“LEAVE YOUR CROWN IN THE GARAGE”
How Powerful Women Subjugate Themselves at Home to Keep the Peace
One year I was reporting a story on the road, which, as a TV journalist, I often do. This time, though, the day of my return home from the work trip happened to coincide with the evening of the year’s most important parent-teacher conference. Well, my work being what it often is, I didn’t get home as planned. There was more news to cover, and Joe and I had to stay. Period.
But I was panicking. It was critical that I attend this meeting. Never mind that my husband couldn’t make it either, also for work-related reasons. The mother wasn’t going to be there. I knew how devastated my daughter would be that I was—for the kazillionth time—missing one of her important life events because my job called me away. I was hundreds of miles away and working through the night. I cringed so deeply thinking about it that it physically hurt. What was I going to do? Finally I came up with an idea. I sneaked away, called up my wonderful manager/executive assistant, Emily Cassidy, who then sped to the school with her phone, just in time for me to FaceTime (videophone) in and join the meeting.
It wasn’t the greatest solution (I don’t think I necessarily impressed her teacher). But it was the best I could do under the circumstances, and the meeting went well. Things did not, however, go well with my daughter. When I got home, I was treated to a lot of sassy backtalk. Unacceptably sassy backtalk. And instead of saying and doing what I, as a good mother, should have said and done—“You may not talk to your mother that way, young lady,” and sending her to her room—I crumpled in guilt. Sometimes the overly modulated, exaggerated attempts to “be there” or “do it all” leave the very people you are home to “be there” for, cold. The FaceTime thing made it all about me, showing the world that I could do everything. Enough!
Judging from the national survey conducted for this book, it sounds as if many breadwinning mothers are feeling that way, more or less. Not that we necessarily know what being a “good mom” means exactly, anyway. Before we get into the good news about working mothers and their families in the next chapter, we’re going to start with the mixed bag in this one. There are many ways in which being an attentive, attached mom doesn’t contraindicate a demanding career, but let’s face it: there are also many ways in which it does.
According to our poll on breadwinners and their relationships, fathers are more likely to say that marital and parental roles are clearer because they are the primary earner, whereas mothers are more likely to say that these roles are more complicated as a result of their primary-earner status. Breadwinner moms are also less likely than breadwinner dads to say that being the primary earner has had a positive effect on their relationship with their children: 36 percent versus 52 percent. Breadwinner moms are twice as likely as breadwinner dads to say, “I’m exhausted on all fronts; I never get a break” (43 percent versus 19 percent). Nearly half of breadwinner moms agree with the statement, “I feel guilty that I can’t be there for them like the stay-at-home-parents, and I can see that this alienates me from my children to some degree,” compared with just under a third of breadwinner dads. Read: shopping spree.
Findings like this, to me, basically reveal what any mother who is also a hard-working professional already knows: we’re exhausted, stressed, lonely. And we are wracked with guilt when we come home and try to embrace the angry, distant, rude, or extremely demanding children that we only get to see for a few hours every day. If that. We’re lonely, guilty, and defensive on weekends, when, if we want to watch our kids’ soccer games, we’re face to face with the neighborhood SAHM posse—the domestic goddess cult who, in an era of intensive attachment parenting, has already judged and convicted us of being neglectful, absentee mothers. And it doesn’t help that most of our fellow Americans don’t support us. As mentioned earlier, according to a 2013 Pew study, only 16 percent of those Americans polled thought that a home with the mother working full-time was the best environment in which to raise a child. That’s pretty damning, considering that most mothers work. So thanks for that, America.
The whole proposition of being a breadwinning or career-driven mother is murky, sticky, and messy.
THESE WOMEN ARE SUCCEEDING, BUT THEY DON’T FEEL THEY ARE
“The dilemmas of working and parenthood . . . start the moment we become mothers—identities formed through careers are forced to incorporate the new role of ‘mommy,’” wrote Tovah Klein, PhD, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development and associate professor of psychology in 2014. “Identity-turmoil gets sparked: Am I a career woman? Ambitious person? Mother? This can be followed by a path of ‘Who am I?’ that can take years to resolve.”
