Women at Work - The Upside of Working Motherhood

0:00It's hard to imagine the positive pieces of the story when so much of it is about going to work with clothes that are messed up, your hair undone, worrying about how your boss is going to see you, worrying about how the stay-at-home moms on the playground are going to see you. And that rhetoric makes you feel like you've got to focus on just self-preservation and management.

0:35I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Amy Gallo. This episode we're looking at an aspect of working motherhood that in my opinion doesn't get nearly enough attention. The positive pieces. There are lots of reasons women should feel hopeful about having a career and children. We're talking to two professors who between their academic research and experience raising three kids each are experts on working motherhood.

0:59Dana Greenberg of Babson College and Jamie Lodge of Northeastern University. A lot of the women that have been part of our research over the years are older first-time mothers, so much of their identity is wrapped up in their professional life and pregnancy and impending motherhood throws a real wrench in that identity. They've organized their insights and advice into a book. It's called Maternal Optimism. Jamie, let me start with you.

1:26What were you seeing in the coverage of working motherhood that made you want to do this work? Well, as you all know, there's no shortage of books about working mothers. And we knew that there were quite a few, and we were a little bit hesitant to get into it. But we were frustrated by a lot of the rhetoric, having it all and a lot of the negativity surrounding the issues that a lot of working mothers face. And certainly that exists, all the biases and stigma associated with being a working mother. But we really wanted to First and foremost, try to come at this with a very positive spin. Not that it's all positive, but there are experiences that women face throughout the course of their motherhood transitions and working mother transitions that work out well. And we wanted to be able to share those stories through the stories that we had seen in the research that we've done over many years. The other thing we were sort of tired of was kind of this one size fits all approach. We know that...

2:20A lot of women share common ground with their experiences around being a working mother, but we also think that no two mothers and working mother stories are alike. And we wanted to make sure that we shared a wide variety of different experiences in the book. Part of that of no two mother stories being alike is the idea that there is not a start and end to being a working mother. So many of the books out there talk about this idea as if you've returned to work.

2:44You made it. You are a working mother. And that's just the first of so many transitions women experience throughout their careers as working mothers. And we felt like it was really important to help women start to understand this is this is a long distance run. It's not short term. It's not just about return to work and their constant iterations going on. And we thought giving them some perspective on that could be really helpful. So in your book, you talk about how working motherhood really starts well before you have a baby in your arms. What do you mean by that? So one of the things that we find is how frequently young women, long before they even have a partner, are starting to ask questions about combining work and motherhood in ways that I don't think we did in our generation. And one of the things that we worry a lot about and we see is that women are making choices early on that are about, will this be a career?

3:41that I can eventually combine work and motherhood. And so I'll give you a perfect example. My daughter is a chemistry and women's health major. She's pre-med. And she recently had a family member say to her, why don't you think about becoming a physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner? Because it's going to be much easier down the road to combine work and family.

4:04Now, my daughter is really career-driven. She's thinking about surgery and specialties. She is not, by the way, a nurturing primary caregiver. So nurse practitioner is not her thing. But women start to do that as young women, even in college and in those early years. And one of the things that we see, and we really advise women, is that this is a really important time to build your career.

4:32to figure out what you want to do and to use the time and space you have to build up your power, your credibility, your skill sets, your knowledge so that if and when you have a family, you have the resources to ask for what you need. And as I go back to my daughter's story, as a physician who perhaps someday is in a specialty, There are lots more ways to create a flexible schedule if that's what she wants or to structure or to have the financial resources to have the child care she needs than would be the case if she were a nurse practitioner. But this is advice many young women are still getting today. So Jamie, your research on working motherhood started with this question.

5:21Is there ever a good time to have a baby in terms of your career? And you've studied, you know, the effects that the timing of childbirth can have on a woman's career. What have you found? So one of the things I wanted to do, because there had been tons of research done, particularly in sociology that looked at the effects of timing childbirth on women's wages and also on promotions. And so we knew that was a a problem for women that it's much better to wait to have your first child because during those early years in your 20s, you know, you're building up your educational attainment, you're making connections and you're building up your network and all the human capital variables are just building up for you. And so that made sense for wages and for promotions. But I actually wanted to find out, well, are women happier? Are they more satisfied with their careers? So I wanted to take a more subjective approach. And so we looked at that and

6:12I mean, sadly, I can't say that there's a magic age for when the best time is to have a baby. I would have loved to have been the one that discovered what that age was. But I have to be like, you know, typical consultant mode and say it depends because it really, it does depend. But one of the things we did find that the women that had their children earlier in their careers were actually more satisfied later on. This is taking more of a life course approach. And we surmise that that's because they had more time that had elapsed.

