After my first child, I couldn’t help thinking, “What’s a mother? What am I doing?” I felt like I needed something else. I was just the big breast. I felt so conflicted. I knew how valuable mothers were—had made films on that subject—yet I couldn’t be just a mother. Part of why I work is that I have a son and a daughter and I feel it’s a good example for them to see me work. Part of it is that I’m just so driven. Plus, I’ve never been able to define myself as just one thing.
—Mary Mazzio, mother/Olympic rower-turnedlawyer/filmmaker
But I love my kids
so much more
than I planned.
—Allison in the play Eve-olution, by Hilary Illick and Jennifer Krier
Parenting is different from other slashes. Having a child isn’t a career, a vocation, or an avocation. Rather, it is a transformative life event, full-time, permanent, unpaid, and ever changing. Yet when I talked with people about the subject of slash lives, they often asked me how parenting fits in. Since, by definition, everyone who becomes a parent is a slash—blending parenting with all their other identities—the subject is certainly worth exploring.
That said, the issue of combining parenting with other career paths is one that has filled the pages of many books. This chapter is not meant as a replacement for those books, nor does it take a position on anyone’s choices about how to parent or whether to become one. Instead, it is meant to highlight some of the ways people have created lives that blend parenting with gratifying careers. Like the earlier chapters, it also offers advice from those who have overcome obstacles and highlights some of the synergies that exist between parenting and other work.
Even those who are predisposed to slash careers say that once they added “parent” to the mix, it became difficult, at least initially, to pursue as many things as vigorously as they had done before. When I interviewed parents, that truth revealed itself in myriad ways. It’s also the reason that many of the people featured in this book had no children at the time they were cultivating their slash lives. Some made room for children later in life; some stepped up multiple career paths after their children were in school or grown; and others will likely not have children.
Becoming a parent is also often the impetus for a career adjustment or reevaluation, especially for those who take maternity or paternity leave and have a built-in time for reflection about the state of their working lives.
As a culture, we are still at a place where blending meaningful work with parenting is not easily accomplished. When the combination coexists successfully, it is often because people have crafted a life that honors who they want to be as a parent as well as whatever else they need and want to do in their life.
If you’re reading this chapter, you are probably considering how to meld parenting with some other identity and wondering how others have found satisfying solutions. Maybe you already have a slash career and are wondering whether you’ll have to give something up in order to be a parent. Or perhaps you’re already a parent-slash-something, and want to do it a bit better. This chapter will give you some ideas.
In the opening episode of the second season of Desperate Housewives, Lynette (Felicity Huffman’s character) is interviewing for a high-level job in advertising after a seven-year hiatus at home with her four children. Her husband has decided it’s his turn to be a stay-at-home parent. Lynette manages to ace the first interview after she convinces the hostile interviewer (who tells Lynette that she opted not to have children so that she would-n’t be derailed from her career) that her children will not be a distraction if she takes this job.
“You’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming,” she says, explaining that being at the office with adults—who don’t throw boogers against the wall and who engage in adult conversation—will be a break from the chaos at home. The interviewer tells Lynette there will be one more round and that Lynette would be wise to show up early for the following day’s interview. The next scene takes place on the morning of Lynette’s interview. Her husband is lying flat on the ground, writhing in pain having thrown out his back. She knows she can’t leave her youngest child, still in diapers, with him. And in light of the interviewer’s comment, she can’t reschedule.
With no time to even make a phone call for emergency babysitting, she scoops the toddler out of the crib and heads off to the interview. At the office, she literally drops the baby off with the bemused male receptionist, with a cursory, “You love babies, right?”
The next scene takes place in a glass-walled office. The shrew from the day before and a senior-level man who’s presumably making the hiring decision ask Lynette questions. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her child teetering on the edge of the receptionist’s desk, with the receptionist paying no attention. She begins to blather, then asks to be excused for a minute. Both interviewers are confused. Lynette returns moments later with a crying baby in her arms.
“Watch me multitask,” she says as she changes the diaper while racing through a well-thought-out monologue about what’s wrong with the agency’s image (not enough awards and public service, and clients expect those things) and its Web site (too hard to navigate, no site map, etc.). The man is impressed and tells her she’s hired before he rushes off to catch a flight. The shrew recoils. In celebration, Lynette throws the soiled diaper against the wall while the bitter woman stares in disbelief. The scene closes with Lynette saying, “Of course, I’ll clean that up.”
