#23 My Decade of "Work" Experimentation, Part 1

Here's the problem I set out to solve for myself 10 years ago.

Hi friend,

Next year I will be turning 40, which also means I’m nearing a decade of motherhood, and thus, a decade of experimenting with “work”. If you’ve followed along for a while, you probably already know that I am and have been the primary caregiver for my four kids. You may also know that I left a legal career that I had spent many years studying and training for (4.5 years getting 3 different degrees, plus a year-long clerkship). When I had my first baby, I was trying to solve for my acute problem of wanting to be with my baby (i.e. physically being with, and caring for her), but not losing myself and my professional ambitions.

Trying to solve for that acute problem launched my decade-long experiment in centering around my role and life as Mother, and building my “career” into the squeezed spaces in between. It’s been an ongoing journey of discovering, nurturing, and fortifying my own agency in building my life and work.

Though the experiment is far from over, nearing this ten-year milestone has had me reflecting a lot on this experience. And what I’ve realized is that my goal of centering around my singular priority and building work around it is actually something that a lot of people are grappling with right now as we try to find our footing on this side of the pandemic.

Our understanding of “work” has changed drastically in the last two years. But our discourse is still fixed on variables and terminology that are still shaped by past structures — flexibility, remote, hybrid. What are we missing? In this moment, what are the guiding principles for leaders and individuals, for us all move forward in a direction that shapes the New Work Order?

This is the first of a series of pieces I’ll be sharing on this topic of the [current] future of work.

Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash

Identifying the problem

It was in the early postpartum weeks after my eldest daughter was born. We were living in a tiny duplex on the upper west side in New York City, and it was Christmas time. And I was up in the nursery, trying to do a feeding in the middle of the night. The doctors said she needed to eat every couple of hours in those early days in order to gain weight, and the rule-follower that I am, I set my alarm for every two hours to feed her. It also meant that I was intentionally waking up a sleeping newborn to try to nurse her.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the wee hours in her room, holding a sleeping baby that didn’t want to wake up. (This is not the problem — I’m getting there.)

One such night, I remember holding her in my hands in the dim lighting of her nursery, staring down at her tiny head, tiny nose and lips. I was overcome with a wave of emotion: this is my child. I am her one and only mother.

It was like I had been walking around in black and white, checking off the to-do’s of postpartum and newborn care, and then in that moment, I had the mental and emotional clarity to actually connect with her. As her mother. And for the first time, I saw myself and my life with crystal clear HD resolution. It was like a black and white movie was transformed into color.

I had clarity on what I wanted to fill my days with. What I wanted to center my life and work around. I felt like a cliché. But it was the kind of knowing that, once seen, couldn’t be unseen.

The problem was this: Once I had placed caregiving and motherhood at the center of my life, I couldn’t see how any traditional notion of “career” could squeeze in around the margins — especially at that stage in my life when I was fresh out of grad school, and especially in the fields that naturally followed from my extensive education.

In other words, at the stage in my life when my biology and personal life demanded the most of my time and attention was also the stage in my career when existing institutions offered the least amount of personal agency to tend to those demands.

This realization was sobering. It was when my head hit that glass ceiling, and then I suddenly saw glass barriers all around me. It was the realization that my decades-long belief that I could be anything and achieve anything came with a huge asterisk. You can play the game and win the game… but only if you keep your uterus, child-bearing and -rearing obligations, and “personal” life out of it.

So I quit the game. And I decided, with some naive, caffeine-fueled confidence, that I would play by my own rules, with baby in tow.

What I started to see was that the purpose of my extensive education wasn’t to get me Job X at Institution Y, in prestigious field Z. Its utility was to afford me the personal agency in building my own life and career. And in the decade since, I’ve learned some key lessons, both hard and uplifting.

More on those next time.