¹ Some have objected to the use of balancing language because, among other things, it suggests something precarious and subject to imbalance or falling.² Of course, that may be precisely why people choose the metaphor of balance to describe the interaction between employment and family—because imbalance is always a near possibility and often a present reality.

There are other images used to describe this tension—juggling, navigating, even white-water rafting.³ Of course, depending on the state of the water, the size of your boat, and the quality of your crew, navigating and rafting seem more than a little precarious. And juggling is just as subject to falls and errors as balancing, though not normally quite so dangerous—depending on the objects juggled. In the end, however, the biggest downside of all of these images is not so much that they are precarious, but that they are a little too exciting and creative to fit the sweet drudgery and ordinary homeliness of much of our work on the job and in our homes.

So, I have come up with another image that comes from a work-related Southern saying: "That's all a mule can do." My mother recently reminded me of this as we were talking about the many sayings that praised hard work. One of the favorite work maxims in my family, a family of extremely hard workers, was passed on by my schoolteacher grandmother, who had grown up in a sharecropping family and escaped the poverty of her childhood through hard work, a passion for education, and her relentless obsession to give her family a better life than she had had in rural eastern Arkansas.

Wagging her finger, she admonished her family, "Good, better, best. Never let it rest, until your good is better and your better is best." Some family members and I are convinced that this saying and the obsession looming behind it are responsible for our own obsessive work habits on the job, at home, and in our communities. If we want to remind each other of the seemingly excessive expectations of our heritage, we have only to wag our finger and say^, "Never let it rest."