Why everything you’re told about being a working mum is wrong!
By a former high-flyer who’s enraged the sisterhood
THE PIVOTAL moment came one evening at a glamorous reception for heads of state and foreign ministers from all over the world. I sipped champagne, greeted guests, mingled and chatted.
But my mind kept wandering. I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son 200 miles away at home, and the urgent phone calls on an almost daily basis about his teenage transgressions.
When puberty hit, he’d become sulky, truculent and monosyllabic. He skipped homework, disrupted classes and played truant. Now he’d been suspended from school and picked up by the police for a stupid prank.
The next step was expulsion. It was unthinkable. Yet where was I when this tumult was erupting in his young life?
I was 18 months into my dream job as the first female director of policy planning for the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. I worked in Washington and lived there five days a week, commuting home to my husband, Andy and our two boys (the youngest was then aged 12) at weekends.
Andy was our sons’ primary carer: he structured his job as a professor to fit round their routine, he ferried them to out-of-school activities, helped them with their homework, soothed them when they were sick and cooked their meals.
My parenting was relegated to a subsidiary role. When our older son was six, he drew a picture of his family and portrayed me as a laptop. Not even a woman with a laptop. Just a laptop. I shared a rueful laugh with Andy over it.
But that evening, four years ago, at the gathering of the great and the good, I wasn’t laughing any more.
Instead, I had a sense of being split in two; of straddling an ever-widening crevasse. And I’d had enough. I needed to go home to my family. More than that, I wanted to.
Andy’s flexibility had allowed me to be the main breadwinner, to pursue my career on its fast trajectory. But the emotional costs of my choice, I realised, far outweighed the benefits.
And although I was — and remain — a feminist, it struck me with the force of a hammer blow that, although the mantra of the movement i nsists otherwise, women can’t have it all.
SO AFTER two years working f or Clinton, I bolted f or home. I’d always assumed I’d apply for a foreign policy job and stay in Washington — but the credo on which I’d built my life was shifting like quicksand.
I, a high-profile career woman — and role model — was conceding that it was impossible to juggle the demands of high office with the needs of my two sons.
I felt, too, that it would be dishonest to continue to propagate the myth that if you just try hard enough you can make it work. I wanted to point out that if I, with all my middle-class privileges — money, domestic help and a husband as main carer — could not pull it off, what hope was there for a mother struggling without these advantages?
So I wrote an article: Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. What I had not anticipated was the tsunami of responses: clearly it touched a nerve.
There were women of my own age — 57 — who had delegated their child-rearing and sustained high-profile jobs, who felt I’d betrayed the women’s movement.
They remarked that it was ‘ such a shame’ I’d left my career for my kids. Others were openly aghast. ‘You of all people!’ scolded one. And some were condescending: ‘ I never had to compromise my career, and my kids turned out fine,’ said one colleague.
But the article also gave comfort to so many young women who expressed relief at being absolved from the duty of trying to be superwoman.
All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the one wearing the faintly superior smile when yet another woman told me she had decided to take some time out to spend more time with her family.
I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly
with a dwindling number of college friends who had reached their places on the highest rungs of their professions.
I’d been the one telling young women they can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field they are in. But now I was on the other side.
My next step, as I met mothers, fathers and would-be parents, was to think of a new way forward. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned.
IT’S OK TO GO SLOW
My OWN crisis f orced me to confront what was most important to me — my family — rather than what I was conditioned to want: a high-flying career. But among many of my peers, I had been devalued.
I was one of a roll call of talented, well-educated women who, having reached a high career level, had thrown it in to take a less demanding job — I returned to university teaching — and spend more time with her sons and husband.
Focusing on family is held to be the death knell to career and ambition. But why should it be?
Working part-time, flexibly or even taking some time away will, of course, put you on a slower track for promotion, but why should it take you off the rails entirely? It is assumed the fast track is the only option: it’s up or out. So the scales are tilted in favour of those who see their careers as one-track races.