Over the top as it is, the scene works because it resonates on many levels. We have no doubt Lynette deserves the job. She’s got the smarts and the experience. It also seems clear that Lynette will excel at work despite the inevitable crises that will arise from her being the mother of four children. And whatever happens, she certainly won’t be pretending that her kids don’t exist. They are as much a part of her resume as her academic credentials and the prior positions she’s held. The fact that we’re seeing this on Desperate Housewives tells us that we are past the point of shock at seeing a senior executive who’s also a mom (or a mom who’s also a senior executive). The fact that her husband is manning the homefront and a male receptionist is at the office are more signs that defying stereotypes about family and professional roles is ready for prime time.
After watching that episode, I called Deborah Epstein Henry, the work/life expert, to ask how she’d advise Lynette to manage her new dance between home and office life. Henry built a successful legal career while raising three young children and now, through her company Flex-Time Lawyers, counsels thousands of others on the nuances of balancing professional careers and parenting. Once we got the issue of the show’s exaggeration for dramatic purposes out of the way, Henry agreed with me that the episode raised a number of important issues.
According to Henry, the most important piece in being successful at work outside the home while raising children is to get the proper childcare in place. Proper childcare includes layers of backup, including emergency childcare in the form of: (1) your spouse or partner, if you have one; (2) available friends and family members in your community; (3) arrangements with other working parents or their nannies or babysitters to share childcare when needed; or (4) a relationship with an emergency childcare facility. In Henry’s case, a flexible babysitter—an older woman with grandchildren of her own—was the ideal backup. For people in professional positions who can afford it (and who want to advance in their careers), Henry counsels having childcare available even on your “off” days for spillover situations.
Henry says that this Desperate Housewives episode reminded her of countless conversations she has had with members of her group who have working spouses and the importance of good communication with your partner. “One issue I hear all the time from working mothers who have partners who also work is the game you play when it’s a snow day and you hit that moment of truth when you have to figure out the importance of your days’ responsibilities relative to each other and fairly negotiate who gets to go to work that day.” In those instances, says Henry, many people make a mistake in the heat of the moment and tend to focus on who makes more money. Her advice: focus on who has more flexibility on that particular day. If both people have crazy days and there are no emergency options, divvy up the day with one going in early and one staying late. Any bigger issues, like rethinking childcare arrangements, can be resolved after the crisis has passed.
“In the eighties, when women were making strides, it was about trying to conform to the male depiction of what success was. Today, we as women acknowledge our femininity more and use it to differentiate ourselves,” says Henry. “This fits in with a trend I’m seeing with employers recognizing the whole person more.”
Of course, there are limits to the amount of your parent-self you might want to bring to the office, and Henry cautions against emulating Lynette and replaying the whole diaper-changing-and-throwing scene in your office. “I would recommend sharing information about your life to the extent you think a colleague or client would relate or learn from your experiences,” says Henry. This is really no different from the rule of too-much-information in all slash contexts. Who wouldn’t benefit from having a good filter for when to stick to work-talk and when it’s okay to get personal?
Lynnette’s line about multitasking is one of the more farcical moments of the episode, but Henry agrees that the analogy is rooted in reality. There’s no denying that employers are starting to recognize that parenting skills are transferable to the workplace. Ann Crittenden’s If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything convincingly argues that the very skills that are necessary to be a good parent—multitasking, functioning amid distractions, dealing with difficult people, operating with a sense of fair play and integrity—are exactly the skills needed to succeed in the world of work.
Being a parent can also be an asset in many work situations. Henry says the fact that she is a parent has been useful to her law firm in so many ways. She has brought in business through relationships in her community, deepened client relationships through a shared connection over being a parent, and learned volumes about dealing with and managing all kinds of people.
Henry’s last bit of advice is never to take for granted that a workplace is family-friendly just because it’s the nice thing for a company to do. In the end, it’s about business. “If the employee thinks about a flexible working arrangement as an entitlement, or if an employer thinks of it as a charitable arrangement, it will never be successful for anyone,” she says. “The threshold question for anyone wanting this sort of balance is ‘Are they talented enough that it is in an employer’s financial interest to hire or retain them?’ and if the answer to that question is yes, then the next step is putting the logistics into place to ensure that it’s a win-win for everyone.”