6:40since when they started their families so they were able to build their career back up as opposed to a lot of the women that we've interviewed over the years who are much older first-time moms well into their 30s some in their 40s and they had kind of the sense of well I paid my dues at work and now that I'm having my child I can kind of take a step back or I can mold my career however I want to mold so not not a perfect age but if you want to be happy with your career it really doesn't matter but it does seem that you can get going a little bit earlier.

7:10So I want to talk about the decision to have more than one child. We know that there are penalties to having more than one kid. Your wages will suffer and so forth. How do women who would like to have more than one kid stay positive? What should they be thinking about? So one of the things we don't think about is how the family structure changes when you have multiple children. One of the things that we know from our own research is that when women have their first child, one of the biggest challenges is enabling their partner to be a real partner. Particularly if they're in a situation where they've got a maternity leave and their partner doesn't, they start taking on a lot of the childcare responsibilities and they don't figure out a way to really share parental responsibilities with their partner and they don't make them a real partner. When you have a second child, that goes out the window because all of a sudden there's a lot more childcare responsibilities to have and they have to be shared.

8:08So women have to let up. They have to enable their partner to be a real partner to them to share some aspects of that childcare responsibility, which enables them to be more confident and more engaged at work because they know that there's another person who's equally capable at home. So that's one of the things that happens in the family that can be really beneficial for a working mother. The other thing that we talk about in our house is that having multiples of children, somebody's always happy.

8:35And someone's always unhappy. We call it the whack-a-mole game. That old game you had as a child and you'd hit them all and they'd pop right up. But one of the things women often do, working mothers, is they add guilt to themselves when something's not working with their child. Oh, it would be different if I were home full-time, if I wasn't working, if I were focused. When you have multiples, you let that go because you start to realize their challenges, their experiencing about them as individual people. And you see one child's Having a good day and one child's having a bad day and it really has nothing to do with you. It has to do with them So those feelings of guilt that you're causing this really change So you're so the second and third and fourth and twelfth child give you perspective they give you a lot of perspective You've also accumulated a whole level of knowledge you get to the third for me I had I had three sequentially you get to the third and There's a whole knowledge about how to deal with this how to ask for help

9:32You start to get much more comfortable being transparent about your work life and your family life Because you've been doing it for a while. It's not a question of am I a working mother? I have to hide it. What are the people gonna think of me? This is who I am. So I actually have a colleague CFO at Babson. She has five children She most recently had the fifth child and the baby came with her to many many meetings And we just passed the baby around. This is a woman whose children range from 19 to probably two And she is a rockstar CFO. There is no question. And you know what? Her childcare broke down and she needed the baby to be there. And the baby just got passed. But there wasn't the sense of conflict or guilt, which she certainly would have experienced having a first child. Never bring a first child to a meeting. But a fifth child, forget it. So what are the positive benefits of being a working mom?

10:27It's funny you ask because I just did a study looking at women and asking them very much that question. After you've returned to work, what do you experience as positive about that or what has enabled you to be more mindful? And there are a couple of different things that we're seeing in the research as we're starting to look at the data, the first of which is perspective. There is a sense of, you know what, how important is this? Where does it fit into my day? How much do I have to do all of this myself or is 80% good enough?

10:57And that can be helpful for women to do their job more effectively. One of the things we see changing in managers is a stopping of micromanagement, because they don't have time to do that. One of the things that women often do is they want everything to be perfect. They want everyone who's working for them to have everything perfect. And when they return to work after having a child, they realize, you know what? That's not what really needs to get done. And that's not helpful for my team. The third thing, which is a really interesting one we're starting to see.

11:26is something we're seeing a relational capacity. Women talk about returning to work and having now be in this caretaker role. All of a sudden, I'm better with my employees. I'm more thoughtful. I'm more understanding. I don't always like what they're saying. I don't always agree with what they're saying. But I have a little bit more patience for dealing with people in a way that maybe I didn't before becoming a parent.