Because of this, we miss out on huge amounts of talent. We lose the distance runners; those with the endurance, patience, fortitude and resilience to keep going over the long haul.
But if we view our working lives as peri ods of intense activity interspersed with times to slow down and draw breath, we could plan a way forward for mothers who want to have time off with their children.
What is needed is a radical change in outlook. Dame Fiona Woolf, a solicitor and former Lord Mayor of London, put it succinctly: ‘Girls don’t ask for flexible work because they think it’s career suicide.’
yet there is a growing body of evidence that those who work shorter hours are often more productive than those whose objective it is to be first in and last out of the office.
CARING IS A SKILL
THe crux of the problem, I believe, is this: we do not rate caring as highly as competitiveness. And this needs to change.
It is a common assumption that the years a woman spends out of paid work is a black hole on her CV. employers fail to recognise that motherhood is a challenging and demanding job.
If we truly learned to value care, and the inestimable worth of parenthood — not just socially, but economically — we would make every effort to fit work round it.
According to Megan Gunnar, professor of neuroscience and developmental psychology at the University of Minnesota, those caring for small children need the analytical skills of a physicist, t he adaptive abilities of a crisis manager, the emotional insight of a psychologist, and the general knowledge of a Trivial Pursuit champion.
And there is neuroscientific evidence that the quality of care you receive from birth to age five can set you up or keep you down for life.
One night when our sons were younger, one of them called for Daddy rather than me.
What I felt most was not guilt, but envy.
Wasn’t he supposed to call for me first, even though I was absent most of the time?
even with all the rewards of my career, I still wanted to be indispensable to my boys.
So my question is: do we really want to share the caring role with our husbands?
Some will be thinking: ‘Of course! We want the men in our lives to pick up the slack, to take an equal share of the parenting and breadwinning.’
In which case, it’s up to us to get off our superwoman pedestal and let them. But if we choose to be our children’s main carers during the formative early years of their lives, we should not feel we are abandoning our feminist principles.
Mothers must embrace a new kind of career planning. There are ways to fit work and family together by building a portfolio of part-time jobs, or by working ‘ on demand’ when we need or are able to.
Lawyers, plumbers, taxi drivers, nurses, GPs — they all have the potential to work flexibly.
If we also accept that our working lives are becoming longer, we can more easily factor in periods for education, caring, and even, if we are fortunate, ‘me-time’.
Planning your career as if you were going to peak in your mid-50s and retire by 65 is the equivalent of cramming a seven- course meal into three. I would counsel women not to drop out of their careers entirely when they have children.
Far too many mothers find it’s much more difficult than they expected to return. So, if at all possible, stay in the game. If you’re strategic about it, you can keep your networks fresh and your skills sharp even as you slow down for a while.
When your children finally take flight, do not flap around your empty nest forlornly, but think of this phase as a second surge; a time of renewed energy, focus and commitment to a professional goal.
I have developed a motto: ‘ If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together.’
If anyone working for me had a family concern, they should attend to it. We, their managers and colleagues, would cover for them and support them in any way we could.
In return, we would expect them to meet their professional obligations; make up any work they could not delegate and ensure that important issues or assignments did not fall through the cracks.
I would never hire someone who told me work would always come before family.
PARENT ADVANTAGE
THe final step requires bosses to view care itself as an asset.
It’s time to realise that caring for l oved ones will give people experience and insights that will help them in their jobs.
So how did it work out for me? My younger son is 16 and about to start his sixth-form studies; my eldest, aged 18, is on the verge of leaving home for university.
The trauma of his adolescence long past, he is happy, productive and bright. I cannot know, of course, if my decision to return home four years ago was a turning point for him. I only know that it has, mercifully, turned out for the best for both of us.
Meanwhile, as I approach the age when most of those who have climbed the career ladder remorselessly to the top are ready to retire, I feel full of vigour and eager to take on new professional challenges.
I’m ready to ramp up again: it’s time for phase three.