Was the meeting worth it?
Earlier this week, the baby slept for four hours in a row, and I started getting crazy ideas, like taking a 10-minute shower and starting to work on some side projects again. I’ve been dying to get back to programming, (especially to my side project, Swedish House ML, which will, once it’s done in a million years, detect how good a techno song is based on the cover art.)
So, I was Googling around for tips on how to get back into programming incrementally while on maternity leave. Obviously, I didn’t find anything useful, but I did find this article from 2012, “Why you should work through your maternity leave,” including such gems as this,
2. Your new baby will sleep a lot at first. "I always thought maternity leave was quite ironic," Herrin says. "Provided that you don't have a difficult birth and an extended labor, that is. Because you deliver your baby, and three days later, you're fine. And your baby is primarily sleeping. You actually have the time to go back to work if you choose." Herrin brought her youngest with her to the office very soon after giving birth and was able to grow her business while also bonding with her baby. "I truly had a newborn at work," she says. "I definitely worked shorter days for the first two months. And I only lived a mile away from my office."
Did a cyborg write this paragraph?
Sometimes after reading crazy like this, I swear I should start a second newsletter, just for young women, called, Things The Media Is Absolutely Wrong About, For Women. In school, they tell you that you can do anything, without offering caveats on what that “anything” looks like if you’re thinking about having a family. Then, the media feeds you stories like this, that makes maternity leave sound like a cakewalk, instead of an intense physical and mental process that takes months to recover from.
Then, Sheryl Sandberg tells you you can lean in. Then, Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo, tells you that she worked through both her pregnancies and went back to work two weeks later. She banned remote work for her employees, but then installed a nursery in her own office.
After aggressively chasing corporate success, where are Marissa and Sheryl now?
Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died suddenly several years ago, leaving her grappling with widowhood and the time she didn’t spend with her family before he passed. Lately, for work, she’s been having to testify before Congress, and not for anything positive.
Marissa was fired - “departed” - from Yahoo. She collected a TON of money but didn’t exactly have a stellar exit. Her legacy is mainly that she didn’t allow people to work from home and let Tumblr decay.
Was it worth it for these women, to give up everything for the Machine?
I was thinking about both of these things as I grief-sobbed my way through this piece about what it means to deliberately take advantage of all the time we have with our families (note, if you are a parent or particularly sensitive, I don’t recommend reading as it includes death.) In it, the author writes,
Many have asked what they can do to help. Hug your kids. Don’t work too late. A lot of the things you are likely spending your time on you’ll regret once you no longer have the time. I’m guessing you have 1:1 meetings on the books with a lot of people you work with. Do you have them regularly scheduled with your kids? If there’s any lesson to take away from this, it’s to remind others (and myself) not to miss out on the things that matter.
Everyone has to make their own choices. Sometimes they’re not really choices, but we work because we need the money, simple as that.
But I see Sandberg and Mayer particularly as examples of performative American workaholism that I just can’t get behind.
There are others. Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsi:
Nooyi has been open about the difficulties she saw raising a family and running a Fortune 500 company. Nooyi’s daughter once protested when she heard her mother’s desk would be replaced during a renovation, the former exec recalled on a panel for Women in the World in 2016. Nooyi’s daughter explained she’d slept beneath that desk while growing up and asked her mother, “How can you give this desk away?”
Reflecting on that moment, Nooyi said: “My god, what a memory for her to have.”
This daughter also wrote her mother a letter when she was just 4 or 5 years old. The letter said, “Dear mom, Please, please, please, please please come home. I love you, but I’d love you more if you came home.”
Nooyi kept the letter to remind herself what she’s lost, she said at the 2016 panel.
I’m a woman who, through some stroke of luck, has a choice: I can choose to lean into my career, or I can choose to be with my family, and often I find myself trying as hard as I can, against the grain of the physics of the pull of corporate life, to be at home as much as possible.
I don’t regret being with my family. I don’t regret not being present in meetings (even if it means that I might have lost promotions) because I was at home. I don’t regret working part-time, unpaid, my daughter’s first year (even if it meant not learning about Tensorflow the minute it came out.) I don’t regret being around for all her doctor’s appointments, her first smile. And I don’t regret any time I’m taking with my son, now, as hard as it may be.
What I do regret is this: My daughter was eight months old, and got her first cold. I was working part-time her first year, and it was one of the days I was in the office. I distinctly remember white-knuckling through work that day as my nanny sent me pictures of my daughter, sick. I do regret that I had to go on a business trip the day after her first birthday, so I spent the whole day, which should have been a celebration, thinking about it.
If other women who can financially make the trade-off do, I’m all for it. But what I’m not happy about is that our society, and these women in particular, doesn’t tell us about this trade-off even existing early on.
Nowhere in school are we sat down and told, “You can have kids, but unless you have someone else watch them 24-7, you won’t get the promotion, the corner office, the ability to testify in front of Congress, the stock options.”
Or, we’re not told, “You can be at home with your children, but there’s a high probability you might not be employable five years down the line, and that’s the trade-off you have to make.”
We’re told, '“Be anything you want to be. Girl power.” They don’t say that girl power has a very heavy price, the exact value of which you may not know until it’s too late. We don’t get the chance to choose which path we want to take until we are in the middle of it, in the middle of a CxO asking us if we can make the corporate retreat and miss a weekend at home, or in the middle of calculations that tell us it makes more financial sense for us to stay at home and miss out on a career for five, ten years.
I get that The System is not incentivized to tell us any of that. But what I’m angriest about is that women who get to the top of the system don’t, either.
Once I start seeing articles about powerful women leaders taking their full maternity leaves, and writing posts like “It's later than you think,” and once I see the media praising those posts in earnest, I’ll know that we’ve rounded a corner.
I’ll start with my small part in the story, with this post.
Art: Isabella Of Portugal With St. Elizabeth, Petrus Christus, 1458
What I’m reading lately:
I’m traumatized second-hand from reading Lyz’s tale of being yelled at at a book reading
This blew me away:
(All joking aside, reading this made me so angry on the parent’s behalf)
How to reverse-engineer Twitter:
This is just me reverse-engineering recommendation algorithms and hacking through some changes to help myself.