What I tell younger women about work and family

Reflections on graduating from boy mom to...man mom?

« A warning - this post contains a description of postpartum depression. »

My oldest is now officially, incomprehensibly, an adult. At 18, a barely-adult still unable to buy a drink or rent a car - but legally grown, according to the laws of the United States of America.

So much is a blur, but some parts I’ll never forget

We celebrated this weekend, and as I woke up to decorate the house and prepare breakfast (the crepe-maker from two Christmases ago has turned out to be a huge win for weekend mornings), there was a tiny dusting of snow on the ground here in southern Virginia. It reminded me of the snowfall the day I brought him home from the hospital, on a Midwest day in January.

I sat on by the hospital window, holding my tiny, warm bundle of a baby while his dad packed up the car. I watched the heavy flakes falling out of the sky - and cried.

“I’m bringing him into a world - with snow!” I thought, overwhelmed at the thought of ushering this tiny precious person into a lifetime of cold, and fear, and danger and the thousands of other vulnerabilities involved in being alive.

Once home, there were the vulnerabilities of caring for that new life. Tear-filled calls with lactation consultants and an education about why nipple cream was invented. Worrying about if I’d stop bleeding, and if the baby would start sleeping through the night, before I absolutely had to go back to work: there was no maternity leave at my NPR station at that time, and I was married to a graduate student, and going without a paycheck for more than a few weeks just wasn’t possible. Looking in the mirror, I had a realization - that at 25, a certain version of youth was irrevocably over.

Those days spent at home were difficult, too; I remember wishing that my friends who came by with lasagnas and casseroles (it was, after all, winter in the Midwest) would stay just a little bit longer, long enough to protect me from the intrusive, dark thoughts I was having. When I was alone with the baby, I would fixate on the most awful news stories I’d heard about women harming their children. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt him - nothing seemed more horrible. It was knowing that I could - and that this little, soft, perfect creature was entirely dependent on me.

There was all of that and more, after enduring nine months of nausea and fatigue and pain in joints I’d never even thought about before.

I was talking with a pregnant younger friend recently, and she asked me, how do women do this more than once? It’s one thing to read about it in theory; it’s another to embody it.

So I told her: yes, it was hard. But there’s nothing in my life I’m prouder of or more grateful to have done. The experience of bringing life into the world has been, for me (obviously not for everyone, but for me) one of the most incredible things about being a woman and without question the greatest source of meaning and joy in my life.

The truth is, I often wish I’d had one or even two more - but it wasn’t in the cards for a lot of reasons. Some of them personal, some of them systemic. And look, if I had to choose between my career and my kids, I would without question choose the kids - but thankfully, I didn’t have to.

It feels like whatever you say about this is offensive to someone. There are weird competing zeitgeists out there that seem to either 1) tell women to have a ton of kids and beware that a woman’s life is utterly meaningless without them, or 2) to see motherhood as a horrible burden to be avoided. Social media, it seems, would have you think that everyone is either a tradwife or a manhater who thinks babies are gross.

Of course, neither extreme reflects the reality of most women’s lives. The truth is, women (and men) make complicated, often painful choices - choices often constrained by less-than-ideal-realities and sometimes by heartbreaking disappointments - about whether, when, and how to have children.

I’m at a stage of life where younger women in my field ask me these kinds of questions from time to time - some version of, how do you balance it all? What would you do differently? What should I do? The answers are as individual as the women themselves.

But when they ask me for mine, I tell them that if they know they want kids, to prioritize having them - like any other important life goal. To think hard and talk to prospective partners in boring detail about how their life will work: all the practicalities, like who makes the money and arranges or provides the childcare, who takes care of the home, what their long-term values and goals are, and the tradeoffs they’re willing to accept at work between professional fulfillment and money, flexibility, and a host of other variables.

There are so many compromises and workarounds I’ve made as a journalist mom: pumping breastmilk on assignment at a dairy farm (no joke!), planning a baby’s birth around an election cycle, scheduling reporting trips around Halloween and birthdays and school events, deciding which of those events I could afford to skip (and then feeling guilty), leaving a playdate to respond to breaking news…

So, I tell younger women to think ahead, imagine the life they want, and then, take steps to try to create it.

And to realize that there are things you can’t fully imagine until you embody them: like how difficult motherhood is, and how deeply it’s worth it.