My senior year of college, I enrolled in an Economics seminar as part of my major. In the course, each student was to choose two of the topics amongst a list of topics to write a report and then present their takeaways to the rest of the class. This was one of the topics I had chosen.
It was a question that intrigued my 21-year old self, before I even knew where I would land my first job or whether I would have a family with my then-boyfriend (now husband), also taking the seminar.
Now, over a decade later, I am working every day to prove to myself and all of the other women out there asking themselves the same question that yes, it is possible. And we shouldn’t be embarrassed or fearful to strive for it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to have it all, as long as we recognize that it requires a commitment to self-preservation, to constant reflection, and to continuous action.
Willy Wonka: “And Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he’d ever wished for.”
Charlie: “What happened?”
Willy Wonka: “He lived happily ever after.”
A bit about me. I am 33 years old and I am a Senior Vice President and Head of the Marketing Science & Analytics division at a marketing agency in Chicago. I live on the northwest border of Chicago and I commute downtown 4 days a week (when I’m not traveling). I am an Associate Board member of two local non-profit organizations in the city of Chicago. I am a dog mom to two Australian Labradoodles, Riley (5 ½) and Hershey (2). And I am also a mom to my adopted daughter Keira (15 months) and to my biological son Jackson (11 months). That’s right: I have two babies that are 4 ½ months apart in age.
When I first entered into motherhood, I looked around me for mentors, for guides, for inspiration. I knew what great moms looked like from childhood. I grew up surrounded by them, between my mom, my aunts, my friends’ moms. My own tribe of women were also slowly becoming moms themselves, but as I looked around, I realized that I was the first of my friends in the Chicago area to become a mom.
As I thought about it more, I realized that even though I knew what great moms looked like, I didn’t have any examples in my life- past or present- of great moms who looked like the kind of career mom I wanted to be. I realized that I really had no one I could look up to who had experience balancing both career and momhood, and no one even to relate to who was in a similar situation to mine.
Now, what do I mean by that? Well, my own mom was a full-time mom growing up; she had worked for 15 years prior to having me, and then shifted her priorities to dedicate 100% of her time to me. Similarly, most of my aunts and the moms of close friends were full-time moms. I couldn’t look back to my childhood for inspiration on how to juggle getting yourself ready for work in the morning while babies were crawling around your bathroom, trying to enter the shower and play with a trash can full of feminine products. I couldn’t get advice on how to flip the switch on your brain from when you leave the office with the stress of the day weighing on you to when you enter a house of giggling babies clapping because they are so happy to see you. And I couldn’t ask how these women could balance attending out-of-town meetings for which they were in high demand with being home for wake ups and bedtimes.
So I considered women currently in the work force. Surely, I could derive inspiration from these strong female co-workers, many of whom became moms many years before I did. Well, as I did my own internal audit, I quickly discovered that many of the women in senior leadership roles that I interacted with in fact weren’t actually parents at all. I turned to two who were. I asked the first how she managed it all of these years – being a powerful woman in business and a mom at the same time. How did she juggle traveling to meetings with the kids’ travel sports teams? How did she balance the late nights at the office with the late nights cramming for a history test?
“To be honest,” she told me. “My husband was never very ambitious. So he was always there to take care of those things. If we had both been ambitious in our careers, I am not sure what we would have done.”
A few weeks later, I had a conversation with another woman in a mid-level management position and expressed some of the internal noise going through my head. I wanted to get her point of view on work life / mom life balance. At this stage, her kids are both grown and in college.
“It was hard. I actually ended up taking 7 years off from the work force. I really didn’t have a choice,” my co-worker shared. “It definitely stagnated my career growth.”
This all made me realize that for this new generation of moms- those of us who are highly educated, highly ambitious, and highly interested in having a family- we don’t have a ton of role models. We don’t have other women to look up to for advice on how to navigate our new normal of being a mom and a businesswoman. And I don’t say a “working mom”, because that implies that we are a mom first (mom as the noun) and that working is just something we do. But no, we were businesswomen first and we established ourselves as experts at something externally before we ever became moms.
Shortly after re-entering the work force I bonded with another co-worker in a similar level role with a baby a few months older than my own. What did we bond over? Our shared Mother’s Room experience. You see, our floor in our office, like many offices, has one Mother’s Room that nursing moms can share to pump during the work day (more on that later). Anyway, she and I were both using the room and would “slack” or email one another throughout the work week to coordinate schedules. We realized that our entire relationship had revolved around breastfeeding and so, we resolved to get coffee. During our coffee date, I realized that she faced many of the same challenges and pressures as me. But it still wasn’t exactly the same. During that coffee date, I also learned that her husband had opted to be a stay-at-home dad. That meant that we could commiserate over pumping during the work day, over still waking up twice a night to feed before waking up at 5:30 AM to start our day, and over having 25 hours filled for every 24 hour day. But she hadn’t needed to monitor traffic patterns daily to make sure she made it home to her kids by 5:00 PM on the dot before childcare ended. She didn’t have to worry about pushing her work flights to 9 AM instead of 7 AM to make sure that one parent could be there in the early morning while her husband had a pre-6 AM departure time for work. And she didn’t have to build a shared calendar with her husband to make sure that their work travel trips didn’t overlap.
I say none of this to diminish any of these women, their stories, and their accomplishments. I say it to clarify that, especially for me, as one of the first in my peer group to navigate this new space, I realized how many things I have had to figure out on my own. And how many things that haven’t gone exactly as I would have liked- at home and at work- that I have had to roll with and be okay with.
And so, in the weeks that follow, I will dive into a combination of topics and stories revolving around being a woman in business and being a mom. Some topics straddle both and some are focused only on one. I can talk about what it’s like to grow in an organization from entry-level to a leadership position, and what it is like to reach that type of position of power and influence at a young age. I can offer a point of view on being a woman in a male-dominated industry (first consulting, then analytics). I can offer solace and relatability for women who are struggling with fertility issues, recurring miscarriages, high-risk pregnancies, and the adoption process. I can make the woman wondering how they will ever survive with “two under two” see that it is possible to survive, even with “two under one.” I can share my experiences on preparing for maternity leave, returning from maternity leave, traveling for work overseas while still nursing, traveling domestically and internationally with babies, welcoming an au pair into our home, and focusing on growing and inspiring my team at work. I can discuss ways that I find time- and times that, quite frankly, I don’t find time- for working out and for staying involved in my charity work.
I’d like to think that some of what I have discovered along the way, along with some of my funny, devastating, and heartwarming anecdotes, may offer encouragement for the others walking alongside me or after me. At the very least, it can serve as confirmation that you are not alone, you are not the first, and you won’t be the last to try to have it all.
Business and Babies 