11:50So I suspect that these are things where this study we're looking specifically at women But I would suspect these are absolutely very similar things for working men When they become fathers and are engaged caregivers one of the themes I took away from your book is that working moms need to have realistic expectations I would say lower their expectations, but I'm trying to be optimistic and What are some examples of how you can set realistic expectations? And maybe you could specifically talk about the crappy dinners example. I loved that example in your crappy dinners example.

12:22The copy dinner idea is a great idea that we've seen written about where people get every night for me. I like to cook. I find it relaxing. This was actually really empowering for me was the idea that you get together with another friend during the week. You bring your families together and you serve whatever you can find in your house. No one's allowed to clean up. No one's allowed to buy anything. It's not the Martha Stewart real simple of the world. It's just.

12:47let's together and share some friendship and help each other out during these difficult periods of time. And women need to let up. They need to let up at home. They need to let up at work.

12:56so that they can embrace those more joyful moments, which sometimes are just about connecting and sharing stories of our day. Yeah. I met a woman who's, our kids were in preschool together. I said, oh, our family should get together for dinner. And she said, we just can't handle that. But if you'd like to meet us for a grocery store picnic, you can. I was like, what is that? And she said, we go to the grocery store, we go grocery shopping, we let the kids get stuff from the hot food bar, and then we sit in the car and talk. And I was like, Wow, I'm totally doing that. And it became like a weekly thing. We started doing on our own too because it was, you got your errands done. The kids were super happy because they got to eat crappy food from the grocery store and there was no cleanup. It was just so easy. I actually think the setting realistic expectations is an interesting proposition because there's so many idealistic expectations. And I actually just wrote a paper.

13:48with Laura Little at University of Georgia about this very topic where the expectations very much become our reality. And we subscribe so much to what we think we should be doing or what other people think we should be doing in terms of being an ideal worker or an ideal parent, that we don't even have time to figure that out for ourselves or that influences what that turns into or what that looks like for us. So our identity is very much shaped by this whole idealistic expectation.

14:15I wish we could have realistic expectations and I think that women need to really figure out what that means for them as opposed to what it is at a more societal level. It strikes me that being a working mom is really just an extreme exercise in prioritization. And you just have to decide what you're going to prioritize at the moment because your life is full, as is everyone's, whether you're a mom or not. And you just have to decide what you're going to...

14:41do and what you're not going to do. And that's not about necessarily sacrifice. It's just about prioritizing. Also, what I'm hearing is what you're going to care about, what you're going to let get to you. Right. Because people are really judgy. They always have been. They always will be. And some of those people are the people that are closest to you. Yeah. I also think Amy, your point about what are your priorities at the moment is a really important one to figure out, right? Because those priorities are going to shift.

15:06And change and that's that's part of the story right and so you make those decisions This is right for me at this moment and that can be really easy not for a working mother versus this is the choice I'm making and I and I'm locked into it versus I'm doing this now It's right for me today in six months in a year in five years. It's probably gonna look really different And that's good, right? Well, and I think when you look at kids, how much they change from infancy to teenage years or even a young adulthood, you have to think about how as a mom, you're going through the same evolution, right? And as many changes, I remember

15:40thinking, you know, I want to work part-time while my kid is really young. And then I realized I hated fighting about nap, right, when she was giving up her nap, one of her naps. I was like, no, this is a great time for me to work and someone who's a professional to handle this nap transition. So, and then, you know, six months later, it's different. I had the luxury of making different choices about how to handle my work life and go full-time or part-time because I was working for myself. But.

16:07you know, I think we think there's going to be a plan for the 18 years and really, you know, really the plan six months at most, right? But how do you deal with, how do you make yourself okay knowing that priorities could shift at a given moment, given day, when if you're working in an organization that is not very flexible and is not going to accommodate your shifting priorities?

16:30There are a couple of different ways to think about that. It's not an easy situation, right? Organizations don't make it easy for us and our shifting priorities and also as you point out, as your children change. And so thinking about some of that in advance can be really helpful. Preparing for yourself about, okay, my children are going to be going to elementary school or middle school and what might that look like or who in my organization can I talk to whose parenting older children and what advice can I get from them about How do I manage this next stage? What am I going to do differently? Keeping your professional network up is absolutely critical because at the end of the day, if you can't make it work in your current organization, having a strong professional network means that maybe you can find choices outside in different organizations. So both of you write in your book, you talk about the importance of new mothers developing what you call childcare bench strength. What is that?