No kidding! In my experience “ambitious person” and “mother” blend about as well as oil and vinegar. Indeed, in a qualitative study that Klein and her colleagues conducted of 240 women who had careers before becoming mothers, researchers found that “the resounding message is that they feel they are not doing enough—for their careers (whether currently employed or not) or their children, and are torn between the clashing domains. . . . They struggle to do-it-all at one moment. Even though many desire to [sic]. In fact, by most objective measures these women are succeeding, but they don’t feel they are.”
These women are succeeding, but they don’t feel they are. That sentence sums up perfectly for me the struggle imbedded in my psyche and, I’ll bet, that of many career-driven mothers. Working motherhood is where my professional value and inner value clash most cruelly. My persona as a professional news broadcaster embraces qualities such as a hard-driving work ethic, politesse, tough-mindedness, ease with public speaking, and quick on-the-feet performance. The essence of my identity as a mother involves—or at least I want it to—being comforting, nurturing, a good listener, a judicious disciplinarian. But a weird hybrid often pops out when I try to force these two together: a “go, go!” mom who implodes on impact. The pieces just don’t fit together right somehow.
Dads just don’t have this problem, to this degree. Experience says it. Research says it. But if a woman has achieved some—or a lot of—success in her work life, it’s easy for her to feel constantly reminded of her deficiencies as a mother and to feel conflicted about the balance of power in the household. According to our poll, male breadwinners are three times as likely as female breadwinners to say that there is less tension in the relationship (24 percent men versus 8 percent women), whereas three in ten (29 percent) female breadwinners report having had arguments with their spouse/partner over the “balance of power” in the relationship, compared with one in five male breadwinners (20 percent). And women are more likely to report arguments about the balance of power if they have children under eighteen (34 percent), compared with those with no children (22 percent).
Part of me wants to scream that it’s not fair that our culture is still so sexist. But the persistent reality is that I am almost constantly aware of how my career disrupts our household. I am reminded either by my family’s behavior (or by teachers, stay-at-home moms, grandmothers—including my own mother) or by my own hypercritical self-awareness.
I am aware, for example, that my job takes me away from home a lot. (Bad mom.) I am aware that my husband and daughters are alone a lot—or at least without me. (Bad mom.) I am aware that I am probably moderating a panel or giving a speech at an event during the parent-teacher conference. (Bad mom.) I am aware that my always being “on”—a high-gear mental state necessary to do the kind of rapid-speed, multitasking work I do—makes my kids feel as if I’m working my professional bag of tricks on them rather than slowing down and remembering who I am and connecting with them as their mother.
I have addressed this problem in many ways. I overcompensate by going on shopping sprees with my daughters, taking the family on exciting vacations (during which I’m rabidly checking my texts and e-mails), and by being sugary sweet and irritatingly upbeat when I’m at home. But, of course, overcompensating doesn’t bring you closer to those you’re trying to please. They sniff out the forgery and retreat from you further. That is what I have learned the hard way: kids want parameters, expectations. I need to be a parent, no matter what they think of me. This approach has worked, but it has also made me more lonely, if possible.
When I spoke with Senator Claire McCaskill, she knew all about the secret dual lives of moms and professional working women. Truly, as she spoke, I felt as if she were describing my life. Verbatim. “I was in the courtroom asking someone to put someone away for fifty years for a horrendous crime, and I was rushing home so that I would not have to serve takeout for the fourth night in a row and killing myself so that my kids would have meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner that I had mashed myself and not used a box. And I did that all the time. It was just normal for me to do those kinds of things,” she said of her years as a prosecutor when her children were young.
“I was single, with my children, for almost a decade when they were little, and then you really have a lot of guilt. . . . My kids were smart enough—I think all kids are smart enough—to know what to use to manipulate. And what they would use was my guilt. All they had to do was go close to, ‘Well, you know other moms were at this, and you weren’t,’ and then I was like, ‘Oh my God, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do for you? What can I do with you?’ So as a parent I probably made some serious parenting mistakes by allowing that guilt manipulation way too many times. But I did.”
I got it completely. To lead the bizarre, bifurcated life of a high-powered working mother—rushing home from a professional, pressurized, demanding work environment to a home where your kids are, however justifiably, sick of takeout and your phoniness—is a tall order. And that raises what, to me, is the central question: How can mothers stay authentically themselves at home and with their children? Is it even possible to feel successful as a mother with an ambitious career?
