Planning for Babies
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Update: Check out our latest discussion on planning your career for babies.
Over at Law.com's The Careerist, Vivia Chen ponders one of the most interesting lessons from Sheryl Sandberg's TED talk: “Don't leave before you leave.” As she notes:
But it was Sandberg's third point that really stopped me in my tracks: Women sabotage their own careers because they consciously or unconsciously put the brakes on their jobs. Often young women are so concerned about balancing work and family that they pull back from challenging work–even at the starting gate.
Tips on Planning for Babies and Parenthood
This was also one of the most interesting points to me, if only because I know that I've done this to some degree, and so have other friends.
(Pictured: Naked Mohawk-Baby Carrot Jockeys, from the fabulous humor blog Cake Wrecks.)
So let's talk about this:
1) Did you plan your career with a family juggle in mind? I know one friend who, upon starting her MBA, was interested in the investment banking track — and she was overwhelmed with “don't do it” advice from other people, all of whom pointed out that no women do that track because the job requires too much.
{related: do you feel like you need to sacrifice kids for career}
2) Have you changed your career due to babies on your brain? How so? I think I can speak for a lot of women when I say that babies and the family juggle were absolutely not on my mind when I applied to law school — ah, the hubris of youth! It was only several years later, in my late 20s, when friends started to have kids, that I took a long look at working conditions of the few supervisors I worked with who were mothers and seriously assessed my career options.
3) For those of you *with* kids — what's your advice to those of us without kids? Plan ahead? Roll with the punches? What job benefits have you found absolutely essential to you as a mother? Flex time? Ability to work from home? For those of you who quit jobs over lack of certain benefits, or if you have a wishlist of benefits, which ones would you like to see?
I’m in law school with two kids that will be 15 and 4 when I finish next year. I’ve focused on finding work in government because my understanding is the hours are more regular. Not that the work isn’t more challenging. I know that I haven’t been in school extracurriculars because I want to spend as much time as possible with the kids.
Regardless of all the “what about the children” rhetoric, we live in a very family unfriendly world. So many of the old Victorian ideals about children still resonate within society. I think opening up our daily world to our children is important both for mothers, non-mothers, and men as well. It’s good for the kids to see where mommy or daddy go every day. It’s good for the kids to see mommy or daddy participating fully in society. That’s just good role modeling.
My kids are the most important thing to me. In undergrad, my son would be dropped off every day at my school so I could finish my work study day. He’d sit at the desk next to mine and play games. Then we’d go swimming for an hour and then head home. My immediate bosses were very okay with this; they thought that the campus should have more children visable. It was a women’s college, but older women always seemed surprised.
I’m a mid-level litigation associate at a V-50 law firm. I’m pregnant with our first child and I’m planning on leaving the firm, permanently, once I give birth. Luckily for my family, my husband is a BigLaw attorney as well, and we live far below our means (even on one salary), so having a full-time stay-at-home parent is doable.
I wasn’t cut out to be a full time lawyer and mother. I know I’ll want to devote myself to my child. I don’t really take any joy or fulfillment from my job. I hate the idea of constantly running from one thing to another in the pursuit of “having it all.” I love the idea of being a home-maker. Of keeping house and holding down the home-frong and having a home cooked, healthy, hot meal ready for my husband and family every night. Of having a life that is not a constant struggle to “balance,” but rather to enjoy in peace and without (a high degree of) stress. Luckily my husband (even before we were married) was fully on board with this plan. We both think that having a peaceful (though, in material terms, modest) life is more important than maximizing our income.
I left private practice for a federal career and I rarely regret it. Finances get a little tight sometimes, but I am able to spend the quality time with my son that I want to spend.
Kat, thanks for kicking off this discussion – this is a very important topic for professional women, and everyone’s situation is so different, so it is always very interesting to hear about the choices others have made and how it has worked out for them.