17:26So Ben strength is a term that we adopt from athletics right when you think about a really strong athletic team You're thinking about not just having that that first string player But having a really strong second string player and even a third string player because at some point the first string player something's gonna happen and They're gonna be out of commission and you have to rely on the second string When we talk to women about child care we find they spend a lot of time thinking about what I call that first string child care what's the best childcare I can find that works for my child, works for my job, and works for our financial situation. And that's great, but that childcare is going to break down. It's going to break down because your child's going to get sick. It's going to break down because you're going to have an emergency meeting first thing in the morning and your partner's going to be traveling.

18:16it's gonna break down because the childcare provider is gonna be sick. It's gonna break down in my case because we had to fire a childcare provider suddenly, right? It breaks down. And so those are the moments that women often panic. They're also the moments where women who always thought they were gonna work may decide not to work. If you've got bench strength, it helps ease the anxiety about that. So figuring out in advance, when my childcare situation breaks down, what am I gonna do?

18:45What's it going to look like? And we've seen women do a lot of very different creative things on this. It can be anything from obviously family members. It can be an elderly, if you don't have family members in the area, an elderly neighbor that you're close with. It can be another stay at home mom, somebody who's staying home and can take your child and help you in that particular way. It can be formal backup care programs, but figuring out that in advance, having those phone numbers, being ready to dial.

19:14So when the childcare situation breaks down, you're ready to figure out what comes next, because it's gonna break down. It's just a part of being a working mom is you're gonna have days where the childcare isn't there. One of the stories I really liked in the book was a woman named Martha who was a single working mom and befriended another working mom. And they essentially ended up co-parenting, right? Even though they didn't coexist in the same household. Can you talk about how common that is?

19:42I actually don't think it's common enough because I think women are so worried about asking for help. I do it. I don't do it as much as I probably want to do it because you do feel like you're leaning on someone too much. But it's really challenging. I mean, there's a lot of people who don't have families around them. I mean, not everybody has the luxury of having grandparents and whoever around to fill that.

20:06bench strength. And so I would just, this might be digressing from your question, but just to add to what Dana was saying, it's not only the, you know, the woman or the mother building up that bench strength, but also making sure, you know, in terms of people, physical people that are helping you out, but also making sure that it's okay, like the example you gave of the professor or the faculty member who brought their child to a meeting, that making sure you're surrounded.

20:31You're surrounding yourself with people at work that are perfectly fine with you doing kooky things like that. Or, you know, even I'm just reflecting back on when I was in my PhD program, I started that program and I was with three single men. And I just stated right up front.

20:48we're having any group meetings at my house. I mean, fortunately, I live right near the university, but every group meeting is going to be at my house. And they were perfectly fine with that. They loved that. And my baby was there and they would play with the baby. And so there's a different form of bench strength that also goes beyond, you know, the childcare aspect as well. I want to be clear that we are strongly advocating for more babies at meetings. Yes. All for it.

21:14So the challenge of finding supportive child care doesn't stop when the kids go off to school. So talk to us a little bit about the stress of the after-school pickup on women's careers and how people deal with it. What are some creative strategies? So when we're talking about after-school stress, one of the things, there's been a lot of research actually done on this topic. We know that when working parents feel a lot of stress about Is their child well taken care of after school or in this out of school time? It affects their engagement at work. It affects their work stress. It actually affects the quality of work they're doing as well as their overall psychological and emotional well-being. So the impact of after-school stress isn't just on us at home. It's on us in our workplaces as well. So one of the things that really happens for for working mothers in that first transition is when your child leaves whatever

22:10Traditional child care arrangement you've figured out for yourself. They transition to elementary school typically a kindergarten in the United States and All of a sudden you're shocked. It's a shock to a family system because kindergarten or any elementary school situation is usually about six to seven hours it runs ten months of the year and About 30 of those days are not covered. All right, so you've got huge gaps in the care situation you have and While we've done some work to improve quality childcare in the early years, we've done very little to improve quality childcare in those later years. So again, thinking about that in advance can be really helpful for working families. One of the things that we talk to families about a lot is this idea of how do you think about the community you're going into and to what extent is this going to be a community that has systems in place that are going to help you as a working mother? So people make decisions about going into a community based upon typically

23:09What kind of house? How big a house I can afford? What's the quality of the school system? But they don't think at all about is there before school care in the system? Is there after-school care? Is it an after-school care program that my kids gonna have to get bused to? How does busing work in the system? Will they pick my child up at the end of my road? Or will they pick them up at the end of my driveway? That creates a really different context. Are there other working parents? You can use that from census data and available data.

