How to "do it all": striking the perfect balance between family and work seems an ever-elusive goal, but this Mother's Day could be a time for working parents to discern their priorities--and to look for help and support in their prayer and faith lives.

I keep looking for a seminar on "The Perfect Balance." If such a program on family and work existed, I'd probably drop my day job and franchise the course. The truth is, no seminar can teach me to balance and execute my vocation as a wife and mother, my profession as a lawyer, and my volunteer activities.

We all juggle obligations and opportunities, whether we work in or outside the home. Learning how to "do it all" lies partly in prayerfully discerning how big or small "all" is and accepting that life has phases.

One thing that I have found helps me restrike the balance is taking regular time for prayer.

My mother, Jean, juggled family and work for decades. When her fifth child entered school, she began a career as a teacher in Catholic grade schools. Being a teacher allowed her to be with her family most of the hours we were home. It also allowed her to share her compassion and thirst for knowledge with a generation of students. My brothers and I never felt shortchanged by the fact that our mother worked outside the home. Instead we gradually realized she was sharing her gifts. When she was home with us, she was with us in full: nurturing, laughing, guiding.

That ability to be fully present when with one's family is key. Some days leaving the anxieties and tensions of the workplace at work is almost impossible. Other days it's as easy as exhaling.

Gianna Beretta Molla, canonized just last year, was a working mother in Italy. She had been a physician for a number of years before marrying and having children. She continued to work until illness during her fourth pregnancy overtook her, and she died in 1962 at the age of 39.

Writings about her life don't tell us much about how she handled the competing demands of work and family, but they do make clear that her trust in God was deep and abiding. Having faith doesn't mean that working parents will never second-guess themselves, but faith is the framework that motivates, and accepts, our uneven efforts.

St. Gianna's official biography on the Vatican website notes that "with simplicity and equilibrium she harmonized the demands of mother, wife, doctor, and her passion for life." Alas, for many of us, simplicity, equilibrium, and harmony can seem very elusive.

Sixty-eight percent of married working mothers work full time, an AFL-CIO survey reports. Thirty-eight percent of working mothers work a different schedule from their spouses. While families often maintain staggered work schedules to allow them to share the child care, that also means less time for the parents to spend together. That, too, takes its toll. Single working parents face even greater challenges.

Sometimes we need to step back and examine the demands we ourselves have put on the scale. Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (Riverhead), writes that mothers born between 1958 and the early 1970s are part of an apolitical group caught up in self-perfection and self-control, bred for competition and winning but facing mounting frustration in trying to meet their ideal of what it means to be good parents and accomplished adults.

Warner sees parallels in this post-baby boom group to the women described in Betty Friedan's groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique (Norton), who were obsessed with a push to be "perfect." But should perfection really be the goal?

One mother recently told me about the elite sports team her daughter played for and their exhausting travel schedule during the school year. Why then did they choose that team? "Because, of course, "you want the best for your child, she said.

Well, maybe not. Or at least not the best of everything. Sometimes we parents need to cut ourselves some slack and say, "I'm doing enough." And we also need to tell our children candidly, "You have enough."

Different families face different choices. Some have no true choice in whether both parents work or how much they work. Some parents, mothers as well as fathers, choose to sacrifice career progression for family time. Coworkers, acquaintances, and interest groups can be critical of these choices, but worrying about that seems to be a waste of emotional energy on something that is, at heart, a personal decision. Instead all of us should support parents in their efforts to meet their families' needs at each phase of life.

Warner's book laments a lack of social structures to help parents balance work and child-rearing. Last year a bill was introduced in Congress to permit private employers to allow parents comp time instead of payment for overtime. While the bill had its critics, it is one example of the increased options many parents seek.

The daily turmoil ebbs and flows, the balance tips this way, then that. Children get sick, problems arise at work, the gas bill never goes down. Making time in our busy lives for prayer and quiet reflection reminds us that we are not in the boat alone.

In my first job as a lawyer I clerked for Justice Janine P. Geske, who was a brilliant jurist, a devoted Catholic, and a soccer mom all at once. She became a role model for me, and we talked often about the importance of family and the demands of the law. In Janine's family Sunday is preserved as family day. I've also known her to make a number of spiritual retreats, particularly when facing important personal decisions.

From her I learned that one's spiritual life can and should be nurtured constantly, despite life's fast pace and multiple commitments. Finding quiet time for prayer and reflection takes discipline and determination, but it is certainly doable.

Janine, who is now a law professor at Marquette University, recently set up a prayer circle on campus on Monday mornings. Students and workers stop in and sit in silent prayer together before getting on with their busy week. No attendance is taken.

In my parish the array of faith formation and service opportunities is tempting. It took me a while, but family and others have taught me that it is OK to limit my volunteer activities. To everything there is a season. Now I try to pray about my choices instead of leaping in. (I still leap in sometimes.)

Parishes also provide many opportunities for personal prayers and peer support. Mine hosts a family rosary night. I look to the rosary not only as a devotion to Mary, who brings us closer to her Son, but also as part of the answer to my "how to 'do it all'" questions.

As we pray the Joyful Mysteries I reflect on the evolving challenges of parenthood and the grace, faith, and humility with which Mary and Joseph met those challenges. During the Luminous Mysteries I think about Mary urging her Son to begin his own vocation, even though she must have had her fears for him. Was he ready? Was she ready?

Whatever the format, making time for personal prayer is like making time for physical exercise. We need it. We need it often. Frequent prayer may not tell us how to help a child with math or get an office report in on time, but it restores our compass. And I'll take a compass over a scale any day.

BETH ERMATINGER HANAN, a trial attorney, who lives with her family in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.