“Leave your crown in the garage.” That’s what PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi’s mother told her when she got the big promotion. As head of one of the most iconic companies in the world, Indra Nooyi is one of the most powerful people in business, period. But unlike CEOs like Sheryl Sandberg and others—who acknowledge that being a good mom and a hard-driving professional is hard, but that it’s vital that women continue to lean in to their careers—Indra flat-out tells it like it is: being successful as a mom and a hard-driving, career-minded person is only possible when you are two people. And maybe not even then.
When she was asked whether women can “have it all” at the elite 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival, Indra declared bluntly in front of a live audience that “having it all” was difficult, something that women “pretend we have,” she said. She went on to confess that working mothers don’t just “die with guilt” over their children, but to pull off being a working mother “you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you,” she said. “But if you ask our daughters, I’m not sure they will say that I’ve been a good mom. I’m not sure.”
Indra and I sat down to a long talk after I had moderated the White House panel and she had spoken at Aspen. I shared the Awkward Moment I’d had at the White House Summit when the room went silent after I’d asked the panel whether they had experienced any stress in their home lives because of their careers. Indra got it right away. “Totally, totally. I think it’s partially true for men, but definitely true for women, and every woman CEO or every woman senior executive—there’s pain behind that job. Trade-offs you’ve made, what you’ve gone through,” she said candidly. “My mom always said, ‘the moment you enter the house, you are not the CEO. If you want to be a successful mom and a wife, leave your crown in the garage. Just don’t bring the crown in.’” Her mother had told her that? Indra nodded. It reminded me of something Senator McCaskill had said to me during our conversation. “I need the love and the sustenance of my family—I need it like I need oxygen,” she said, tearing up thinking about how much they meant to her. “So if you can’t figure out how to make sure that is good, you can’t go soaring as high as you think you can soar.” To feel successful at home and at work, I felt that Claire was saying, you have to adapt your own attitudes, behaviors, and maneuvers until you feel you have the wind under your wings—or else you’ll crash. What Indra was saying, essentially, was that to be successful as a wife and mother as well as a career-driven person, you have to be two different people.
She underlined this point. “You have to be. You know, it’s interesting: at work we force people to bring their whole selves to work. We try to create an environment at work so that they don’t have to leave themselves at the door—we are very particular about that at PepsiCo,” Indra observed. “But at home, if I can retain 20 percent of my CEOship and drop 80 percent of it, I have to do it. I have to do it. Otherwise—I’ve been married thirty-five years—I couldn’t have kept the marriage going.”
How did she keep it going, and how did she manage to be such a calm mother at home when her work obligations were creeping into her mind? “You get up at four in the morning when everybody is asleep. And by six a.m. you get things done so that when everybody gets up, you’re smiling, and you say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ So you have to develop your coping mechanism.” Before I had a chance to comment—wow, what a strategy—Indra continued. “I think if you talk to any woman CEO, they’re doing that—and then you give up a lot of your personal life,” she commented. “I love going to ball games—I don’t go to those. I love watching concerts. I watch them on DVD at home. Because there’s no time to do those things.”
There was that sexist double standard, popping up again. “But men have time,” I insisted. “Men CEOs have time.” Indra agreed. “Yeah, they do have time. Sometimes I ask myself the question . . . if Dad was a CEO, would the kids all behave differently?” she mused. “But Mom CEO? You’re a CEO, but you’re mom first.” I wondered what this looked like on the ground. That is, what mysterious, supernatural force did she have to undergo in the time between leaving her CEO self at work and slipping into her mom self at home? “I have one mouth and many, many ears [at home],” Indra explained. Was she really telling herself to shut up when her kids said or did something that made her want to yell—in order to keep the peace for her, to keep steady in both domestic and professional worlds? This was, for me, a jaw-dropping moment. For one thing, Indra was talking openly about accepting her dual life as CEO and mom. For another, I completely related to it.