23:36Does the recreation system, is it set up in a way that they're summer camps and they're vacation camps? And are those things that are actually used by parents in the community? Doing some research on that can help you figure out how do I get into a community that's going to be able to be a place where I can be authentic about who I am and have the supports I need and be more comfortable asking for those supports versus feeling like I've got to hide a little bit either side of my life.

24:04And emotionally as well, I think finding communities where there are other working parents, working mothers around because I've used after-school programs and even in a community where there's probably predominantly fewer working mothers, but you feel guilty about being the last one to pick up your kid in an after-school program that goes until six. You feel guilty about dropping your kid off at seven in the morning when you don't see any other parents or kids around. There's this emotional struggle.

24:31having to feel like you have to downplay your work or you have to sacrifice your work to be there. And so the stress is not just the financial stress, but there's also the psychological stress associated with feeling the guilt about utilizing these programs that are the very programs that are supposed to alleviate the stress.

24:50to begin with. So I think the community thing is an interesting one, not just in terms of what resources are available, but also what people, you know, you surround yourself with in those resources. And I also tell people to really try to find partners in your organization, other working families that you can switch off or trade off with. So I really advise our junior faculty at Babson, they struggle with those vacation weeks because we're teaching, we're in the classroom. And so find another faculty member who's got kids maybe around your same age, maybe not.

25:19And maybe you can trade off one day for one day, that kind of a model, or you can trade off pickups. And so that community support can be at your home community, but it can also be in your work community, too. Our neighbors, we have a text chain that whenever school vacation is coming up or snow day, it's like, who's going to be home? Where can the kids go? It's OK if they watch TV all day, but will anyone be home? And it's great.

25:45Cause it's, you know, I can still go to work if I need to. Right. And it sounds like you live in a neighborhood where you have a lot of dual career working parents, right? So being in a neighborhood where you know, sending that text out, or also knowing on the other hand that you're sending the text out and there might be a stay at home mom who's happy to help and pitch in because they're going to be other ways you're going to be able to support her too. So part of the network and community is also building relationships between those who are currently working and those who aren't. Yeah. I have, there's a stay at home mom at.

26:14my daughter's school who is like the uber stay-at-home mom and I know if I sent her a text and say I can't get it to pick up can you pick up my daughter she will text back within 30 seconds she'll list the snacks she has packed are there any food out I mean it's it's insane and so comforting because you know she has your back and there's no judgment about it at all it's she's she's amazing I want to move to your neighborhood So Jamie your twins are 12 my daughter is also 12 So I'm particularly interested what you have to say about how work changes for women when they're mothering pre-teens or teens I understand from your research that Workplaces sort of forget that women have caregiving not responsibilities at this age How do women advocate to still get the support they need when they're mothering older children? I think that's a great question and when I think about all the time

27:08I hate saying this, but I know it's true. You know, little children, little problems, big children, huge problems. And I think people forget that. But I think one thing is figure out what your best approach is for how you deal with your work and family challenges. There's research that shows that people often either make a choice between whether they segment their work and family or integrate their work and family. I think as I know I've gotten older and accumulated more work and family knowledge, I've become more of an integrator and I'm not afraid to show people. So what is integrating? So in other words, when I was starting out having kids, I didn't have pictures of them on my desk. I didn't talk about them at work and I feel like I am confident enough in my ability as I've gotten older through the years and as my children have gotten older. I'm less worried about

28:02any stigma that I may face as a working parent because I've already proven myself, or at least I feel as though I've proven myself to others. A segmenter would not have pictures on there. An integrator would bring their child into work and not have any qualms about it. And I try to signal that preference to people. And hopefully I'm a model to others that will do the same because I think that there's a real positive aspect of being able to show and highlight to people that work and family are important.

28:31Is it harder to talk about parenting challenges of older children than younger children? Absolutely. The conversation about I'm leaving early because they're little or sick. Right. There's an assumption that older children are very self-sufficient. And in our society, good or bad, even in high school, they're not yet really self-sufficient. And so there can be needs to be present there that just aren't articulated.

28:59and they're not comfortable being incredibly transparent about what are those needs. The other thing that shifts is how interested are you in filling those needs? I don't love big children. I'm not as good in the teenage years. It's not my strength, right? I'm lucky. I have a partner who's really good in the teenage years.