I was in private practice (regional big-law) when I had both my kids, and I definitely felt that I had choices and the decision on how to balance things was mine. I took the allowed 3 month leave each time and then returned to work full-time (with more reasonable hours than some of my colleagues, but there were still the crazy times around deal closings), with no disruption to my careeer path. My husband worked full-time, but in a non-legal job with more predictable hours and no travel. We did that for a few years with kids, and then I took an in-house legal job in a new city when my kids were 3 and 5, and my husband became a stay-at-home dad. I always felt that if my husband stayed at home while I was still at the law firm, my (internal or external) excuses for moderating my hours would disappear, and while I saw examples of women partners who attempted balance, I never saw great examples of success at balancing; it seemed like either family or career was was not getting the full attention it needed.
Now, as the sole breadwinner, luckily my job demands are not excessive. I’ve found that as my kids age, the amount of time I need/want to spend with them is actually higher – I personally want to stay in engaged in their life and their learning and their emotional growth, and that would have been very hard to if I was still at the law firm, whether my husband worked or not.
I’ll always work, and I’m very driven, so it was important to me to find a job where I can excel and still have sufficient time to stay connected to my family (and friends and hobbies). To me, that is better than a more challenging job where I have to constantly assess what needs to give in order to be connected to family and work.
I am older than most of the commenters on here – I just turned 46. One reason for not giving up on your career is that you may actually need it some day. The statistics are true – 50% of marriages end in divorce. I’m not saying you need to go for head of office, necessarily (unless of course that’s what you want), but you may very well end up supporting yourself and your children one day. It’s not about fancy cars, purses and vacations at that point. It’s about food on the table and a roof over your heads. Don’t even get me started on “child support.”
I’ve been divorced (and now remarried) and more than 50% of my friends are divorced, too. It’s not just my working friends, either. My children are in elementary school and MOST of their friends are from so-called “broken” homes, regardless of whether the mom was stay at home or working.
15-20 years ago when I was going to all those beautiful, expensive, meaningful weddings, I never ever for one second thought the landscape would look this way at 46. I swear to god. If that’s you, all I’m saying is look at it with open eyes.
I appreciate how respectful this discussion has been. I am so used to the whole mommy war thing I almost declined to read the comments on this post.
This is a great post and I completely agree.
Please don’t take the following the wrong way, and I am not saying at all that this is the case with you, but there is a flip side to this: my marriage would not have survived me continuing my career outside of the home. I was stressed, husband was stressed, unhappy home life for everyone. It was completely unsustainable. Fortunately, there was a clear solution that I was happy with (I quit my job to stay home and work for myself part-time). But when I was leaving my firm, a female partner who I liked a lot took me aside and warned me about this issue, and she spoke from the voice of experience–she was recently divorced with a 5 year old daughter, and her ex-husband had a demanding career as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if, maybe, she had worked a little less, she might have been able to keep her marriage afloat. Probably not, but who knows? All I knew was that, for me, continuing my career as it was would not happen without seriously damaging my relationship with my husband.
AA, of course there are individual circumstances in every case. When I think about my friends and acquaintances, as I said in my original post, the stats are pretty evenly split between working moms and SAHMs. Among my close friends I would say the SAHMs stayed in bad marriages longer because they had fewer options, but they didn’t stay forever. And none of them have been able to remain SAHMs either, without a head of household income.
You can never know what goes on in someone else’s marrige, but among my friends and acquaintances, infidelity seems to have been the primary driver of divorce. Of course, that is probably a symptom of other problems, but it’s often the last straw.
That 50% of marriages end in divorce statistic is not true! People who got married in the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s have significantly lower divorce rates than the 60’s and 70’s, same with people who get married after 25 and who have college educations. Fewer people are choosing to get married today then they were in the past so if you’re looking at how many people in x year get married v how many get divorced it looks like 50%, but that’s a terribly skewed statistic! NYT writer Tara Parker-Pope wrote “For Better” that examined this and other marriage studies in a really interesting and positive way. I’d encourage a library check out. Discussions about how one handles children and work/domestic life are also examined in great detail and how to prepare yourself and your marriage for the change to kids I found very helpful and interesting.