I often feel as though I have no authority to put my foot down at home because I’m not there often enough to deserve it. I let my kids’ bad behavior go because I feel guilty. My crown is definitely checked at the front door. And I too am often thinking of work—although I don’t do as good a job of disguising it as Indra does. Clearly. My daughters can tell when my mind has left the room. They know when they’re trying to engage with a mannequin mom, and they hate it. By the time I’ve snapped out of it, the moment to connect has often passed. It’s those lost moments—those little windows that can open to mother-child closeness—that I most regret. What did Indra most regret? What, if anything, would she have done differently? Anything she could share with other women?
Instead of answering my questions, she told a story. “I have to tell you, I came to PepsiCo, and my daughter was nine months old—my second daughter. And my older daughter was nine years old. Difficult ages. And I worked twenty hours a day, seven days a week because PepsiCo was going through a lot of changes,” Indra recounted. “And my little one was here in the office the other day, and I said, ‘Tara, when we move . . . all this furniture is going away.’ She said, ‘No, we’re going to buy this table!’ I said, ‘Why are we buying this table?’ She said, ‘The little cubby hole under the table—that’s where I used to sleep in the evenings! You can’t give that away, Mom! That was my bedroom many times.’”
Her office desk was her baby’s bedroom? Indra confirmed. “This is the same table I got the day I started at PepsiCo twenty years ago. I have not changed it; I have kept the same furniture,” she said. “And underneath that is a cubby hole where you put your feet in. Tara would walk in with her security blanket, and she’d go underneath that and curl up and sleep.
“And my older daughter, her journal entries made me choke up. ‘Waited to talk to mom. It’s 10 p.m. Going to bed. Mom not home as yet.’”
Indra’s story spoke epics about life for working mothers and small children. I completely related to her experience, almost to the letter. When I was an anchor at CBS, my girls used to crawl under my desk during live broadcasts. I couldn’t figure out a way to integrate my work life and motherhood, so bringing them with me and letting them cuddle around my feet while I read the news was my solution. And it was fun. When they were little.
“There is one thing I would do differently,” said Indra, finally answering the question. “Perhaps spent a lot more time with the kids.” It was a poignant admission that I connected with completely. Indra didn’t feel as though she could have progressed in her career had she not put in full-court effort at the office, but doing so was necessarily at the expense of being with her children. Actually she didn’t just feel that way; she knew it was true, she said. “I honestly believe women, especially twenty years ago, started in a hole. Did not matter how good you were. You had to dig out of the hole, and then excel, so we had to work twice as much,” she argued. “This level playing field is a more recent development. Twenty years ago you always had to work hard, whether we liked it or not.”
What conflicting messages I was getting from some of the most senior women in the country on inner value versus professional value! On the one hand, Judith Rodin and Claire McCaskill had told me that their marriages and family lives had taken a backseat to their careers—and that’s what had made their professional lives work. On the other hand, PepsiCo’s powerhouse CEO was telling me she became submissive at home to make her family life and marriage work. Was anyone right? Isn’t there some middle ground where you can succeed at work and still have a solid personal life?
SENDING ME A SIGNAL
If you want to excel, you always have to work hard, whether your kids like it or not. And let’s clearly acknowledge that for the majority of the world’s mothers, whether to work hard or not—or whether or not anyone likes it—isn’t up for debate. In the United States alone just over a quarter of all households are headed by single mothers who are the primary or sole earners. We know that as of 2013, 40 percent of all American households are supported by a breadwinning mom who is either the primary or sole earner—and where our relationships with our children are concerned, that status takes its toll on a fair number of us.
According to our own poll, more than one-third of breadwinner moms say they “feel as though I’m not there for my kids as much as I feel I should,” compared with one-fourth of breadwinner dads—and the agreement is higher among breadwinner moms who are the sole earner (55 percent). Breadwinner moms are also more likely to say that being the primary earner has had a negative impact on their relationship with their children if they are the sole earner (24 percent), compared with those who are not the sole earner (9 percent). You can hear the range of realities and emotions in the voices of some of those women from our poll. “It has taken me away from my children. Children need their mother, regardless of money. But they cannot have their needs met if I don’t work,” said one woman. “It’s very stressful having to carry the financial weight in the relationship. Someone is always counting on you, when you have no one you can count on financially,” said another.
