The Things Mothers Hide
The recent crisis has forced us to leave our urban highrises and office parks and for kitchen tables and home offices. The lines between home and work have never been more blurred as we as parents take on our dual-responsibilities in what often feels constant chaos. And we’re all likely aware to a degree of the baseline inequities, starting with pay, facing women and mothers. I know, you’ve heard so much about this already… stay with me.
Many companies talk about a culture of transparency, and of supporting working parents. If there ever was a time for transparency, it’s now. It’s inevitable. We’re fully exposed in our identity as working parents and the challenges that come along with it. Our identity is not simply one or the other — it’s truly intertwined. Work-life and family life are as blended as a morning smoothie, like it or not. It’s the current-day reality, and I’m unapologetically here for it.
It wasn’t always this way for me, though. I used to go to lengths to keep my personal life separate from my work life. Mixing my family life with my work life never felt right when I first had children while working in tech, perhaps because I suspected kids might be viewed as a liability to my employers. So, for a while, I lost myself amidst two personas I created — professional Christine, and mom Christine. In a professional world shaped largely, for decades, by masculine forces, the femininity of my new role as a mother felt out of place, in a world where I had worked carefully to mold myself to fit in. Yet motherhood changed me — the one-way door that it is — there was no going back. As is so beautifully described in this Reboot podcast by Heather Jassy, “there’s an identity shift that happens when you become a mother. Your heart gets broken wide open.”
So my solution, as a result, then, was to hide most everything about my life as a mom, at work.
I hid my pregnancies as long as I could, for fear they would change the way my bosses treated me (they did, drastically, in 2 of my 3 pregnancies). I hid the fact that I had kids twice when applying for jobs, because I feared I wouldn’t be hired, deemed as not dedicated — kudos to the employer that hired me 7 months pregnant, though that came with its own set of challenges. I hid pumping milk for my babies because at the time it felt awkward to hear the hum of my pump eeking from the (supply) closet. Then I hid the breastmilk I’d pumped, inside a bag within the company kitchen fridge, because some 25-year-old coding bro might be grossed out seeing a container of breastmilk next to his leftover fried rice from last night, or worse, think it was creamer and add to his coffee (though that would have been fun). I hid the fact that I had nighttime commitments to my kids and signed up to take the weekly client call at 7:30 for a while, even though it conflicted with bedtime. I hid and hid and hid. It was exhausting.
Worst of all, I hid that I was overwhelmed. Because as much as I wanted to believe I had a handle on being a new mom and rocking my job per usual, I didn’t. I was majorly sleep deprived. My boobs were leaking — of course, I hid that too — and my body took on an unfamiliar shape which yes, I tried my best to hide, albeit uncomfortably in a professional wardrobe. My baby was with a new caretaker I hardly knew, while the new hires who joined the company during my maternity leave were ambitiously working their tails off. At home, my colicky 3-month-old was a stressful bundle of joy, with no clear reasons for her constant crying around the clock. The demands of being a “good” mom — making the homemade baby food, washing bottles by hand, getting her on a schedule, and all the programming designed for babies with promises of incredibly intellectual development — well, they wiped me out in a way I’d never experienced. I was suddenly spent — unlike nothing I had experienced in my startup career or 4 years on a Division 1 Athletics team. Nobody really tells you this stuff. And as a culture, moms have not felt very safe discussing it openly.
It was a slow transition to my own becoming comfortable enough to share aspects of my personal life with clients and business partners. Shortly after my third was born, I launched my own business working with startups and innovation-oriented organizations, and the transition to becoming a business owner combined with self-exploration and meditation, helped me to show up at work more wholly.
Every woman is different in how she approaches her new role of motherhood while balancing her career. And many employers still struggle to truly support them. The smallest gestures or statements, or assumptions, often seemingly coming from a place of care, can cause more harm. Many of us simply have not been witness to open discussions and knowing the best way to handle the needs of new mothers. And so the hiding will continue. Most pregnant women don’t see the demands of motherhood coming — in preparation for baby, society teaches us to focus on birth plans, short-term maternity leave plans, and nursery decor. And we don’t prioritize the whole health — the mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing — of the mother. If women can show up comfortably as their true selves when they return to work (aka feel psychological safety in being their true selves), I’m confident they’ll be more productive than if they’re trying to assure their coworkers and managers they’ve got a good handle on it all, all the time, when really, that’s an impossible feat.
This pandemic is going to change business and society in ways we’re not even aware of yet. Mothers’ mental loads (caring for the emotional health of their family, scheduling homeschooling, grocery orders, etc) are now higher than ever. That’s before even trying to balance full-time work with full-time parenting, and the additional household management that comes with everyone being home all day, every day (more cooking, dishes, and laundry oh my!). I’m not saying partners don’t help — most do to an extent (that’s another story for another time). I hope that this unique situation we’re in now is a wake-up call for all employers to value the real health needs of all employees. And, for moms, to become more comfortable with asking for what they need, and allowing the imperfections to show. Entering motherhood, especially while working a demanding job, is a delicate time. And tending to that need is something we have to do a better job of as a society.