Women Work. We Have Babies. Get Over It.
Why is it so hard to play it cool about being pregnant on the job?
There’s a particular look that people have when they come into my office to tell me they’re pregnant (and as an editor with a mostly young, female staff, this happens a lot). The expression is one part joy, and one part anxiety — and while I always hope they’ll leave my office feeling all of the former and none of the latter, I know that particular cocktail of personal-life happiness and telling-the-boss dread all too well, because I lived it.
When my husband and I first started talking about having a baby, I was 33, and editor of a magazine I felt I had well in hand. It would be hard to pull off a maternity leave, but not TOO hard. Then I got promoted, to a bigger job with bigger stakes. We decided to wait a bit. (Some friends tsk-tsked; “don’t put it off — no job is worth that,” snapped one mentor.) But about ten months in, the time seemed right. I was 34; work was demanding, but not crushingly so; my husband, a film producer, was between projects and could be at home for much of a baby’s early months. And my pregnancy was blessedly easy. As I jetted back and forth to the European fashion collections in those early months, covering my not-yet-announced belly and grabbing catnaps between shows, I felt my life was firing on all cylinders.
Maybe it was pregnancy hormones, but this was a cinch! I could do this! Thank God for tent-dresses!
Until I started thinking about telling my boss. Suddenly everything seemed more fraught. Would he worry about my pending absence? Would he criticize my timing? And what was I thinking with this timing, anyway? Most of my friends in similar jobs had had their babies long before becoming editors-in-chief — wait, why hadn’t I thought of that? By the time I pressed the 11th-floor elevator button to go see him to break the news, I was in a full body sweat, and Bernard Herrmann’s music for the shower scene in Psycho was playing in the back of my mind. (I was also seriously straining at the seams of a denim Gucci skirt that hadn’t fit me for at least a month. I had been putting off this meeting for a while.) My husband, mystified by why I was worried, had offered some kitchen-table advice that morning — “just be businesslike, upbeat and casual” — and I clung to that mantra as I marched down the hushed hallway. Businesslike, upbeat, and casual. Businesslike, upbeat, and casual.
In the end, those three words got me through. I blurted my news, my boss beamed with authentic happiness (and asked me whether I already had kids — oh, I guess the details of my personal life weren’t quite as vital to him as to me), and then we went on to the rest of the meeting’s business. The volume lowered on the Psycho soundtrack. If I was going to act confident and unconcerned about my ability to do two things well, then, it seemed, everyone else would follow along.
Which is, of course, how it should be.
Pregnancy, no matter when you decide to go about it, is as normal and common as a human activity can be; as epic as my pregnancy seemed to me, I was doing nothing particularly unusual in having a baby, and it was reassuring for me to be reminded of that.
(On a similar note, I once delivered a calf on a dairy farm — long story — and during my own labor found it strangely comforting to remember how unruffled the mother cow had been by the whole process. Females get pregnant. We have babies. That cow was happily munching hay five minutes after delivery and I’m pretty sure she could have edited a solid issue of Bovine Monthly with no problem if she’d had to.) Parenthood is full of challenges, but just announcing it should not be one of them.
For too many women, of course, that moment is much more difficult than it was for me. Not every boss is as enlightened and unworried as mine was; simply chanting “businesslike, upbeat, casual” won’t get you too far if the head honcho sees your leave as annoying, or the company won’t grant you a paid one (yes, that’s still legal!), or your superior secretly doubts that you can do what working fathers have done for millennia and procreate while still being awesome on the job. I had it lucky.
All women deserve that kind of straightforward encouragement, and I think not apologizing for wanting to do the thing that, you know, our entire species depends on is a good start — especially while we wait for our legislators and employers to catch up. The moment you decide to have a baby is both extraordinary (to you) and ordinary (to the universe), and you will do it, with its ups, downs, and unexpected roller-coaster turns, as women, men, cows, cats, and every other living thing has before you.
Businesslike, upbeat, casual, wonderful.
Now tell me: If you’ve made the decision to become a parent, when, and how, did you do it?
Cindi Leive is the editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine and glamour.com, which together reach one out of every eight American women. She has two children.
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