But what about mothers who love their work and are ambitious to succeed in their fields, but don’t necessarily “need” to do so for financial reasons? For those women, Indra had argued, it is a choice between working hard rather than spending more time with their children—whether they like it or not. And it begs the terrible question: Is it okay to choose to work hard rather than spend extra time with your kids, even though you have regrets or wish that you didn’t have to make a choice to begin with? At heart this is the question the White House panel hadn’t wanted to answer.
In truth probably no mother can answer it absolutely affirmatively. But after the summit (off stage) Dr. Judith Rodin had spoken to me about her experiences as a mother and tenured Yale professor, working her way up in her career and on to becoming the president of University of Pennsylvania, the first woman to do so at an Ivy League school. There was no getting away from having a constant pit in your stomach if you felt disconnected from your children, she said, nor was there any way around your kids feeling bad if they feel disconnected from you.
“I think that’s a very common experience, and I think that the truth is [that] the more disconnected your family is feeling from you too, you are not only giving that feedback, but you are getting that feedback back. And that makes it harder [because] sometimes they’re overt,” Judith pointed out. Perhaps if the kids are young enough or have a close enough attachment to us, they’ll give us very clear signals that they need their moms. Now. We might be able and want to give them our full attention. But other times we have to work—or might actually be doing something for ourselves.
Judith illustrated this point by describing her experiences with her then-young son. “I remember I was at home and I was playing with my three- or four-year-old—I forget how old he was—and the phone rang, and he dashed to answer it. It was obviously either a colleague or one of my graduate students who wanted me. My son said, ‘I’m sorry, she’s playing with me. She can’t talk to you,’ and hung up on them,” Judith said. “And I thought, ‘Good for you, Alex!’ I didn’t say that to him. I was really shocked. I told him he really shouldn’t have done that. But wow! How brave of him! But he was also sending me a signal that I was intruding on his time.”
Although she silently applauded her son that time, Judith did not, like Indra, believe in remaining silent when kids sent their signals, as it were. Judith, for one, had spoken up on her own behalf. She recounted a time when she was on her way to play tennis one evening for exercise and, frankly, just to blow off steam and have fun. Her son wasn’t happy. “He saw me walking out of the house with my racquet and he said, ‘Why don’t you play during the day, on your time? Don’t play on my time.’ So it wasn’t only the working stuff,” Judith said. “And that, I think, Mika, adds an additional pressure to women, because then you start feeling guilty for what you are doing personally. You want to play tennis or you want to work out, and that’s viewed as stealing from the family time. And frankly, you do do it stealing from family time.”
If I was reading her correctly, it seemed as if Judith did not want to be owned by any one role in her life; she wanted to own it herself. In a way that was where her professional value and her inner value overlaid each other in Venn diagram fashion: “Know yourself—and be true to yourself” could be the phrase that appeared in the merged areas of her professional philosophy and her own as an individual. And that included a healthy amount of personal time.
Personal time? What do I do during my “personal” time? Wait a minute—do I have personal time? Is that what I should call it when I take a run while the kids are still in school so I can get it out of the way before they come home? But by the time they get home I usually am already working like a nut. I might as well be out jogging. Sometimes when I’m at home, during my so-called personal time, I’ll catch myself juggling three phones at once. I’m on a conference call using my research assistant’s phone, on the landline with a family member, and on my own phone, talking with Joe about the show. And I’m actually trying to listen and contribute to three different calls. At the same time. I actually think it’s acceptable to do that—that it’s even possible to do that. When it comes right down to it, let’s be honest: my idea of a personal life drives me crazy.
YOU NEED TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE MONEY
Nely Galán would know what I’m talking about—times about four hundred. Nely knows about being a new mother, being the sole breadwinner and single mother, and being a senior executive in an extremely fast-paced field—all at the same time. Like Indra, she came to a blunt conclusion about the old Women’s Movement promise. “Can you have it all—at the same time?” she asked incredulously. “No. . . . I almost missed my personal life completely!”
“I had a child, I got pregnant at thirty-five, had a child at thirty-six, I started a business launching TV channels abroad, so I lived in Mexico City and in Chile, Argentina,” Nely explained. “Then when I started running Telemundo and moved back to the United States, I was still traveling every week of the month . . . one week a month in LA, one week in New York, one week in Miami, and one week in Mexico City . . . so until my son was about three, my life was crazy.” And with her son’s father out of the picture from the start, Nely—just as Indra said she and countless other executive mothers did—had to “co-opt” a team to help raise her son. “My mom came and lived with me for a year, and then my mom was in charge of hiring nannies—and I had nannies ‘round the clock because I traveled so much,” she explained.