Henry’s comments (as well as the advice in chapter 8 about negotiating an alternative schedule) are worth considering for anyone—male or female, married or single—seeking to balance family responsibilities with a professional-level job. But that route is only one option of many.
Sometimes the best answer to the work/family conundrum is to ditch the job altogether and go the entrepreneurial route, removing an employer from the equation. So many working mothers have gone down this path that a new word, “Mompreneur,” has entered the lexicon of work (and been trademarked by the authors of a series of books on mother-founded home-based businesses). This excerpt from an article in BusinessWeek gives a glimpse of just one sliver of home-based entrepreneurs, those setting up shop on eBay:
Today, upwards of 430,000 people in the U.S. alone—more than are employed worldwide by General Electric Co. and Procter & Gamble combined—earn a full- or part-time living on eBay selling everything from fashion to farm equipment, with the highest sellers grossing up to $1 million a month. Of the estimated 48% of these sellers who are women, many are “mompreneurs”—corporate dropouts who have found in eBay a way to tap into an international marketplace from their kitchen tables and finesse a saner work/life balance at the same time. . . . It’s no coincidence that the rise of the eBay mompreneurs comes as more highly educated women are choosing to stay at home with young children. The percentage of working women with children under the age of one dropped from a record 59% in 1998 to 55% in 2002, after rising steadily for 30 years. Some see the decrease as a referendum on the work/life balance. As in, it doesn’t exist.1
For Debra Dicker Cohen, thirty-eight, being a stay-at-home mom was integral to the success of her business, a referral network that homeowners use to find contractors for home repair projects. “When I pitched my story to local press, I explained I was a stay-at-home mom looking for a balance between work and family,” Cohen wrote in the manual she sells to others wanting to replicate her business formula. She leveraged parenting as a way to build her own business by (1) reaching out to other stay-at-home parents looking for work that could be done from home; and (2) pitching herself to the media as a Mompreneur. (Cohen was profiled in one of the Mompreneur books.) She succeeded because her business never required her to compromise or hide her role as a parent.
After struggling over leaving her children behind for yet another business trip for her previous job, Cohen decided it was time to “retire” to the suburbs to care for her infant daughter full-time. Before long, she was battling both boredom and financial pressure. Her prior work had given her a glamorous lifestyle, including frequent travel throughout Latin America. After leaving the job, she and her husband were struggling to manage a house they had bought as a dual-income couple on his income as a teacher. Cohen was drifting and depressed. She knew she had to do something about it.
Around this time, she was settling into a new neighborhood and muddling through a series of home repairs. When it took three different exterminators to tackle a recurring rodent problem in her attic, she realized there was a business opportunity in matching homeowners with reliable contractors. It was a simple idea and she knew it would take off. Cohen started her business in 1997 with a $5,000 loan against her husband’s retirement fund; within six months she had paid that back and made a profit.
She has never used outside childcare, doing the bulk of her work during her children’s naps and during weekends and evenings when they were small. Once the children were in school, her husband, Charlie, a high school teacher, coached sports teams in the afternoons until Cohen’s business was profitable enough for him to quit. After he gave up his slash jobs, he was able to be home in the afternoons and on Saturdays to watch the children.
Cohen handled all of her own public relations, and with each press mention she was flooded with phone calls—from contractors who wanted to be part of the network, and from homeowners who wanted to sign up for the service. But most of the calls came from people in other locales who wanted to know how to get a similar business going in their neighborhoods. Cohen knew it was time to expand. After working with a small-business consultant, she decided to write up her business plan and sell it, along with some private sessions with her, as a “business in a box.” By the end of 2005 her revenues topped $2 million and she had sold more than 500 business packages. She also markets a database program she created to help her clients manage their referral businesses.
Cohen achieved all this without leaving her home for more than a few hours at a time, something that is integral to how she wants to parent. She steadfastly avoided conferences or meetings that would take her away from home. Instead, her strategy was to grow her business by aggressively courting the print media and building her network via the phone and Internet.