I’ve seen some of the posters acknowledge that it may take a while to conceive. We started trying when I turned 32–DH and I were in great health and never dreamed we’d have a problem. It ended up taking two years of fertility treatment to get the job done (ironically, I then conceived #2 by accident at age 37–acupuncture and Chinese herbs are powerful stuff).
The stress and time investment of infertility treatment was MUCH harder on my job/career than parenting has been. I did the math and found that for each month I was on a treatment cycle, I was spending an average of 3 hrs/day on infertility: driving to the almost-daily ultrasounds at o’dark hundred each morning; phone consults w/nurses; acupuncture; mental health therapy; guided imagery tapes; involvement with an infertility support group/organization (RESOLVE); and last but not least, 40 minutes of having to hold ice packs on myself before DH could inject me. I’m one of the lucky ones who had good insurance coverage, so my paperwork hassles were minimal.
I’m not arguing that women shouldn’t attend to their career growth, and my own career was definitely helped by “paying my dues” early on. What I would offer is that if you’re even thinking about having a child, don’t make the mistake my DH and I made–we waited until our lives were perfectly in order and, looking back, we could have easily moved things up by a year–and one year can make a huge difference in your FSH levels and other hormonal factors. Infertility is heartbreaking, and it’s additionally stressful to try to keep it hidden from your co-workers. It was hard to not cry in meetings when a colleague would joyfully surprise others with her own good news.
My employer is flexible with my schedule, which helps a great deal, and I have a spouse who is a true partner. I’m also confident that as my kids grow older, I’ll be able to ramp up to 110% again–I’ve seen a number of 50+ women do that in my industry who then enjoyed fantastic results from their career revitalizations.
Another helpful workplace amenity has been my private office (for pumping milk). I let everybody know that when my door was closed, I was still completely accessible by IM and email–this made a big difference. I (tactfully and strategically) let a few people know that I had a hands-free device so that I could still type and do email while pumping, so they didn’t think of me as unproductive. Also, I had a car charger for my breast pump, so I could pump while driving (with a towel draped over me for modesty!). It helped, too, that I was assertive about finding a lactation consultant (and pediatric chiropractors) who really knew their stuff and could help my kids learn to breastfeed–my kids wouldn’t latch for eight weeks (#1) and three weeks (#2). Successful breastfeeding was very important to my career, since my children were sick less and also because I lost weight more quickly…and it helped my image and my confidence to fit back into my professional clothes as quickly as possible.
Good luck to everyone who is struggling with these choices.
Ditto private office for pumping. There was a woman in another suite in my building who was in a bathroom stall with a pump 2-3 times a day. That would be a dealbreaker for me. I fixed up a tension rod and curtain for my window to the hallway, and have a hands-free device, and everyone knows to just shoot me an email if my door is closed. I honestly think this arrangement made the difference in whether I would come back when I did.
Working from home is a nice thought, but for me it really doesn’t solve anything. I just can’t get work done at home, even if I take baby to daycare (and especially if I don’t!) I need the office environment to get away from my mommy hat mentally as much as physically. YMMV.
My personal theory is that no household can reasonably handle more than 1.5 “Big Jobs” (i.e. full-time professional jobs) without it affecting the children negatively.
I am super-fortunate to work a part-time transactional job, and mostly from home. My husband, a teacher, is home every day by 4PM and in the summers. Although I have undoubtedly stepped onto the Mommy Track, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Do you think that’s true for all ages of children? My personal experience, with one child, was that the first 3 years were the most important to develop strong parent-child bonds. Now my only child is 5, I believe that she needs social interaction with her peers and with other adults as much as she needs one-on-one time with me and family time.
