Post Mortem

A couple of months ago, I wrote my inaugural Urban Mommies post, in which I alluded to my dissatisfaction with my current employment situation.

Over the course of this year, it became clear to me that my particular foray into the world of balancing full-time working with full-time mommying wasn't working. Which was a bummer of a realization, since I had honestly believed it could work back in my naive days as a new mother returning to work from maternity leave.

It didn't work for a number of reasons, some of which are my employer's fault and some of which are not.

It didn't work because I joined a new business (at my employer's behest) partway through the year -- a group in which (1) I didn't really know anyone, (2) everyone worked very long hours and lots of weekends, and (3) we had clients whose needs often dictated the schedule. Of these three factors, #1 was the most critical to the ultimate outcome. For my type of "special" hours arrangement to be successful, my colleagues had to be comfortable with it. And for them to be comfortable with it, they had to understand that my early departures didn't make me an unmotivated slacker -- it made me someone who worked somewhat different hours than they did and in a different setting (my living room) during the evenings.

When I left for maternity leave, I left a group of people who knew me, knew my work, and knew that I would always get the work done. When I came back from leave and subsequently moved into a new business, I joined a group of people who didn't know me, didn't know my work, and didn't realize that a general lack of availability for 6:30 or 7 pm conference calls wasn't an ominous sign of slackerdom. That, combined with the fact that my new role was substantially different from my old role and required a fair amount of getting up to speed before I really felt comfortable with what I was doing, pretty much doomed me.

So what could I have done differently? I suppose I could have fought the move. I could have asked to stay where I was, to keep doing a job that I already knew how to do. But I don’t think that would have been the right decision, and I honestly don’t think it would have made a difference. The opportunity to join the new group was a good one – it was an excellent chance to learn a new skill set and to get involved in a high-growth/high-profitability area of the company. What’s more, even the people in my old group didn’t know me that well, because so many people had quit both shortly before and during my maternity leave. So the group I returned to was a dramatically different one, and one in which people might have had the same complaint about my schedule. On the margins, they might have cut me a little more slack, but it wasn’t like I would have been working with people who’d known me for years and would give me the benefit of the doubt.

Alternatively, I could have made the decision to increase my face time for the first few months until I was so good at my new job that I could then reinstitute my leave-a-bit-early-hang-out-with-kid-until-bedtime-then-continue-working-from-home policy. This could have worked, but only under one condition. I’ll admit that I was not – and am not – willing to have my daughter’s weekday parental contact consist solely of the hour or so in the morning between when she gets up and her nanny arrives. So for me to have worked later at night, Mr. Metropolitan would’ve had to get home by 6:30 or so most nights to hang out with the Metropolitoddler until her bedtime.

But as I indicated in another post about a month ago, my husband’s work schedule has been insane for – well, a long time. And truthfully, it wouldn’t have been any fairer to him to only be able to work from 9-6 at a job that demands long hours, late nights, and lots of weekend time than it was for me to work from 9-5:30 every day while he was traveling. I know that if he’d had the choice, Mr. Metropolitan would have been more than willing to do it for a few months to make my job work out, but we really didn’t have any choice.

So the only way to prove my mettle to my new colleagues would have been to increase my nanny’s hours significantly so that both my husband and I could stay at work until later at night. Not acceptable. At no point during this entire work debacle have I ever once questioned my conviction that as a general matter, my daughter should see at least one parent in the morning and at least one parent during the evening.

Could I have worked even harder during the hours I was at work to transform myself into a Tasmanian Devil of efficiency – so impressively intense and efficient in the workplace that my absence for a couple of hours would have never have been questioned? This is a tough one. The answer is maybe. I will confess that I have never been the kind of person who puts her nose to the grindstone when she gets to work and doesn’t remove it until it’s time to go home. I am, however, the kind of person who always gets her work done correctly and on time. When mania is required to meet a goal, I can marshal an impressive amount of it, but when a more casual attitude will get the work done in a timely fashion, I am more than happy to get a cup of coffee or kibbitz at the proverbial water cooler or chitchat over email. That’s just me, and there’s probably nothing much to be done about it.

But here’s an interesting fact. Not everyone I work with has issues with my schedule. The people who don’t have a problem with it generally fall into two categories: (1) people who worked with me before my maternity leave (a dwindling bunch, to be sure) and (2) women. What do you make of that? It’s interesting, is it not, that women – married or single, mommies or not – were totally cool with the fact that if you want to have an evening call with me, it has to be after 8 pm.

And this is the part that in some ways bothers me most, because I can’t figure out a way in which it could have been avoided. The ultimate problems I have encountered stem from a workplace culture in which one’s heart and soul are supposed to belong to The Job 24/7. That culture came into existence at a time when men worked and women stayed home with the kids. And it’s not limited to my employer – it applies to most high-powered jobs with most high-powered companies and firms.

But that culture is not compatible with a world in which women work at jobs that are equally as high-octane as those of their husbands. The solution should not have to be that one or both parents must exit the race. The solution should be that everyone recognizes the value of spending a couple hours with their kids and that everyone who wants to can take the time to do that and that everyone should be cool with that, recognizing that the work will get done two hours later than it otherwise would have but it will still get done. Because that’s a culture that makes sense. Women – not all women, but a lot of women – seem to understand that. Men – not all men, but a lot of men – do not.

I can assess my particular situation with a fair amount of detachment these days, having had a few months to make my peace with it. But the broader issue continues to trouble me, because I’m not convinced that I’ll be able to overcome it even in a new workplace, even with Mr. Metropolitan picking up evenings for me until I’m settled in, even in a smaller environment where everyone has vowed that they understand the constraints of my schedule and that they’re totally fine with it. I’m just not sure that I won’t be writing another one of these posts in another year. I do, however, plan to use whatever lessons I've learned from this whole experience to try my best to make the balancing act work.