My interview with Cohen took place at her “summer office,” a pastel blue beach club on the Long Island Sound where she works Memorial Day through Labor Day, forwarding phone calls to her cell phone. Work and life are completely integrated. At her beach club cabana, which she shares with another family, she idles away the summer days with other moms whose kids are occupied at the club’s camp.
Now that Cohen’s business has provided them with financial stability, Charlie is building his own entrepreneurial venture. Along with two partners, he launched the Long Island Golf Academy, a six-week golf instruction program that marries his two passions—coaching and golf. He still teaches during the school years, but he has given up working at camps and other jobs he used to take over the summer.
Cohen is not unusual in changing the parameters of a career after having children. Like so many slashes who blend multiple vocations into a unified life, Cohen has been able to do that with her business and her parenting. She has also capitalized on the synergies between her two roles: being a parent helps her relate to her clients and the representatives who buy her business packages, many of whom also spend their days at home dealing with house maintenance and small children underfoot. Whether on the phone with a contractor, a homeowner, or one of her fellow home referral entrepreneurs, Cohen never hides the fact that she works from home, and at any time her two children could be creating background noise. She’s also created a life in which talking with other mothers about the challenges of juggling work and family is part of her daily diet. The idea of creating a working life that fits around the way you want to parent is a common attitude among satisfied slash parents.
S. Mitra Kalita, twenty-nine, an author/journalist, was very focused on her career through her mid-twenties. After attending the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, she went on to a series of jobs as a reporter at various newspapers and eventually landed at the Washington Post on the metro staff, which was filled with “young hungry people who were the best thing wherever they were before.” At the same time, she was finishing up her first book, Suburban Sahibs, a nonfiction exploration of the relationship between immigrant communities and the suburbs. Kalita was proving herself at the paper, breaking stories that were well-received, when suddenly her life took an unexpected turn.
About a year into her time at the Post, Kalita learned she was pregnant. She asked for and was granted six months’ maternity leave, but even though she was on a fast-track career path, she doubted she would want to go back to work at the end of the leave. “I just didn’t see any women around me who were juggling it all very well and when I saw them at their desks at 9 p.m., I secretly thought, ‘I don’t want that life.’” She had also grown up with a stay-at-home mom and appreciated having had someone who was always there and a home that was the hub of all activity.
Kalita’s daughter Naya was born a few weeks early and when she was in the hospital, she missed a deadline for an article she was writing freelance for a magazine. When the editor called her, Kalita was in the hospital. She took the call, explained where she was, but still finished the article within three days of giving birth. “I just didn’t want to let anyone down,” she explained. “And even three days into it, I realized my whole illusion of being a stay-at-home mom was not an [acceptable] reality. I thrive on having multiple things going on. It just gives me a whole lot of satisfaction to be a woman who can do it all— maybe not at the same time, but in the same week. So writing that piece was a sign of things to come.”
Six weeks later, Kalita traveled with her newborn to New York’s Chinatown to accept an award. Her parents and husband accompanied her, along with the breast pump and stroller, and she realized that she was not going to be able to retire her reporter’s identity because she had become a mother. Kalita’s work focuses on immigrant communities and families, and having a child made her feel even more connected to the issues she was writing about. “I couldn’t give up writing about these kinds of things because they mattered even more now that I had a child,” she told me.
Kalita did make a few changes to the way she worked. When she returned to her job at the paper, it was on a part-time schedule, leaving two days a week for her own writing and to be at home with Naya. By going part-time after establishing her value to the paper, Kalita has been able to jump out of the rat race and actually live a real community-based life, something that informs her writing while allowing her to be more integrated in her daughter’s life. As she put it, “I decided that my work would be more profound than prolific and that I would try to make every story I write really count. And even when I’m in playgroup, I now find stories there, talking with other mothers, just existing as a human being.”
Kalita’s husband, Mukul, an art director/artist/DJ, has also made some changes to his working life since having Naya. He still divides his time between his day job as an art director and his fine art, but late nights as a DJ have largely disappeared. He has also given up a lot of social things, like just hanging around with other artists. But, he says, he now focuses on making art rather than being part of any particular art scene. Whereas he used to play drums in a band, now he plays with Naya and is looking for a music class to do with her. Kalita and Mukul work with their muses—his art and music, her books—in the evening hours when Naya is asleep and on weekends when they cover for each other. Reorienting the way you pursue your interests and/or work—or pursuing them in a way that includes time with your child—is a smart strategy that many parents employ to make sure they don’t lose their passions when they become parents.
