Balancing the Drive to Do Something Great With Being a Mom
Meditations on tech across generations
Dear Daughter,
Your letter asking how to balance work and family echoes deep in my psyche, taking me back to when you were born, when I was just five years older than you are now. I had banished the word “balance” from my vocabulary — lest anyone in my large law firm discovered I did care about anything other than doing billion dollar financings. Which I cared about, a lot.
The day before you were born, I organized a conference room for the closing of a cross-border financing. You were still an abstraction, something happening to me that made me unable to see my feet as I laid out contracts and flagged signature lines.
And then you arrived, in all your perfection. When it dawned on me that an actual human being had been born to me and placed in my care, it seemed a given that I was going to mess this little miracle up.
How would my mash-up of lovestruck mother and deal-maker junkie turn out?
How terrifyingly lacking they were, those parenting books I read, in the throes of my mother-infant love affair. Where were the succinct words about the role of the career mother that would sum up the objectives and “best practices” of good parenting? Parenting advice was, by definition, anecdotal, derived from a non-statistically significant sample of the population. Unrepeatable. No control groups.
And most of the parenting books seemed, between the lines, to be affirming the moms who had time to read them, and discouraging us career types, activating our most primal insecurities. La Leche League had clearly not returned from maternity leave to my 38th-floor law firm office, if their advice was to close my door and hang a “Lactating” sign on it at various points in the day. You, my baby, cut off at four months from your mother’s milk when I returned to work, would just have to go through life with fewer brain cells and a compromised immune system.
Twenty-five years into it, I am humbled by your request for advice on the epic subject of how to craft a professional life of passion in the presence of an all-consuming maternal love. Here are three things I would tell you.
Motherhood is a relationship, not a role
When you were four, I was promoted to general counsel of an energy company in the midst of a global acquisition spree. “So, Mom,” you asked. “Does this mean you are the boss of Bender? And Ellen?” I nodded as you ticked off names, and then paused, with your little arms folded, your Norse goddess countenance appraising me. “Well,” you said, ending the conversation, “you are not the boss of me.”
It turns out that motherhood, as it has slowly revealed itself to me in the context of you, is not a role that can be memorized or learned by rote; it is a relationship between two people, created by both of them over time, as they discover one another.
You grew and revealed yourself to me as I beheld you in awe and wonder. Effervescent. Keen. Level-headed. Creative. Practical. A nature and science lover. A self-described “bear person, not a doll person.” A born leader.
And I revealed myself. Over-extended. A failed marriage and a stint as a single mother. Patched over by nannies, some beautifully augmenting our pattern and others frayed and missing even more stitches than me. And me, absent-minded enough to buy groceries and forget them in the trunk for a week. And sometimes just plain absent, neurotically faxing you pages of Australian coloring book animals while closing a privatization in Brisbane. Feeling the lack of you, like a piece of my heart was walking around outside of me.
Elated at times by the sheer bubbly wonder of childhood, and at others, utterly deflated by your disappointments and my limits, stretched between work and home. Ruining your first grade social life by neglecting to provide you with an essential item. Me, sharing your tears after an in-the-know mom pointed out my failure: “Wait, sweetie, just tell me, what’s a Beanie Baby?”
I couldn’t have articulated my “parenting philosophy,” even if I had tried to think about it, as I blearily changed out of my suit and into my PJs after coming home, taking a few deep breaths in the driveway, making dinner, giving baths, reading books, and getting you to bed. I bounced between competing desires to pave your path and pre-engineer outcomes to make your life “happy,” versus allowing risk and failure as a natural outcome in your world, a mere onlooker in your quest to “be the boss of you” as soon as you were able, which would be a source of long-lasting joy to you.
The good thing about a relationship is that both people can do some adapting.
Only later on would it strike me that going to the garage and getting in the car, and expecting young kids to follow, was not “standard” human parenting. It worked for ducks to mother this way, marching out ahead, with the ducklings trailing behind, fending for themselves. Human mothers generally tend to be of the “herder” variety, protectively nudging their young out in front, and bringing up the rear.
You and your child will figure things out, together, as you go. Keep your focus on what is called for in your unique relationship, including what is needed to sustain yourself. Don’t measure yourself against an abstract notion of what a mother role is “supposed” to be.