My kids are 13 and 10. I worked much more when they were younger, and have actually found that they need me more now than they did then. I could outsource diaper-changes and toddler park outings, but when my 13yo comes home from school with social problems or school worries on his mind, he needs to talk to me *right that moment*. I’ve found that if I am not around, and the moment is gone, he tends to shut down. He won’t re-raise what’s going on later in the evening.
Statistically speaking, teens tend to get into the most trouble between 3 and 6PM.
They do need social time with their peers, but in my view parents are perhaps even more important during this stage.
Thanks – you’ve given me something to think about.
I agree with this completely. The preschool years are the golden years for mom working. I failed to anticipate how quickly this would change, but once we hit elementary school, we entered the world of homework (yes, in kindergarten these days), sports practices, evening school performances, obsevations days, etc. The physical dependence of the kid ends by age 2, but the emotional needs ratchet up thereafter.
I very much agree with this. I found it pretty easy to work full time before my kids started elementary school. They were enrolled in a fantastic childcare center where they spent the whole day. They were happy and the logistics were simple.
Now that they are in first and fifth grade, I find myself managing a patchwork of afterschool childcare and other activities (music lessons, sports, school play rehearsals, playdates, etc.). And then there are the (tremendous number of) school vacations to deal with!
We’ve made it work, largely because my husband and I both have the flexibility to work at home when we need to, or work in the evening instead of in the afternoon. But it’s certainly not getting any easier!
As many have said: thanks for this topic and thread, which I have enjoyed reading. And as one other commentator has said, this is quite timely for me, as I am home right now literally waiting to give birth to my second child (and feeling SO done with pregnancy right now).
My quick responses to Kat’s original questions:
(1 & 2) Did you plan your career with a family juggle in mind? Have you changed your career due to babies on your brain?
I worked as paralegal before heading to law school and observing how the lawyers there handled family life was very instructive. It was probably a best-of situation, as it was a federal office, but it gave me a glimpse of some things that I don’t think I would have considered on my own (commute from suburbs or tough it out in the city? Nanny v. daycare? Stay at home? How long to take for maternity leave?). In law school it dawned on me that because having kids earlier rather than later was a priority (my husband is a fair amount older), I needed to start thinking about these kinds of things when considering my options.
Don’t get me wrong: I still went through OCI and landed a BigLaw gig, but I definitely chose a firm that was lower-ranked than my other options but seemed a kinder place in terms of work-life and had offices in cities we have considered relocating to in the future.
Where I differed from most is in having baby No. 1 right after graduation. I realize that our timing was incredible, and a lot of that is luck, but some of it probably had to do with the fact that I was a healthy 27-year-old. (At my pre-law school job many of the attorneys had waited to have kids until their mid-/late-thirties and many of them had difficulty getting pregnant, ended up doing IVF after years of dealing with fertility issues, etc.) I was also lucky that my firm was okay with me taking the February bar and starting the first week in March (and I should mention this was pre-recession), but I thought that the five-months difference in start dates between me and my peers at the firm was, in the long run, not that big of a difference. And it wasn’t.
I then luckily was able to obtain a one-year clerkship, which just ended last week, and we decided to try to have baby No. 2 after that. Again, we were incredibly lucky in timing, and my due date is about three weeks after my position ended. Because I’ve been off-cycle in my short career (i.e., not starting new positions in the fall), I also will be taking off about nine months to recuperate and hope to start working again in the fall.
I’d also like to add a different opinion than has been expressed above, which is that it’s better to pay your dues at your job before ducking out on maternity leave. Part of my rationale about having kids now (at the start of my career), rather than later (once I’ve “established”), is that I am totally fungible right now. By that I mean that whatever I was doing as a junior associate could, if need be, be done by someone else if a client really needs it. I realize this also means I was replaceable, but after the recession and the layoffs we’ve been witness to, it’s clear to me that everyone (or at least most people) can be dismissed.