During the week, Kalita and Mukul take a slash approach to childcare, using a variety of arrangements. “When I was pregnant everyone said consistency was best, but we have a child who thrives on being in different environments,” says Kalita. On Tuesdays and Thursdays a nanny whom they share with another family comes to the house to care for Naya while Kalita works at home. On Wednesdays, Mukul takes Naya to a day care center near his office. “Those days he’s in charge,” Kalita said. On Mondays and Fridays, Naya is either with Kalita or at the home of a Salvadoran woman who is a flexible babysitter as well as a part of the couple’s extended family.
The family is now looking for a new home, having outgrown the starter Cape Cod they settled in when Naya was born. The new home will have room for Mukul’s drum set, which was stored in the basement when Naya was born. “Everyone says you’ll never be the same after having children,” says Kalita, “and sure, the 3 a.m. thing is really hard. But we’ve realized that Naya hasn’t stopped us from being us. In fact, she has strengthened a lot of our interests. Some things, like his drumming, may sound like hobbies, but they are really our definition of ourselves so they cannot be relegated to the basement.”
Kalita and Mukul have found it relatively easy to fold their new identities as parents into the lives they were already living. Though they made changes to the way they lived after Naya was born, Kalita says that what struck her most was how little she felt she had to give up in order to raise Naya the way she wanted to. Like Deborah Epstein Henry, the lawyer who talks about how her children’s network helps her bring in clients, Kalita learned that being a mother has deepened her commitment to the issues she is interested in writing about. Of course, with a couple there are twice as many ways to tinker with both the logistics of home and the logistics of work, and Kalita and Mukul’s story shows that as well.
Kalita and Mukul were both raised by Indian parents, and exposing Naya to cross-cultural experiences—in their community, in her childcare, and in both her parents’ working lives— is an important part of how they want to parent. In today’s world, Kalita says that children aren’t integrated enough into parents’ multiple lives. Still, she concedes it’s a little easier for them than for other parents. “It’s easier to take a kid to an art opening than to a meeting of investment bankers.”
At thirty-one, Jennifer Krier had the job opportunity she had always dreamed of. After obtaining a Ph.D. in anthropology with a focus on gender and power in matrilineal societies, she got a tenure-track position at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She was married with two young children when she accepted the job; her husband had his own career in business in Boston. Though they knew it would be hard on the family, the couple decided to commute between Boston and Ithaca so that each of them could pursue their careers. The children stayed in Ithaca with Krier, where they spent their days in day care or with an au pair, and Krier’s husband joined them on the weekends. In the summers they all lived together in Boston.
Their careers may have been on track, but family life was chaos. “My life was counting the days until Thursday nights when we’d be together, constantly packing all of our belongings, and transitioning the kids to new childcare situations. It was totally dismal, like a gray Ithaca morning,” said Krier of that period. After three years of this, Krier began to question whether the academic career she was striving for even made sense now that she had a husband (whose work was tied to Boston) and two children. “It all started to seem unrealistic,” she told me. “What was I going to do—go back to Indonesia with my two babies and a husband who doesn’t like third-world travel?”
She took a two-year leave of absence and decided to move back to Boston so the family could live in one place and she could make some order out of her life. She took a carrel in the library, put her kids in day care, and began to work on a book. She also did a lot of reflecting. “At first I thought I’d be taking a few years off and then get into the academic scene in Boston. But then I realized that academia wasn’t who I was on an authentic level. Teaching and working in an office was one thing, but there was also the pressure of all those outside projects. Also, the culture of academia is very competitive, with a lot of posturing and politicking, which I wasn’t good at. There just isn’t a lot of joy in it and it wasn’t me,” she explained. “Plus, my husband had an eighty-hour-a-week job and I couldn’t face having kids and not being with them.”
Krier was going through a classic mid-career reassessment, questioning whether the career she had chosen a decade earlier was living up to her expectations. In her case, the issue was complicated by the fact that she also had other responsibilities competing for her attention and focus.
