(FORTUNE Magazine) – Every day is hectic, but Thursdays are psycho," says Tom Kirkpatrick, a project manager at an environmental-cleanup company in Knoxville, Tenn. Kirkpatrick does his share of chauffeuring, homework helping, and other fatherly duties. But on Thursdays his wife, Stacy, carries the full load of parenting. The manager of a vascular surgery research lab, she drops off their three kids at school at 7 A.M., commutes 45 minutes to work, races back at about three to take her daughter to gymnastics, then picks up the older boy at football practice and tries to get everyone home for a quick dinner before the youngest child's seven o'clock soccer practice. "Then I walk in about 6:20," Kirkpatrick says, "and say, 'What? They haven't eaten yet?'"

Sound familiar? Sure it does. Reams of research over the years have confirmed what most of us already know: Anyone with a career and a family is preoccupied with juggling them, to the point where pollsters have found that, given their druthers, most of the jugglers would choose more free time--or just more flexible hours--over more money, more power, or a fancier title. "All parents tend to think, 'It's just us, struggling with this,'" says Jennifer Whelan, a single mom who manages marketing events for Intel. "But when you start talking to people, you realize everyone has stories and everyone is trying to come up with creative solutions." One of Whelan's solutions: On business trips she books connecting flights from her hometown of Portland, Ore., only through airports that offer wireless access (Denver does, Chicago doesn't) so she can send and receive her e-mail between planes, read and reply to it at 30,000 feet, and save an extra hour or two to spend with her son when she gets home.

Eventually, of course, the kids grow up. But right about then (if not sooner), their grandparents begin to need help. The National Council on the Aging estimates that about ten million adults now care for their elderly parents, a figure that is expected to more than double over the next 15 years.

Liz Ryan has a few thoughts about keeping all those plates in midair. A former head of human resources at U.S. Robotics, she co-founded a tech startup called Ucentrix Systems while also launching her own firm, Liz Ryan Consulting (www.lizryanhr.com). In mid-1999 she began an online discussion group for women in the high-tech industry in Chicago, where she then lived, called ChicWIT (Chicago Women in Technology). That grew into WorldWIT (www.worldWIT.org), which now has 20,000 members in 40 discussion groups worldwide and offers a slew of online career-counseling resources besides. Ryan runs both the consulting business and WorldWIT from Boulder, working at home a couple of days a week when she isn't on the road. She and her husband have five children, the youngest of whom, 14-month-old Darrien, spent the first year of his life traveling everywhere Ryan went, including trips to "15 states, Washington, D.C., and Switzerland." Some excerpts from our conversation:

The WorldWIT website says you act as "mother hen" to 40 discussion groups. What are you hearing from these folks about balancing work and life?

Oh, I hear a lot about it, all the time. But I actually hate the phrase "work-life balance" because it implies something static, just hanging there like the scales of justice, with maybe a quiver now and then. In 2003 that image is all wrong. Work is high-pressure and fast-moving, and so are families, so "balance" is a mythical state of equilibrium that no one ever attains.

Another thing the concept implies is that you can balance your life by taking on less responsibility at work and opting not to go after what you really want professionally. It may have been true that a few years ago you could have downshifted from a $100,000-a-year job with long hours and a lot of pressure to a $60,000-a-year job with fewer hours and less pressure. But guess what? These days the $60,000-a-year job is likely to be a pressure cooker too.

So, realistically, instead of striking a balance, you're more likely to find yourself careening wildly between work and family. You develop an internal gyroscope that tells you when one or the other has to come first. Before I was self-employed, I had situations where one of my kids needed me and I had to tell a boss, "I can't meet this deadline." Sometimes it was the other way around. Corporate policies don't matter. Things like the Family Medical Leave Act don't matter. It's a question of negotiating, project by project, week by week, both at work and at home.

Sounds Exhausting.

Companies would like to ignore the fact that people have families, and women in particular fall into the trap of never saying no. When someone tries to get me to come to a 7 A.M. meeting, I just say, "Gee, I'm usually breast-feeding at that hour. Do you mind if I bring the baby?" And the meeting gets rescheduled. My mother used to say, "Your yes doesn't mean anything unless you say no once in a while."

Women also tend to apologize every time there's a conflict between work and home. Some bosses reinforce this habit, consciously or not: "Oh, another parent-teacher conference?" Yes, another parent-teacher conference. What would they rather have us do? Lie and say that we're having Lasix surgery? Books like [Allison Pearson's bestselling novel] I Don't Know How She Does It don't help, by the way. The heroine of that story is working too much to bake a pie for her daughter's school, so she buys one and smacks it around a little to make it look homemade, which is just another way of saying sorry. You don't hear men apologizing all the time. We need to cut it out.

Was there an "Aha!" moment when you realized all this?

Actually, there was. Shortly after one of my kids was born, there was a big company event scheduled in Salt Lake City, and I asked my then-boss, the CEO of Ucentrix, whether I could bring the baby and also bring my assistant to watch him during a couple of the meetings. His answer was: "Your department has a $120 million budget. Why are you asking permission for an $800 expenditure?" And I said, "It's not the money--it's the precedent. Is this something people actually do?" He looked at me as if I was crazy and said, "Liz, what's best for the business? For you to come to Salt Lake City, however you can manage it, or for you to stay home on your sofa with the baby?" That was a real epiphany, because it made so much sense. I thought, Why isn't that always the metric for how these decisions get made? And I believe women won't really be in the game until it is.

You've made big changes to spend more time with your family. How's it working?

The biggest thing was the decision to move to Boulder. I met my husband, Michael, 15 years ago at work--he was an engineer at U.S. Robotics, the cool guy with the Dostoevsky paperback shoved in his back pocket--and we had twins [now aged 10] soon after we married. He began teaching around then, which was great because I was traveling a lot, and he was home a lot. But then Ucentrix moved from Chicago to Boston, and I was spending all my time flying back and forth, and it was too much. We had a 1-year-old, a 3-year-old, and two 5-year-olds, and a nanny, and I was never there. I was making a lot of money to keep up this crazy life that was wearing us out. So we moved to Boulder to start fresh, and Michael decided to stay home with the kids.

I still travel a lot. Taking the baby along for his first year wasn't as big a deal as it may seem. Babies adapt. What did people do in Wales in 1608 when they needed to get the crops in? There's always a way to do what has to get done.

You mentioned that women need to stop apologizing for having families. What else would you like to see happen in corporate America?

I think all of us need to put friendly pressure on organizations. Until having both a career and a family becomes normal in people's minds--becomes an accepted part of the culture--nothing much will change. Legislation won't do it. And you can't write a "work-life policy" that accomplishes much either, because solutions are by necessity individual. Everything's a one-off. Trying to cover every contingency in a policy is like trying to write a dress code that lists every item of clothing that employees may or may not wear: tank tops, tube tops, bicycle pants, flip-flops--it's endless, it's impossible. Companies love formal policies because having them feels "safe." But most are designed as security blankets against lawsuits, not as ways to actually resolve day-to-day problems.

If legislation and company policies won't work, what will?

We'll know we've really gotten somewhere when the majority of employers' attitudes is "We recognize that everyone has outside lives and entanglements, and we'll deal with those issues as they come up." Most companies are still, unfortunately, a long way from that. What it takes is, most of all, some confidence that your managers can manage. If they can't, well, maybe you have the wrong managers.

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