The Promise
In March 2020, I began researching India House. It was also when I found out I was going to be a parent. And, nothing else of note happened in March 2020.
Kidding, we all know March 2020.
Anyway. I’d always thought pregnancy would be hard but manageable, and I’d do all the normal things while pregnant (There were always pregnant women on the Caltrain getting to work in rush hour, and I thought I would be no different). I thought I’d take the usual parental leave, and then leave my child with grandparents, or daycare while I go back to my usual routine, except mornings and evenings would be filled with baby stuff. My worries would be about fitting into smart clothes for work events again, and pulling all-nighters, and “me time” and “feeling like myself” but we’d find a way.
I’d read all the books about being a Power Mom, and balancing work and life. All those moms were traveling for work, not being home for dinner, and still managing fine, so why would it be hard for me, who wasn’t some high powered exec, and who definitely didn’t need to travel for work.
Nothing turned out like that.
Pandemic Parenting
My daughter, from birth, turned out to be a high-strung, highly energetic child. A baby Neymar, if you will. She wanted me present at all times, even if just in the background typing away. And if I didn’t play with her between her naps, she’d avert her face the next time she saw me. Add to this we couldn’t get as much help from our families as we wanted, because the pandemic messed things up unexpectedly.
Working from home, with highly flexible jobs, and having some help, made it easy for us to be highly present parents. And our child thrived with it. I cannot imagine parenting any other way.
When my daughter was three months old, another mom with a 1-year-old son told me she managed to work from home with this “exersaucer”. It’s this device where you can plop your kid in, it holds the baby securely, and then there’s all these fun toys for the child to play with whichever direction it turns. That mom’s kid loved it so much, and they called it his “office”, and that’s how they managed to get stuff done.
When Amazon delivered this much-awaited miracle device, we couldn’t wait to plop our daughter in it and get a moment to do the dishes, or repot the hibiscus. She lasted all of 30 seconds in it before she tried climbing out. Her weak baby arms didn’t permit a full escape, but she had made her intent clear - Poorna Swaraj, or Complete Freedom.
We compared notes with our relatives with similar aged children. They too complained it wasn’t enough! “Our daughter used to be able to hang out in it for twenty minutes before, but now she’s bored with the toys and barely lasts ten”. Yes, we’re on the same boat. Meanwhile, our hibiscus died in its tiny pot.
Things definitely got easier as she grew older, and her attention span lasted longer. But the core of it was the same - she thrived on 1-1 attention, which was reasonable, and if you took your eyes off her for one second, the house would come crumbling down, which was much less so.
What Only I Can Do
I love the book Eat That Frog. It tells you how to prioritize your tasks and allot your time so you are able to focus on doing the things ONLY YOU can do. It helps me get a lot done.
But with a child, when I tried making those lists again to figure out what ONLY I could do, I realized I was pretty replaceable with everything, except with my daughter. So, according to the rules of the book, that’s where I needed to spend my time. I had to stop being in denial and admit that the lurking feeling within me was based on fact.
I found not spending time with my daughter had big emotional consequences. Not just for her, but for me as well. This is not intended to be a judgment on other people’s parenting choices. It just wouldn’t work for me and my child to have someone else watch her for the entire day, somehow. Part-time made more sense. I needed to spend that many of her waking hours with her.
The Power Mom Books
There’s a whole bunch of books about how to balance your career with being a parent. There’s Power Moms, which is about high-powered exec moms and how they manage everything. And there’s Overwhelmed - How To Work, Play And Love When No One Has The Time, which is one of those NYT Women Books. You know, the sort where an NYT writer talks about her struggles and then extrapolates her personal experience with stats on how things are bad for women and this society is misogynistic, and ends with some hopeful stats about some new phenomenon that might make things better, but we all know nothing will change. There’s also The Fifth Trimester and I Know How She Does It - How Successful Moms Make The Most Of Their Time which are more hopeful in tone and actually provide actionable advice.
The thing is, though, all these books just ASSUME you’re going to have your child in daycare all day. The difficulties are with the rest of the time. They are about how to navigate work when your child is sick and can’t be in daycare. Or how to find powersuits that flatter your new body. Or how to split overtime with your spouse. Or how to get your husband to take on more. Or how to sneak a trip to the gym regularly. All valid issues, but somehow bordering on archaic in the pandemic, and completely irrelevant to my family
None of these cared about if you wanted to spend more time with your child. Or if your child needed you to spend more waking hours with her. They were all about how to work more and spend less time on childcare. The solutions they tout are almost always about universal daycare, or husbands doing more. And they all have at least one scene of a mom realizing she doesn’t have to work so much and can just take a day off to just play with her child.