Mine your vein of gold
It’s tricky as you grow up, for you and your mother to build a relationship that is adapted to your specific temperaments and circumstances, while at the same time allowing you to find your vein of gold — the mission you are meant to claim on this earth.
It was also difficult at times, as your mother, to keep sight of my own vein of gold. There are a lot of discouraging messages in the professional realm for mothers. I’ve found my passions are what give me the energy required to meet the competing demands of the day, at home and at work, while stepping over the naysayers.
The truth was, my gold involved mayhem situations that did not lend themselves to part-time work or proactive “balancing.” Innovating, change-agenting, crisis managing, starting-up. Like a firefighter, I couldn’t just drop my hose at the inferno to make it to the soccer game.
Once, when you were little and too many things were in flux for our family, I went part-time. I wanted to. I took on assignments that weren’t crises and could be finished during shortened office hours. It was blissful luxury, being home to meet you kids after school, and having those long, lazy stints at the cabin. As much as I cherished that time, all the while, I could see my professional gold claim, off shining in the distance. Was I risking it all?
When the opportunity was right, I returned to work full-time, to lead a turnaround of a public company. As it turned out, I would end up later getting a chance at full-time mothering, between selling one company and starting the next. My story would be fulfilling, looking back, if I was willing to break it up into chapters. As long as I kept my golden work prospects as inspiration, somewhere in my line of sight, I could find my way back to them when I was ready.
So, no matter what motherhood requires, don’t lose sight of your rich deposits of creativity and zest for all of life, and your love of the tech world, which you have already discovered and started to explore. Like mining for gold, a full life involves taking big risks in the face of a lot of unknowables.
Remember that “love” is a verb
As a mother, you will be brimming with love. But sometimes, it will be hard to discern what to do with it. I worried sometimes that other parents, especially the stay-at-home cohort, were putting their thumbs on the scale, being the team manager, or the chair of the drama club fundraiser, trying to give their own child an advantage. Meanwhile, I was distracted, in a do-loop about a personnel issue, or obsessing about commercializing technologies to move the needle on the concentration of man-made CO2 in the atmosphere we would leave for your generation.
What if leading with passion made it harder for me to follow you? Had I missed my chance at Quality Time? When would there be a Teaching Moment? Were you slipping through my fingers, as Meryl Streep would sing about in that ABBA movie?
Looking back, given my “fixer” temperament, and my predisposition to give unsolicited advice, I can see that my own life pursuits were essential to my staying out of your sandbox.
My working definition of love is “extending oneself for the purpose of the growth of another.” I remember stumbling upon Scott Peck’s elaboration of this definition just when I needed it in my motherhood journey:
“Although the act of nurturing another’s spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one’s own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.”
There it was, my elusive parenting philosophy.
From the moment our umbilical cord was severed, and all that commingling between us of every substance that sustains life abruptly ended — my job as your mother was to help create and maintain a separation of my self and your self — and then, across the divide, extend myself, selflessly, for your growth.
Motherhood for me involved a primal struggle, trying to afford you, my daughter, the space where you could locate your own vein of gold, without the overlay of my glittering hopes and worn-out worry beads. I gave you life, and you got to live it. And, as a corollary, you had to live it, with its attendant hard work and privilege of self-discovery.
Love involves discernment and action, and sometimes a decision not to act. When in doubt, stop, behold your child, and choose what honors her separateness. Having two stars to chase, as you put it, helped me let you be. It is messy, and perfection is not attainable, but you will experience beauty in the grander patterns that emerge. And, as Yumi said, it is through the cracks that the light gets in.
Reflecting on living a life with these sometimes irreconcilable demands on my time and energy conjures the many ways I have fallen short in this gold standard of love with you. How will I ever know if I got it right enough?
All I know is that I have seen glimmers of my dream life with you, my adult daughter, made possible only through this conscious, painful boundary drawing and necessary separateness. Lately, I have seen signs of the light between us — you, reaching back to me from your hectic tech professional life, texting, calling as you climb the sidewalks of San Francisco, breathlessly relating situations in detail — and asking, “Mom, do you have any advice?”