Krier decided not to go back to Cornell and instead settled into suburbia, where she encountered her next struggle—what kind of mother to be. She couldn’t identify with mothers who were home all day with their children; yet the career she had been striving for didn’t feel right either. Peace of mind came in the form of a friendship with Hilary Illick, a mother/writer Krier met in a Mommy & Me gymnastics class.
In Illick, Krier discovered an outlet for some of her darkest confessions about modern motherhood. After hours of frank discussions about their guilt about being bad mothers, their professional disappointments, even their sexual mishaps, the two soon realized they had the makings of a creative work that would speak to others. They decided to meet for daily writing sessions, following the “morning pages” model of Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. At the beginning, they just started recording their conversations in journals, having no idea what they were doing.
Less than a year after starting those morning pages, those confessional monologues became the basis of a play, at first titled Venus de Minivan, which they performed themselves as a reading at a yoga studio. “Basically, we took our lives as they existed and turned them into art,” says Krier. “As an academic I felt like I had to pretend that parenting didn’t take anything out of me. So it was such a relief to write that play, which was about how parenting completely reoriented me.” Several months later, using some connections they had in the literary world, the script was optioned and Krier and Illick rewrote it under a new name, Eve-olution, which opened off-Broadway to enormous acclaim with professional actors playing the two writer/moms. The writers had no idea their little creative project would end up reaching such a wide audience.
When I met Krier in the summer of 2005, she was in the midst of yet another transition. She was finishing up training to be a life coach, a field that she says is the ideal complement to motherhood. “With coaching, the time that I have to be on call for a client is so short, usually forty-five minutes,” she reflected. “Even with a kid home sick I can stick them in front of the television for forty-five minutes. It’s about using all the resources I already have as a human being to help someone else come into awareness. As an academic you have to do all this research and be the expert. In coaching, the client is the expert, the expert in his life. It’s so much about what’s happening in the moment. As a parent you have to dance in the moment all the time, you have to improvise, be spontaneous, come up with new solutions, and those are the kinds of skills coaching taps into.”
Coaching has a relationship to her anthropology work as well. “Instead of studying lots of people from one culture, I now study one person at a time, along with their own inner culture.” Krier says it’s hard to peel back the layers of her different identities. Motherhood turned her into a playwright and her play examined motherhood as an anthropologist might. “That play is really the ethnography of everyday suburban life for someone in my gender and culture, of my class and race.”
In typical slash fashion, what sounds like an unlikely collection of ingredients has simmered together to create a well-blended stew. Even so, Krier realizes that the recipe may need to change again. Following her heart is a skill that will help her stay on top of that. As with all slash pairings, what matters is that it’s working for her at the moment. For parents, this might even be more true than for any other slashes, since parenthood and what it requires of you by definition evolves over time.
Krier evolved into her post-parent career path because what she was doing before didn’t feel right anymore. Another approach is to build a career from the ground up with the plan of blending parenting into it.
Amy Salzhauer started Ignition Ventures (along with cofounder Maureen Stancik Boyce) with the specific goal of creating a family-friendly environment. A business in which almost no one works full-time and work is done on a project basis was the solution. Salzhauer came to Ignition after a slash career with stints as an environmentalist, journalist, consultant, and scientist, often with overlapping periods.
When I interviewed Salzhauer, she was on maternity leave from her own company and nursing a five-month-old daughter. She was in the process of figuring out how she would return to her position as CEO on a part-time basis. She plans to have a crib in the office and a nanny on hand. Her husband, a physician, plans to continue to work full-time, but he will likely scale down his outside activities.
Salzhauer echoed a view I heard a lot when speaking to high-achieving types, mostly women, who were finding their way as parents—that they are willing to reorganize their chosen careers to make room for parenting responsibilities. Before children, Salzhauer was the model fast-tracker who’d made it onto some of those 40-under-40 business achiever lists that magazines like to run. But from the start, she wanted to build the kind of company that would allow her to have children. She was also determined to create an environment for others—employees and independent contractors—who wanted to live the same way. Company planning meetings involve a lot of talk about goals and Salzhauer says money isn’t usually high on the list. “A top goal for the year could be making sure that a person who is having a child doesn’t travel. Or that someone needs to spend more time outdoors. Or to take projects that have a positive impact on the world. Money is often something like twenty-one on the list,” she explained.
