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-- "Tired is my middle name," says Carol Rohder, 41, a single mother of three in Joliet, Ill. She works days as a medical technician and four nights a week as a waitress. "I'm exhausted all the time. I didn't think it would be this hard on my own. I thought once I was divorced the pressure would be off."
-- "You get addicted to overworking," says Nancy Baker-Velasquez, a partner in an insurance brokerage in California, whose husband is a sheriff's deputy on the night shift. "At the same time, you have so many more obligations as a parent now. These days, you have to start brushing their teeth even before they have teeth."
-- "It's not so much that we need to make ends meet," says Jon Hilliard, his three-year-old at his side. Hilliard works for the Street Department in Crown Point, Ind., and as a self-employed carpenter. His wife Sharron is a gym teacher, and together they earn something over $60,000 a year. "It's the way we get extra things. I grew up in a poor family with four kids, and we had no extras. There's no way my kids are going to be like that. We want to make sure that if they're not good athletes or smart academically, they can still go to college."
-- "The most precious commodity to us is time," agree architect Trunzo and his wife Candace, both 41 and parents of two. "We have tried to simplify our lives as much as possible." Candace believes she and her husband are living "better lives than our parents. More hectic. But fuller." James wonders about that. "It's dangerous to use the word fuller. Where is that sense of spirituality that we talked about in the '60s? Where is the time to go up to the mountaintop? Technology is a diversion from life. You can be transfixed. I'm not sure that technology doesn't remove us from each other, isolate us. In architecture we're seeing demands for media rooms. What ever happened to the kitchen as a gathering place?"
Lynne Meadow and Ron Shechtman, both 42, dote on their son Jonathan, 4. "And there's maybe 30 minutes every day," says Ron, "when we don't discuss having another child. But where would the extra minutes come from?" Lynne runs the red-hot Manhattan Theater Club; Ron is a partner in a midsize law firm. They live in a home where the telephone cords stretch into every room, and the nanny starts work at 7:30 a.m. "You can imagine what getting out the door in the morning is like," says Ron. Are there regrets? He ponders, "Can we take the added pressure that a second child would bring?" For the moment, the answer is no.
Parents know all too vividly the effects of the stress they endure in order to keep up with their lives. Addiction to a speeded-up schedule can lead to a physical breakdown from hypertension, ulcers, heart disease, or dependence on alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes. The effect on the psyche is subtler and more insidious. People find themselves growing impatient and restless, and it seems harder to think logically about a problem. Even if two hours miraculously open up one evening, they may be spent watching TV, since people are too tired to do much else.