But it wasn’t the life she wanted for herself. She could feel her professional value and her inner value—as a “fully and authentically Latina . . . and yet a Latina that can be fully in the mainstream”—begin to wane. After all, she knew, she had always wanted a more typical Latino family life. “I have to say in my most successful moments, at least financially, I was probably the unhappiest because I’m very traditional . . . I really wanted a family, and I wanted a husband, and I wanted all that, and I had to mourn that and let it go,” Nely said. “I also didn’t think anybody was going to love my kid the right way, so I just sort of decided, ‘Okay, I’m just going to be alone. I’m going to sacrifice until my son is eighteen, and I’m going to be a great mom and then see if I can meet someone later in life. I’m alone now and raising this kid, and I’m going to be very successful—and a part of me will be very sad.”
Yet it was during those years that Nely rose the highest in her industry’s ranks in her career, and she was making a lot of money—so much, she realized, that she could afford to pay nannies at all hours and support her mother’s stay during the first years of her son’s life. She knew that people who judge working mothers (maybe some of the people in that Pew study) might have said that the fact that she was giving up time with her son to earn increasingly higher levels of income was crass, that a working mother’s worth should be judged on her sense of mission. However, Nely knew that she was doing what she had to do. She also knew that that kind of attitude was born of privilege. As the daughter of first-generation Cuban immigrant parents, she said that worrying about whether people are judging you as a mother for earning what they consider to be an unseemly income is itself a “luxury” type of problem.
“It’s a very elitist, first-world mentality. Are you going to tell some woman from Cambodia, ‘Follow your bliss and the money will come’? That’s a lie! The most grounded thing to say is, ‘You need to find a way to make money,’” she said frankly. “Money first. If you’re in survival, where you need a paycheck, your mission should be: 2 percent of your time and your money should be 98 percent of your time. Until you have enough money that you are done, at whatever level you are done—because everybody is different—then you can spend more time on mission.” She illustrated her point with an example of a small business owner in LA. “I went to this nail place, and the lady who runs the place is Vietnamese, and she is the most impressive entrepreneur: the way she buys products and deals with customer service is just so loving and so smart. And she works like a dog,” Nely explained. “It warms my heart. And she’s not sitting there going, ‘Did I follow my bliss?’ She’s taking care of her family.”
For Nely, as she had said earlier, making “enough money that you are done, at whatever level you are done, because everybody is different”—feeling “abundance” and having the wherewithal to support a family—was clearly a very deep part of both her professional value as an entertainment executive and her inner value as a mother, as well as her sense of Latinas’ socioeconomic justice and growth. There was no contradiction, no conflict embedded for her in having financial power. What did bother her, she said, was when she saw that her young son, by then a grade-schooler, had grown more attached to his nanny than to her. She also saw that the nanny was smart and had ambition; she needed to grow beyond a job like this.
Nely ran up against an impassable, hard edge. She knew she had to face her sense that if she didn’t do something about this situation, it would destroy her inner value, period. Her longing to be the close mother she had always promised herself she would be as well as her commitment to Latina empowerment stood in stark relief. She took stock of her financial situation and concluded that the need to work like a dog wasn’t necessary anymore. She had invested wisely, and she owned her own large home in Venice, California, as well as a few small neighboring houses, which she rented out for extra income. She had reached her “enough money” point.
She had suffered to get there, but Nely was now in an extremely powerful place. If she wanted to, she realized, she could use one of her rental properties as an office, work from home, and dial back her hours. She could retain her professional value as a major player in the industry. But she no longer had to be the “always on” entertainment executive, flying constantly between multiple time zones and running on fumes. She could be there for her son when he came home from school. She could help her son’s nanny find the work she wanted to do. She could integrate her professional value and inner value as a working mother.
She had cracked the code. She won.
But Nely isn’t the only one—not by far. Experience says it. Research says it. There’s a major flip side to all this. It turns out that if you’re a working mother, you may be giving your children the edge in many areas of their lives. Which is to say that you may have won already.
You just might not know it yet.