Toward the end of my time with the firm, I went to a women’s group lunch where many female associates and partners chatted about these kinds of issues, and one of the things I learned there was from a woman who was a junior partner in a busy litigation practice. She had her daughter not long after making partner and said that this timing was absolutely, really, incredibly terrible. As a junior partner you’re still proving yourself, but you’re a big enough deal that clients are hiring YOU—and this means YOU are expected to be on call, do the work, etc. By contrast, clients are hiring me, junior associate X, only indirectly through the partners, and don’t particularly care if the person who does the work is me or my fellow second year, which is a different kind of pressure (internal/firm v. external/client). So this poor partner was sleeping four hours a night trying to juggle the incredible demands of her job and the ability to see her child a few hours a day.
(3) Working with kids—Good grief, as evident from the numerous comments, there’s so much to say about this that it’s crazy. My main points would be first: I don’t think we could make it work for us (two FT working lawyers) if one of us didn’t have flexibility with their schedule. I’ve had less (see: I’m low on the totem pole, whereas my husband has more control over his life because he’s more senior in his career), so my husband has done more of the drop-offs/pick-ups from daycare, but both of us have taken the hit when we get a sick-kid call. My worst experience with this was that in my last two weeks at the firm I literally had to tell a partner I’d never worked with before (and therefore wanted to do a very good job for) that I wasn’t going to be able to hand in a memo to him because my son had an ear infection and my husband was on a business trip. That sucked, but the partner was actually good about it. (And when I pulled an all-nighter after taking my kid to the doctor, etc., and passive-aggressively sent the memo to the partner at 4:30 a.m., the partner chided me, saying that unless it’s a TRO, you’re on trial, other emergency, there’s no need to work past ten. Wish I had known that before, but it showed me that this was someone I’d love to work for again.)
The hardest thing for me has been negotiating between DH and me who got to work, who had to be on kid duty, whose deadline was more important, and so forth. And I still don’t think we’ve found any sort of answer. I’ve felt at times that I’ve had to compromise more or take a professional hit (leave in the middle of the day), and I’m sure there were times where my husband felt the same. I don’t have any solutions for that one and expect this will be an on-going issue. To say that it causes guilt, resentment, and great frustration would be an understatement.
As for other advice: being in New York makes everything different. The hours expectations are greater, the commute is hard, childcare is difficult to find and pay for, etc. I’m sure other people work just as hard in other places, but overall, the time expectations are different elsewhere (I’ve worked in other cities and would be the only one in the office at 6:30, which in New York BigLaw is like mid-afternoon.) If we weren’t here for a specific job reason, I’d get the heck out. Don’t stay if you don’t have to.
AMNY, I think you make a good point about timing. However, this may be profession-specific. For lawyers, doctors, (and accountants perhaps), having a baby while in school or studying for an exam may be a good choice. Doctors could have a baby immediately after finishing internship but before the fellowship or first position. Professors should consider delivering during PhD coursework or during the dissertation phase, or in the post-doc position before obtaining a tenure-track position. It may be too late if a lawyer waits to become a partner or if a professor waits to get tenure before starting a family. In these professions, men have it much easier when they plan baby timing than women do and they usually run out of fertility later.
For those in finance, consulting, and other corporate jobs, it may not be possible to have much control over your job until you are established – say early 30s. If one is travelling 40 weeks a year as a junior consultant, moving into a boutique firm or into industry may be necessary before it is feasible. When established well in your career and firm, I think you potentially have more flexibility, such as flex-time, telecommuting and if you work reduced hours at certain crisis points, you won’t suffer as much backlash.