29:20And so one of the things that we've, we've actually flopped a little bit. I'm much more active and engaged at work and he's much more the call to go to when they have those particular problems. And in a certain way, I think it's easy for him to respond because he didn't respond when they were little, right? So it's new and it's different for him. So it is really hard in organizations to say and advocate. I think it's also hard for women if they've worked full time their whole careers and all of a sudden are saying, you know what?

29:50teenagers, they're in high school and I want to be a little more present. How do I advocate for myself now when I never advocated for that before? But I do think it's easier to advocate when the children are older because there's less fear that there's going to be some kind of bias involved. I think one of the real challenges and what we've seen in our research for pregnant women or new mothers is that if I ask for something, if I advocate for something, that's going to set the tone for my whole now life as a working mother in this profession or whatever. And like I said before, if you have the confidence in yourself and you know you've proved your value, then advocating things when your children are a little bit older, I think, becomes slightly easier to a large extent. But I think the challenge, what Dana's pointing out, is the challenge of having older children doesn't necessarily get easier. So Dana, your kids are, as you said, a little older than Jamie's. One's in college, two others are 16 and 18.

30:49entering a new family stage, what transitions are happening to you professionally? What feels positive to you about this period? So all of a sudden for me, there's this energy to engage in my research and my writing and leadership in the college in a way that I just didn't have before. And so it's a really exciting phase. There's also a lot of positive feedback that starts to come from your young adult children that you don't get.

31:17from a toddler or an elementary schooler right when you're dealing with little children there's often can be more angst intention and things that they say that make you realize or think oh my gosh they're upset I work or why do you work mommy or those kinds of questions that cause you angst when they're older they're excited about your working and Kathleen McGinn's done some great research on this looking at how working mothers impact both their daughters and their son's careers and I see it in my household all the time. My daughter's studying chemistry and women's health, and she's done research and done research projects, and she calls me for help. My sophomore came home one day from his honors English class with 20-some-odd kids in it, six boys, and the six boys got on a conversation that all six of them noticed they had working mothers in a community where they're not a lot of working mothers.

32:09they start to see ways in which your life has impacted them positively. And that has really exciting repercussions for a working mom. I can imagine that being really rewarding. So, you know, as your kids are getting older and more independent and they're going off to college, you know, there's a lot more coming your way. You've got more bandwidth. You have more opportunities. You have more experience.

32:34How do you figure out what to do with your time? How do you sort of sort through all of the options? I think it comes back to the same thing you do early stages, which is you have to hear your own voice. The options that come your way are exciting. They're flattering in a lot of ways. And it's very easy to jump in and say, yes. Yes, I'll do that. Yes, I'll do that. And we hear a lot from a minute this stage that all of a sudden, instead of being overwhelmed with home responsibilities, They're overwhelmed with work responsibilities. They're overwhelmed by board responsibilities. They're overwhelmed by community engagement responsibilities. So taking some moments to think about, again, I don't have to do everything at the same time. What's my priority? Where do I want to engage? What's going to be rewarding and fulfilling in this moment? And where am I going to say no? Because just like in your early careers, you've got to say no to some things. And so making those decisions based upon what I want,

33:31not what everybody else is expecting or asking of me is really important to do. And so we hope that by this point in your life, with all of these other balls you've had in there, you figured out which ones you really want to catch, right? Is that the idea? Or which ones you want to catch now, right? Something, a ball that wasn't important to you five or 10 years ago may all of a sudden be really important to you and you're going to want to run with that. I loved the line in the book about having a proud engaged mother being more important than a big backyard? Why do you think women lose sight of the positive impact their working has on their children? I think they lose sight for a couple of reasons. The first of which is the rhetoric we've talked about that we're all told. I think the other reason you lose sight of the positive is it is hard. The day-to-day responsibilities of loving your job, wanting to be successful in your career, in your work,

34:29Wanting to be there and be present for your family and be an active and engaged parent and partner if you have a partner it's not easy day-to-day and I think like anything else we lose sight of the big picture we lose sight of the joy in those really small moments that happen and we lament what we didn't do and so giving up a little of that rhetoric giving yourself a little bit of space and looking for the joy in the day What is that joyful moment? It might be just the cereal bowl and what happened over that conversation or it might be one thing that you do during the day that has an impact on a colleague or a client but focusing on the joy changes the story you're telling yourself and that's what we need to help women do is change the story we're telling ourselves and we need more positive stories we need

35:21women to feel good about, we need ourselves to feel good about the choices we make as opposed to, like Dana said, lamenting over decisions. And we shouldn't look back. We shouldn't always feel like we have to look back and say, I wish I had done that. I wish I had done that. We need to own and feel confident about the choices that we make. And if they don't work out the way that we intended them to, okay, they didn't work out, but at least we know that we can move forward from that and maybe the next choice.

