Words of wisdom for working moms (2023 edition)
Who’s ready for the most wonderful time of the year?? 🤪😵💫
In this newsletter, I talk a lot about dualities—stillness and movement, ambition and ambivalence, reactivity and proactivity. In my tagline, I say that I write for working moms (and enlightened dads and grandparents) who value professional success and being an involved parent. And so, this week, I encourage you to acknowledge the dualities inherent to this time of year. I hope you embrace both time with family and community, while also carving out time for solitude and reflection.
In that vein, I wanted to share words of wisdom from some of the amazing women that I’ve interviewed in the newsletter this past year. So, I’m rounding up my favorite pearls of wisdom specifically on working parenthood from 2023. I hope you enjoy!
Liz Fosslien, author of Big Feelings and No Hard Feelings on giving yourself a break when facing uncertainty:
“Women leaders often put so much pressure on ourselves to have everything right the first time. I think about myself and how I managed the transition to remote work in 2020. I'd never been remote. I'd never managed remotely. I'd obviously never lived through a global pandemic! And I just showed up like a robot to those meetings, because I thought that I needed to have everything together to be a good manager or just to be a good colleague.
Then I shifted instead to, ‘I'm a person learning to be a manager, in a remote setting, while going through a global pandemic and being terrified for myself.’ And that helped me switch to a growth mindset and I came to meetings saying, ‘I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm going to try these things. I'm working to research what's going to work for our team. You guys need to tell me what's working, what's not.’ And that was much, much more effective in helping us come together as a team.
From a motherhood standpoint, I was never someone who knew that I wanted to be a mom. I was always a little concerned about what having a child would do to my life. And I really did not like being pregnant. And so that phrase helped me reframe my experience as ‘I'm a person learning to be pregnant.’ As opposed to being like, ‘I'm failing at this. I'm not doing it. I'm not enjoying the experience.’”
“The most important thing is that we start thinking about parental leave as a personal and professional development opportunity instead of a ding. That's really the change that needs to happen. It’s not a crisis, but a normal and predictable part of the career lifecycle, a process that 80% of people go through at some point in their career. And, instead of it being this thing everyone's having to deal with, it becomes this experiential learning opportunity that can really be harnessed by the organization.”
Lauren McGoodwin, CEO of Career Contessa, on the messages we tell our children:
“Our generation was told that if we could just fix ourselves, it would fix everything. We were the problem. We were told that if we just ‘leaned in’ more, or said ‘yes’ more often, then everything would work out. So I hope that our kids' generation understands that there are real hurdles out there—from federal and company polices to societal expectations and stereotypes—that keep people from being successful. Because you can be doing everything right in this country and still not be ‘successful’ in a traditional sense.”
“We really need to develop a sense of entitlement to more support in the United States for both mothers and fathers. We have to expect more, because it is the norm everywhere else. And the stress and overwhelm that moms in the US feel is not their own fault. That's the main message that I try to communicate to audiences. It's not their own fault, and it's also not something they're capable of fixing on their own. These problems are structural and systemic. They are not individual and personal, though we live in a culture that's constantly telling moms and dads that it is their job to fix all of this on their own and that they can't turn to other folks for support, which I think is a tremendous part of the problem.
The problem, of course, is that the folks who are best situated to make this argument to politicians are working parents themselves, and working parents are fucking tired! But if we thought of ourselves as a voting block—working parents or working moms as a voting block—we would have more political power than any other group in the country.”
I also wanted to highlight some other great interviews I’ve done this year, including:
Melissa Nicholson, Founder and CEO of Work Muse, on the untapped potential of job sharing
Jasmine Kelland, author of Caregiving Fathers in the Workplace, on caregiving dads and the “fatherhood forfeit”
Caroline Chambers of "What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking", on easy meals for working parents (her turkey bolognese recipe is the real deal, guys 👍)
Happy holidays, friends. Take care of yourselves and each other. 💙
