Fear of Falling Over
Lean in? Absolutely! But are we less committed to working now that we are Moms? Probably. You should hire/promote/exalt us anyway.
Lean in? Absolutely! But are we less committed to working now that we are Moms? Probably. You should hire/promote/exalt us anyway.
I tell this story mostly to female peers, but rarely in (gender) mixed company: A few years back when I was seven months pregnant with my second child I attended an executive-level meeting with peers in other organizations.
I remember feeling a bit self-conscious at the time. It was the day before my 40th birthday, and I remember joking that I would not be able to celebrate it with a glass of wine. The handful of women in the room were roughly my age — perhaps 3–7 years older — and were supportive, even complimentary.
“Work maternity clothes have become so much nicer,” one said to me. “I’d wear what you’ve got on to work in a heartbeat.”
Several men made pleasant conversation, asking about my due date, or remembering when they and their spouses were going through the same phase. But one, in particular, shocked me. A successful entrepreneur and executive chairman of his company, he approached me cheerfully and full of conversation, as he always did when I saw him. I almost didn’t capture his comment, it was offered up so casually:
“Aren’t you a bit old to be having babies?”
The first thing I could do was laugh; I assumed it was a poorly delivered joke and that I would eventually understand the punchline. But there was no punchline. The question was exactly what was delivered. A sarcastic response came out of me.
“Well…I wanted to see how old I could be.”
He didn’t get it. He then shared how he and his wife, in their lean years, had their children in their late 20s, and now his kids were adults. “Twenty-nine seemed old to me to be having kids back then,” he said. I stood silently trying to ascertain his point.
Another female executive who overheard the exchange said to me, “He’s a dinosaur. Don’t worry about it.”
But actually I was worried about it. Not about having a baby at age 40, but about being at the supposed peak of my career and having a living threat to it growing inside of me. I didn’t see it that way, but my male colleague’s comment confirmed what I had feared, that others did see it that way. All that baby stuff I should have handled in my relative youth, before I had started a company, or not at all. In my mind, that question meant, how do you expect to have a family AND a career?
I’ve spent the last five years in unspoken insistence that women CAN have kids and be at the top of their game. I point out successful women, like Marissa Mayer, who have had children while juggling demanding careers and defend their decisions. I applaud Sheryl Sandberg’s efforts to encourage women to lean into their careers while having children.
And yet, I have never fully been comfortable with my own decision to have both kids and a full-time career simultaneously, as I turn my home office phone on mute to get through a conference call without anyone knowing I have a sick nanny and a kid who says she’s going to poo on my floor. Or when I don’t correct the Dad at the Gymboree who’s on “kid duty” on weekends and assumes that I’m the full-time mom, giving my working husband a day to himself. In truth, I’m the Saturday Mom, making up for time I didn’t have with my kids during the week, just like him. Despite having a caregiver network to support me, I never fully feel like I’ve got it covered, not like I did when I was on maternity leave and was with my kids full-time. Despite the support of my colleagues and (most of) my peers to have kids, I fear that some question if my dedication to my work is what it once was.
I don’t regret having kids or resent my work; quite the opposite. But I do sometimes question if my insistence on fully experiencing both is a fantasy. We now know that “Having it all,” is a false idyll. But what, then, can we reasonably expect to have? I’m still trying to discern what reasonable is, and I still fight the notion of having to sacrifice one for the other.
Anne Weisberg, approaches working motherhood from a different, but equally relevant, perspective in her NYT Op-ed: “The Workplace Culture That Flying Nannies Won’t Fix,” in which she looks at the spate of companies that are accommodating working mothers and noting that family-friendly policy is merely a BandAid on a much more troubling norm.
We are a nation of working caregivers, except at the top of the corporate world. That’s why business leaders are more likely to see caregiving as something that is fundamentally incompatible with the way they work.
While most married workers are dual-income couples, a majority of business leaders, roughly 80 percent of whom are men, are not providing both cash and care. Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams, of Harvard Business School, completed a survey in 2014 of nearly 4,000 executives in a wide range of industries. It found that 60 percent of the men have spouses who don’t work full-time outside the home, compared with only 10 percent of the women.
The Norman Rockwell model of family life continues to be the prerequisite for success in corporate America, it seems. It provides the right incentive (complete reliance on one income) and the right support (ability to focus entirely on work). It perpetuates the prototype of the ideal worker as someone who can — and does — regularly put work above everything else, including caring for oneself and one’s family.
This study — and others like it — suggest that while women are free to work AND procreate, and have a hand in childrearing, they can’t expect to kill it at work.