35:47will work out. And just because so-and-so down the street did this or my colleague in the office did that, that doesn't mean that's going to work for me. It's good that I have that model. It's good that I have that guide to follow, but I'm going to chart my own path. Jamie, Dana, thank you both so much for joining us and talking to us today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So do you, Amy G, feel more optimistic about this? I mean, you're kind of entering this...

36:15New phase of working motherhood Harper is 12, you know, she's an older child How are you feeling after the conversation I do feel more optimistic reading the book I felt there was a lot that resonated with me that I thought oh I hadn't quite thought about it that way because I think there is the sense that it's motherhood and working are at odds and that it's more about compromise on both sides so you can make it work and I liked that they sort of talked about them actually feeding one another in a positive way. And I've definitely seen that in my own life. And the transition I made from Harper being sort of a young child to being this tween, that was a very optimistic transition for me because she was more independent and she was observing me working in a way that she hadn't before because she was completely self-centered as a kid. So I'm curious. So you just said that being a mother

37:13and working that the two sides of you fed each other. What was that? How did they feed each other? Well, I think the way that Dan and Jamie talked about it was that, and this is what's felt true to me, is that I'm better. I'm more efficient with my time because I have greater demands on my time than I ever have before. I use work.

37:37Particularly research we find or tactics I use time management. I use those at home So I think I'm better organized at home because of it and I think because of having a kid I'm much more empathetic with other people, you know having a kid Trust me you you get frustrated and mad but you realize it's not their fault And I think I treat people like that at work more often I see them all as like the child's whose needs aren't being met rather than the adult whose being a jerk to me in this meeting. I'm sort of more emotionally grounded than I was before I had Harper. Like Dana says, working motherhood isn't just return to work. It's a long-distance run. But returning to work is the start. I decided to take four months off. This is my third child, but it's my first time going back to work full-time because of my other two children. I was self-employed and I worked from home part-time. That's Hannah, a listener who's been in touch with us over email.

38:41Hannah first wrote to us after hearing our episode, managing parental leave, yours or someone else's. She was on leave at the time after having her daughter Greta. As the three-month mark was approaching I was feeling so unprepared and I wasn't ready to leave Greta and I just had so much guilt about being away from her for so many hours during the day. Hannah said the stories our colleague Erica Truxler shared in that episode helped her feel like she could manage the challenges of returning to the office full-time after leave.

39:09A few months later, Hannah offered to tell us how it's been going for her. And we thought it would be great to get Hannah and Erica on the phone together. And it really was.

39:18Well, Hannah, I just wanted to start by saying thank you so much for emailing us after our episode from last season. You know, it was very vulnerable putting myself out there and how difficult I had a time getting back into work and hearing that you found comfort in my story really honestly helped me too. So we were helping each other from across the country. So I just wanted to know how things are going and I don't know if you could go maybe just into a little bit more detail about maybe even just your first month back at work and how that went and really, yes, just an update on how things are going on your end. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a positive outlook, but I think, I mean, I tend to be a little bit type A, so I think I take it like to the extreme a little bit. And I was just, I went back to work with this attitude of like, I'm going to do it all and I'm going to fit it all, everything I want to do in one day into a day. And I'm going to, you know, do all this self-care. And I had this,

40:17you know I had this crazy schedule of like I'm gonna wake up at 5 a.m. every morning and meditate and work out and do all these things before the kids wake up and I was kind of doing it on some weeks but I had like such a frantic energy going from one thing to the next and even though I was trying to practice all this self-care it like was not really self-care because it was yeah more of like a stressful thing to complete it and so then It was like this crazy roller coaster, like within two weeks of getting back to work, our whole family got hit with a stomach flu. Oh, then I got strep throat. Oh my goodness. Yes. I had exactly the same experience. I was going to mention, um, this was my first winter daycare germ filled winter, um, with my one year old now Claire. And truly it was almost like back to back. We also had, I think it was like two or three stomach flues, um, the flu.