Thanks for sharing the video link and for a thought-provoking post. I couldn’t capture everything in a comment-length response, so here’s the long version!
http://somewhereinthesuburbs.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/a-tale-of-two-tables/
I graduated from college in 2009 and with a masters in management from b-school in 2010. I went to a top 10 university and have pushed myself in school for as long as I remember. However, I have known ever since I was a little girl that I wouldn’t feel completely fulfilled unless I had children one day (I come from a large, very close family). What I think is so interesting about this post is how early people start dividing themselves on the baby/non-baby “tracks.” As early as college, there were people who made decisions about majors/internships/careers based on the fact that they thought the career choice was more/less viable for being a mother. At graduate school, there was an even greater divide.
As someone who knows that I want children but is unsure as to whether I will leave the workforce or change to a less time demanding job, I have felt more motivated to work hard while I am young. I work at a prestigious boutique M&A investment bank in NYC and am busting my butt to prove myself. The most senior woman at the firm is twenty-four and the there are only a five professional women at the firm. We have yet to have a banker go on maternity leave. I think that if you know you want children, it’s even more important to establish yourself younger. I know that if in five years that I decide to have kids, having proved myself in my early twenties will make the situation so much easier. Plus, if I have earned respect within the industry, leaving to do something else will be better received and I will leave knowing that if I wanted to continue working, I am capable of doing it.
Obviously I am at the beginning of my career and not sure how I will feel once I have children, but my goal is to establish myself so that I have options when the day comes. Options with lots of support from the people close to me who have seen me achieve career success and from co-workers that respect the hours (oh there have been many) that I put in.
I agree that it’s important to work hard while you’re young and don’t turn down the hard projects and promotions because you would like to have kids some day. Having kids and a successful career requires serious juggling, and when the time comes, you want your colleagues (and clients) to believe that you so experienced, reliable and valuable that if you need flex-time (or whatever work-life balance/accommodations you want), they’ll be happy to work with you. To get to that point, don’t short-change yourself on experience while you’re still young.
That said, if you know you want to have kids, I do think it’s important to think seriously and realistically about what kind of parent you want to be..and where you want your career to fit in — what do you want your life to look like? While you may not want to be a stay-at-home-mom, maybe you also don’t want to be having to spends weeks away from your kids b/c you have a two week trial in Atlanta. While I am not advocating cutting your career short prematurely, I do think it’s important to be strategic in career planning. I knew I didn’t want to juggle litigation with kids, so I did it for a few years for the experience (which was invaluable), then developed a transactional practice went in-house where I also developed risk management experience, something my client/employer values highly.
I know a lot of women out there will say that going in-house or leaving law firm practice was tantamount to putting on the breaks prematurely (I did it about 5 years before having my daughter), but I disagree. I work for a large healthcare provider that has a small legal department, but doesn’t farm out a lot of legal work, so I have been able to take on work that is challenging and interesting, develop expertise in areas that are of interest to me, and become a key player within the organization. While the pay and office settings in-house are not what they are at a law firm, I appreciate that I am also not expected to bill 2500 hrs per year anymore. I still get the occasional calls at night or on weekends, but I can pick my daughter up from daycare at 5:00 and take a couple hrs off w/o question if she needs to go to the doctor. I also get to enjoy my weekends w/ my family, something I couldn’t do when I was in litigation.
Was it a waste to jump out of law firm life several years before I had kids? I don’t think so. I didn’t exactly spend the time slowing down. I spent the time getting to know all aspects of my (in-house) client’s business, taking on a variety of work with the goal of meeting and working w/ as many executives as I could, and never turning down challenging work. I mean let’s face it.. no organization likes having employees take maternity leave or scale-back their work to spend time with family. So, if you know you’re going to do it one day, you need to figure out exactly what skills/experience your client/employer values. Then you need to spend your time pre-baby developing those skills and your client/employer relationships so that when the time comes, you have those crucial skills in spades and a strong relationship with your client/employer so that they WANT you on their team, even if it’s on YOUR terms. When I got pregnant, I actually worked harder to be more accommodating to my clients to make sure that no one questioned whether my having a baby would interfere with my work commitments. By developing relationships and putting in the time/effort up front, when I had my daughter, I was actually encouraged to take the full 12 wks of maternity leave and assured that my work would be there when I was ready to come back. And even though I leave early a couple days a week to pick my daughter up from child care, I still get challenging work b/c I have a proven track record. I can honestly say that while I initially worried that having a baby would taking me off the short list for the really “sexy” projects, that has not turned out to be the case. My daughter will be 15 mos old next week, and I’ve just completed the biggest deal of my career and was just assigned to the project team for a new series of deals which may turn out to be even bigger. But I don’t think I would be where I am if without some realistic and strategic career planning.