Salzhauer acknowledges that there are tradeoffs, primarily on the revenues front, but being a private company gives Ignition the ability to think like this. Her advice to others: “You can pay attention to salary, you can pay attention to work/life, and you can pay attention to both. But you might have to give up something to get something.”
While they are still considered pioneers, a small but growing number of men are scaling down their careers to make more time for parenting or to allow their partners to pursue a demanding career.
Sally Hogshead, the advertising executive/author, has two young children. Her husband, Rich Johnson, is a stay-at-home dad. They came to that arrangement for a few reasons. Johnson is twelve years older than Hogshead and was in a good place in his career to take some time off, whereas Hogshead was running her own advertising agency and was nowhere near wanting to take time out. As a couple, they decided that Johnson would take to the role of stay-at-home parent whereas Hogshead says she is a better parent when she can also engage with other goals.
Even with a husband assuming a lot of the daily jobs of parenting, Hogshead says that combining career and family is challenging. “Basically, our situation works about as well for us as the traditional roles work for other couples. In other words, it’s hard, but no harder. The difficulty has less to do with gender and more to do with the fact that it’s tough for any two people to juggle work and family responsibilities. Marriage and raising kids are hard, for any couple. It’s wonderful and joyful and amazing . . . and hard.”
While this arrangement solves a lot of business concerns for Hogshead, it results in a lot of bewildered reactions for her husband. “Once in a while he gets asked what else he does,” she said. “People are still not entirely ready for a father with no other slashes. People sometimes have the perception that he somehow ended up in this position, as though he didn’t have a choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. He retired from one job, in advertising, and embarked on the next, as a dad.”
Bonnie Duncan, the teacher/dancer/puppeteer, and Dan Mil-stein, the computer programmer/theater director, are talking a lot these days about fitting parenthood into an already slash-filled household. They expect that they will each do some reshuffling, especially in the near term.
Duncan has thought a lot about how having a child will fit in with being a dancer. “The dancing I do is all acrobatic with a certain amount of danger to it, so it’s just not something I can do if I’m pregnant,” she explained. “And to be in the right physical shape, I would have to miss some time performing.” She expects to get back to her dancing as soon as her body allows. That said, her teaching and puppetry are things she plans to continue without much of a break.
A lot of their planning has to do with logistics, Duncan told me. “With the way my teaching works, I work one to two days a week (say, from 9 to 1 p.m. or so) and sometimes I work just one morning a week in a school. Either way, I can take on as much work as I need (as long as arts funding is around). I figure that would be about right if I have a small child at home. Alternatively, Dan seems to work on his computer from 9 to 2 p.m. as well. I assume that we’d be able to juggle who is at home and who is out of the house—this is where the flexibility of our careers is great. We have talked a lot about how important it is to make sure we both get to do our artist work as much as we can.”
Milstein is evaluating his own slash mix as well, and he’s assuming he will have to scale back across the board. “It’s even possible that I won’t be able to make Rough & Tumble [his theater company] work anymore, though I think I’ll be able to find a way to keep it going in some form,” he explained. “The computer gig definitely provides us with a level of security. And I feel very, very lucky that there is something I find interesting and challenging that is lucrative enough so that I can do it part-time and make a living. Very, very lucky. The ratio will shift when/if we have a family, but I’ll still do lots of things that interest and challenge me.”
The fact that Milstein and Duncan have each cultivated so many professional paths gives them options and more flexibility than most people. Of course, as S. Mitra Kalita’s story shows, no one knows what kind of parent they will end up wanting to be, but having a flexible life already in place provides a lot of options. Once you have the foundation, it’s up to you to build the life that makes sense for you, at any given time.
Support groups for working mothers (and increasingly, fathers) are the new networking meccas. During working lunches and in online discussion groups, parents who split their time between a career and child rearing trade tips on everything from nanny nuisances to face-time frustration (at the office, of course). Most of these resources are directed toward mothers, but fathers who have taken on a lot of childcare responsibilities may relate to the issues under discussion (and will often get a warm welcome at meetings). If parenting and work has the distinction of being one of the most challenging slash combinations, it is also one of the most universal ones, which means that support is available. Why not learn from others who are facing the same issues? Here are a few resources that can help.