41:14Also, pink eye, hand foot and mouth, double ear infection at the same time as hand foot and mouth. So anyways, all of this is to say, I hear you and I feel that it's one of those things where, you know, you kind of go in and you're like, I can do this. I set myself up for success. I'll even carve in some me time before babies wake up and then the reality hits. Yeah. And it's hard to figure out like, what is like the best perspective to have and I know that you gave me the advice to just be gentle with yourself and I feel like that's a really good thing to focus on but sometimes like I know for me like I had to go through that curve of like having all these expectations and having them backfire and then being like oh okay this is what it means to be gentle with myself you know. Yes yes and Amy is

42:07Amy Gallo is careful to say it's not lowering our expectations. It's setting expectations for the moment that we're in in our lives. Yeah. I work with a coach through my work. It was actually like a leadership coach to start, but she kind of morphed into my like maternity leave coach. Yes. So when we were working on all these things like, okay, don't expect to do everything in one day, like let's stretch out the time. Like maybe it's just you're trying to complete those things in one week or two weeks. And the other thing I did, which was crazy, but I stopped drinking coffee and I feel like that really helped my frantic energy and even though I was like sleep deprived and tired, I think it was better to be in that state than it was to have that kind of like buzz going all the time.

42:54Like I said, I've always been kind of like a go getter, exerciser every day, that type of thing. And I just was like, you know what? I'm not even going to exercise. I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to go to work and be with my family. And I feel like taking it way down, I finally like accepted it. And I feel like that was like a huge huge. Yeah. It's huge. And I do feel that there is positivity that we often miss in the.

43:21rush and the bustle of going back and forth and rushing to daycare and doing deadlines and work. And I was just wondering if there are any moments that you can think over the past few months where you really did feel happy at work and you came home and you felt happy at home. And you realized like, wait a second, I wouldn't have this feeling if I weren't doing both. Yeah. Well, for one, I mean, compared to my first two children I think and of course this is something that's so different and that's such a personal thing for everybody but I really like working outside of the home it's really nice having that I mean it is like a little bit of a break you know and when you're a parent and you're working so hard and it's such a demanding role sometimes it's nice to step out of that and I think if if you're

44:16not working outside of the home it's a little harder to orchestrate that as frequently or have it be as effective as working outside of the home so I think that that was something that was really a positive thing this go around and the other thing about that is you know I was so worried about all the hours I was going to be away from Greta and in the end like that was probably like one of the least challenging things for me. I mean, of course I missed her at work, but...

44:46I don't feel like I have a deficit of time with her. Yes, you know what's funny is I've noticed on Sundays when I'm with Claire all day and I'm there starting at 5.30 in the morning by like 9.45. I'm starting to get very tired and I start to check my phone and I start to go on Instagram or something while she's sitting next to me and I've had this realization that when I pick her up from daycare it is like such a happy moment for me like literally yesterday I was in her um they have a little playground and I was talking to one of her teachers and I didn't see her right away and then all of a sudden I hear like

45:25like running towards me and it was just like the happiest moment honestly and then we come home and we have about two hours so it's not much but those two hours I make a point not to have my phone in front of me and we are playing and I value that time so much and when I've had a good day at work I often think I've been able to kind of accomplish, you know, edit that article and I came home and I had a great evening with Claire and I feel very positive about it. And often those positive moments do get overrun by, you know, the illnesses. And so I've been trying to kind of note the positive moments more when I can as well. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's something that for me, when I slowed everything down, it really helped me to have more of that kind of attitude and really recognize what I was accomplishing. Right.

46:15Thank you so much, Hannah. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you. That's our show. I'm Amy Gallo. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Nicole Torres. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hoek is our supervising editor. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart. Erica Trexler makes the show's discussion guides. And J.M. Oljarz is our copy editor. And one more note.

46:42We've heard from a lot of our listeners about the discussion guides. I was actually at an event in California a couple weeks ago, and someone stopped me at the sink in a bathroom to tell me that she uses the discussion guides with her women's group at her organization. That is fantastic. We also got this email saying, and I'm going to quote here, the guides are having an impact on how we talk, act, and lean on each other in the office.

47:06If you want access to the guides, you can find them on our website at hbr.org slash podcasts on the Women at Work page.