I approached childrearing much the way I approached starting my company, by throwing out the rule book of how it’s “supposed” to go down and ignoring the odds. I never entertained the notion that I and my co-founders could not pull off growing a company, or getting venture capital. When I got pregnant, I refused to consider that having a baby might impact my job. I eschewed my midwife’s insistance that, at 34 weeks pregnant, I had no business taking a cross-continental flight to New York City to open my company’s conference. Staying home, I thought, was the ultimate cop out.
My husband and I decided that he would be the stay-at-home caregiver after my maternity leave ended. Done! Weren’t we lucky that we could afford this option, and that my husband had agreed to it? Men often told me in hushed tones how they wish they could have stayed home with their kids. Women commented how reassured I must feel not having to worry about outside-the-home childcare.
But of course these things don’t just tuck in perfectly, like the sheets in a fancy hotel room. There are loose ends, and little stains that you can see when you look at the situation a bit closer. I didn’t really feel like I was pulling off the dual role with aplomb.
My husband questioned whether it made sense for me to continue working as I had been after having my first child. I responded with a collection of examples of successful friends of mine who maintained their careers immediately after having kids. One, a single mother, shared with pride how she never really missed a beat after her daughter was born. She just brought the nanny with her on business trips. She told me her daughter had elite status on American Airlines by age 1.
She had an ability of seamlessly taking calls from her nanny during live meetings and jumping back into the discussion, even finishing the sentence she had started before taking the call.
Another hero friend of mine nursed her daughter for nearly two years — never relying on baby formula — despite a rigorous travel schedule. She would pump on planes, hotels, in corporate bathrooms, put the milk on ice and the ship it for next-day delivery via Fed Ex. And all of my friends paid for these efforts on their own dime. After all, it was their decision to have kids in the middle of powerful careers. It makes IBM’s, Facebook’s, Apple’s and Netflix’s recent decisions to financially support working mothers seem almost indulgent to women like us. But that’s how we working women, who were not in the middle of a tech bubble talent crunch, were wired. We got good at covering up our Mama status, even if Mamas were our customers. We learned to overcompensate for any perceived shortcomings due to motherhood.
I knew I never would or could take the extreme measures my friends did, but I played up the Working Warrior facade. I myself took great pride in working back up to my 1K status on United and flying over 100,000 miles the year I came back from maternity leave. You see — I was, in effect, saying to the world — I never actually left to have kids, despite the fact that my chest is aching from milk that needs to be expressed, and I just snuck away to FaceTime with my infant.
Another peer I sought out at conferences because she was like me, but even more seasoned in the corporate world, and had a baby in her late 40s, via IVF, after numerous miscarriages. We’d huddle together at events and touch base on the intricacies of arranging for childcare, or pumping and dumping. We sought each other out like life-saving flotsam in a sea of seemingly boundless career dedication. At the end of the night, when our colleagues engaged in late nightcaps, we slunked back to our hotel rooms to pump, check in with our caregivers, or just sleep. I did so with hesitation, knowing that I was likely missing key business conversations saved for those who could stick it out until 2 a.m.
Before becoming a mother I used to worry about whether being a parent affected my career; I know now that it does. But not because of any overt disrespect for my choices (comment by colleague at aforementioned event notwithstanding). It was disruption from within.
I once wondered if moving away from New York City to work for a digital media start-up in 1999 was going to destroy my prospects in media later. I went to visit a mentor of mine, a senior editor I worked with at a previous job whom I respected. I told him I was offered a job in San Francisco.
“Don’t spend too much time away,” he said, half-jokingly. “You’ll lose your place in line.” As scared as I was of the prospect of that, the intuitive pull of something better put me on that plane to the West Coast. To a new life.
I never left San Francisco; I suppose I lost my place in line. But the line lost its significance. It became a baseline for a life I would never want to return to. It became two-dimensional.
Similarly, being so singularly minded on career was a two-dimensional existence. I work for more than myself now. And when I was just working for myself and found an unprecedented level of success I could not have anticipated, it was then that I realized the cosmic joke — the third dimension — that all this, for myself, would not suffice. Many have found this out for themselves already, and for many who choose not to be parents other things comprise that third dimension.
For me, work, and all the affirmation that came with it, is not enough, just as it’s true that motherhood isn’t enough. I have to work. And that work has to hat-tip that third dimension somehow, or I don’t feel welcome.
I no longer worry about how motherhood will affect my career. I worry about whether the corporate world can accept and build on these inevitabilities in life — kids, newborn passions, questions about our purpose — and play less on the career FOMO that most of us, not just mothers, experience.