How She Really Does It (1 of 2 free samples)

---

COPYRIGHT
How She Really Does It by Wendy Sachs. Copyright 2005 by Wendy Sachs.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

---

Next

HOW SHE REALLY DOES IT
Secrets of Successful Stay-at-Work Moms

Wendy Sachs

For Michael
My loving husband,
I don't know how he really does it


PREFACE

IDENTITY CRISIS: DIAPERS VERSUS BRIEFS

Upon giving birth to my son three and a half years ago, I was quickly initiated into the cult of mommyhood. Part of the rite of passage in this postpartum society is to enter a parallel universe, a highly social and active world where moms and babies spend their days hustling around to a wide array of classes, lunches, and playgroups. When my son was six weeks old, we joined organized "New Mommy" lunches that took place at various New York City restaurants. For $20, moms bonded over sore nipples and poopy diapers, swapped dramatic tales of labor and delivery, and shared tips on which infant gas remedy worked best. As we sat around the tables, feeding and burping our crying newborns, guest speakers would talk to us about important matters such as the benefits of baby massage and the surprising fat-burning efficiency of Strollercize.

It was here where I met my first mommy friends--a lactating sorority of out-of-shape, exhausted women who were, like me, simply looking for sisterly support as we all struggled to survive those brutal first few months of motherhood. The women at these lunches had an impressive collective résumé. They were lawyers, psychologists, engineers, financial analysts, social workers, and marketing and advertising executives. Many had graduated from some of the elite universities in this country. So when talk turned to life after maternity leave, I was surprised to discover that only two women were returning to work. One was going back to her full-time job as a credit analyst at a Wall Street financial institution, and my friend Sue, a school psychologist, planned to return part-time after taking a year of maternity leave from the school system where she worked. Some of the other women initially agonized about whether or not to return to their careers.
One mom even saw a therapist to hash out her anxieties. She has since had another baby and has decided to stay home--at least for now.

At that time, I had recently left my job as an associate producer at Dateline NBC to work at an Internet start-up. I had been wooed by stock options and the ability to work from home. But my company was on the verge of imploding as the dot com bubble was bursting, and I was itching to go back into television, a career I had truly adored. I had thrived on the rip of adrenaline breaking news gave me--the chase, the conquest, the addictive feeling of being a part of history.

On September 11, 2001, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, my infant son, Jonah, was sleeping soundly on me, molded to my chest. While I watched the towers crumble on TV and smelled my delicious baby on top of me, I suddenly felt conflicted. I wanted desperately to be covering the story, the biggest news event of our generation. As the story evolved over the next few weeks, I started speaking to former colleagues about freelancing for NBC. They needed additional bodies, and I wanted to sign up. But how could I leave my infant for what would have been long days, if not weeks on end?

For the next few months I continued to grapple with how I could go back into television. I was on the outskirts of this historic event, and I couldn't stand it. Instead of field producing in Afghanistan, I was breast-feeding at Starbucks. For the first time ever my clear career path was suddenly as opaque as the Calvin Klein tights I used to wear to work. Had motherhood permanently obstructed my Big Career plans?

Many of the moms I initially met truly couldn't relate to my growing restlessness. They had made peace with their decision to stay home and were getting settled into their routines of full-time, at-home mommy-hood. As I became more antsy, they seemed more content. Part of me envied them for being so thrilled with motherhood and not appearing to need more. And part of me was simply bothered by their satisfaction. I just didn't get it. I found myself getting sucked into traditional stereotypes of what defines a "Good Mother," and I began fearing that I simply wasn't good enough. If I were good enough, I figured, I should be relishing motherhood, not feeling a relentless churning for something more.

It was at this time that the inspiration for this book evolved. I was shocked to discover that so many smart, talented women were dropping out of the workforce, or "opting out" as New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin called it. We're the women who were raised in an environment where anything was supposed to be possible. We're the ones who had the doors to advancement jimmied open for us to waltz through, so why were so many women turning on their heels and leaving once they became mothers? Had all of these women embraced their inner Marthas and discovered domestic bliss and fulfillment in baking the perfect linzer tortes, as some headlines suggest? I felt desperate to find moms who weren't dropping out but who were staying in--and I was equally desperate to discover how they were doing it all.

As I wrestled with what to do, I looked for support--beyond the "New Mommy" group--and asked other women about how they handled this tricky work-family quandary. When I shared my concerns about how to still have a fantastic career and be a great mommy, I found that I wasn't alone. Whereas some moms seemed genuinely happy to take a mid-career sabbatical because they both wanted to and could afford to stay at home, many more women I met were, like myself, feeling anxious because they wanted to work and were trying to figure out how to merge their career with motherhood. The "balance" everyone talks about, that Holy Grail for working moms, was much more nuanced and complicated than we had ever anticipated. The dirty truth that no one wants to admit is that the world works against the Stay-at-Work mom. We have been led to believe that career women can gracefully maneuver motherhood into already bustling lives.
But ask any new mom, and we're simply stumbling along blindly trying to stay afoot, to please everyone, and to make sense of our suddenly conflicted identities. Every mother I met seemed desperate to hear about how other women strike that precarious balance in their lives between motherhood and career. How do they do it? What are the trade-offs? How do they handle the inevitable conflicts? How do they reconcile the guilt? How do they come to terms with their own ambition? Are they happy? Is there anything they regret? What are the options out there?

Despite growing up at a time when more and more women worked, we had few examples showing us how we were going to succeed at being both great moms and women with fabulous careers. Ours was the generation who grew up and came of age watching The Cosby Show's smiling Claire Huxtable, the witty, tough mother of five who allegedly worked full-time as a lawyer but was always around for dinner and endless chitchat. She never seemed stressed or fried from work. She never bitched about clients or mentioned that she couldn't make it to Rudy's ballet recital or Theo's soccer game because of a grueling caseload. But as we've all now learned, The Cosby Show epitomized the idyllic family sitcom, not reality TV. So how are real women doing it?

Next