Most parents, though, go to work to put food on the table. They don’t have a choice to opt out of the workforce, or find jobs that are flexible and parent-friendly. But this genre of books doesn’t really speak to them either. Not on purpose at least.
They assume your work is inherently fulfilling and meaningful. They assume it makes more sense for you to be there than with your child. Granted, this is all targeted at a pre-pandemic audience of folks who couldn’t work from home, and were written by ambitious female journalists, for an audience of high powered execs (for their book blurbs) and other ambitious female journalists (for their reviews). I’m not in the target audience.
That Anne-Marie Slaughter Piece About How Women Can’t Have It All.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is a well-known think-tanker who, from a cursory googling, seems like she was working on the disastrous US intervention in Libya. While busy working on the death of Gaddafi, she wrote this pretty provocative piece called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”. I read that fresh out of grad school in 2012, and thought “What a bitch”.
Obviously I did. She dissed Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”, and said there’s a point beyond which you really can’t lean in. She said women need to have children earlier and press the accelerator on their careers after their children are out of the house. None of that seemed realistic, or even squared with the normal discourse in that era, where the focus was on destigmatizing motherhood after 35 and freezing your eggs.
But then I read this article a few weeks ago and found myself nodding with every word.
The discourse then and now is all about how best to outsource childcare so women can go out and work. Or, for most people, how best to bring home two incomes with children around so as to not struggle financially. In tech, particularly, there’s a lot of talk about the “funnel” and how it “leaks”, with women quitting the industry after children. It provokes all this soul searching about how awful tech is for women.
But somehow, no one talks about how meaningless a lot of jobs are, and maybe if someone’s privileged enough to go through a tech career, they actually have a choice to stay or not, when forced to choose. And maybe parenthood is just the more fulfilling choice sometimes.
I used to think it was uninvolved husbands or lack of childcare that prevented women from advancing in their careers, but now I can understand, like in the case of Anne-Marie Slaughter, how a woman can turn down a job with Hillary Clinton to actually spend more time with her struggling teen son (while “only” being a professor and writing books). Heck, just wait a few years, you’re going to see more dads in this situation too.
So How Do You Have A Hotshot Career While Raising Your Child?
When I was pregnant, I saw a Reddit thread where someone said he was the son of a hotshot computer science researcher, and waxed eloquent about how great it was. I asked how his parents managed to be stars while still being hands-on.
Turns out, his dad was the star researcher, and his mom stayed at home with the five kids. The dad spent late nights at the office often, BUT, get this, when he was home, he made it count.
Oh. Okay.
I couldn’t imagine someone saying that about their mom. Sure, gender comes into it, and we can rant all day about that. But also, what kind of a life was that, where you got to see your kids once in a while and just played with them? Not one I wanted, for sure. It sounds fun of course, but it doesn’t suit my personality in the least.
I don’t know too many hotshots who work on flexible schedules while their main focus is something else, least of all, parenting. To be a hotshot, you need to put in a lot of time and intensity into whatever you’re doing. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
So, I don’t know how to be a hotshot while you limit your working hours. If you find out, let me know. And no, The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris doesn’t count.
Closing thoughts
I spent 1500 words just coming up with problems. Which aren’t really problems. I just want to play with my child more while not totally losing my mind.
But I’ve come to realize time spent parenting isn’t very valued in America. It ends up feeling like you’re wasting your time and your life when you look back at it. Most people assume children’s thoughts and feelings don’t matter very much, and it’ll all even out as they grow up. Everyone likes to say “children are resilient”. I used to be one of them.
I don’t say that to mean I’m some superior supermom who kills it at mom-ing. I’m not. That’s exactly why I need to spend more time with my child. What I can’t give in quality I have to make up for with quantity. That makes no sense, but that’s the kind of defensive stuff I end up saying, because talking about this without sounding like some kind of weirdo is hard.
I resent that I can't even talk about spending more time with my child without being oddly defensive. I almost expect people to come at me with “What, is your child extra-unique or something?” and “Don’t be so overprotective of your child”. I don’t know about being extra-unique or overprotective, but I know my child needs her parents to moderate her experiences. And somehow, voicing that can prompt some interesting reactions.
I suppose it’s nice to ponder about an okay situation and wonder about it being just a little better. Bonus points for ruffling some feathers along the way.