Thanks for sharing this. In my observation and personal experience, those who plan ahead as you did end up the most satisfied after they have children. I’ve watched several friends who did not do this end up deciding to stay home full time because they were not able to combine parenting with their intensely demanding jobs, and then feel frustrated and regretful about that.
Has anyone out there had to continue working just to make enough to continue paying their six figure law school loans? I’m due in august and would love to go down to part time (if the firm would even allow it) but would still need a certain salary just to continue paying off school loans. I don’t hate my job, but I do hate the idea of only seeing my kid on weekends b/c I get home so late. Just another way I feel trapped by law school loans.
Luckily, paying loans was not an issue for me, but I do have some thoughts. The truth is that small children go to bed really early (7:30 pm/8:00 pm). If it is possible for you, change your schedule so that you can get home earlier and work after bedtime. And, you never know until you ask about part time.
I still have 4 years left on what were 6-figure student loans and I’m the breadwinner in my household. So, I definitely have no choice but to keep working full-time even though I would love to cut-back a little to spend more time w/ my daughter. TwinLawMom’s ideas are good ones.. I generally go home between 5 and 6 so we can have dinner and some playtime as a family. My daughter goes to bed at 8, and generally I’ll do some more work after she’s asleep. My husband is also a lawyer and basically does the same thing, and it’s worked well for us so far. Sometimes, a few hrs on Saturday or Sunday morning while everyone’s asleep also helps make up for not staying late during the week. And if it gets to be too much, don’t be afraid to speak-up. You won’t get flex-time (or part-time) if you don’t ask for it.
I completely dismissed the possibility that my career would be incompatible with having a family when I entered law school. Actually, I didn’t even think about it. Young women in their early twenties are encouraged to pursue a successful career above all else and not to let motherhood “get in the way” of that path. Having children seems so far off that it’s hard to think about it as anything more than an abstraction, and society offers so many shallow reassurances that you can be a professional and have a fulfilling family life. But a few years into my career I realized that continuing on the professional path I was following would provide me with a life in which I wouldn’t have the capacity to be the type of mother I wanted to be. The work was exhausting and I barely had it in me at the end of the day to cook a meal for myself, let alone the energy to provide care for another human being. I felt that I had been led into a trap, because I had bought into the fiction that women can have it all and be fulfilled. It’s not true, and if I had to do it all over again I would have never chosen to attend law school in the first place.
I have a suggestion for those women out there who find themselves wondering if you can have a successful career and kids. You can have both, but you will save yourself a lot of heartache and disppointment if you try to think of career success — and success in the legal profession — more broadly than simply being partner or head of litigation in Big Law. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it: some career paths do not lend themselves to having a life outside of work, and that includes children. I’m not sexist – this general rule applies to men and women — but I am a realist. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful career and a full family life.. but it’s a lot harder to do in some jobs than others. I find it sad to hear that women are leaving the legal profession or abandoning their careers because they are overwhelmed by the task of trying to balance a career with family life. There is a lot we can learn from those who have been able to make it work successfully.
I think it would be helpful to hear from some of the women out there who have had successful careers balancing work and family life: What kind of legal work do you do? Do you think the line of work you are in lends itself to flex-time or better work-life balancing? How do you make it work? Do you need a nanny or housekeeper to keep everything running or are you and your partner sharing all the household/childrearing duties? And how do you define success for yourself? for your career?