Parenthood X Work: reflections of a working mother
Today, my son turns one year old. Today is also the day in which it has been a year that I got to be called a working parent. And believe me, when I decided to get pregnant, I thought I knew but had no idea what that meant.
None of the conversations I’ve had with my friends or co-workers who were parents (and even talking with my own parents) would have prepared me for what came ahead — and I am not talking about the sleepless nights. Meetings while breastfeeding, naps on your lap while analyzing data, measuring fever while replying to emails, fearing the nursery will call while in a presentation, attending urgent calls while taking them to school. This is just the beginning.
The feeling I carried with me throughout these 365 days (or 185, to be honest, because I was able to enjoy my maternity leave) was total fear. I kept asking myself: how do other parents — especially mothers — do that? And the fact is that I’ve learned that they don’t. I discovered that what I felt was not only natural but common between all of us, parents of one, two, three, or more. The constant split attention. The sensation of overwhelming. The feeling of not doing enough (neither for work nor for the kids).
Of course, in the end, we learn that we manage to work things out (or to adapt to the new life), but the question that remained in my mind was: at what cost? Being able to balance work and parent life has cost parents (especially women) more than just time — it is also costing health.
But to me, the issue of modern parenthood is not only related to how working and having kids can affect our lives in all possible ways (topics that we exhaustively discuss — and have to keep discussing, especially for women). What often picked my brain was how we live our professional lives today, which is not aligned at all with how we expect parenthood to be (inside and outside social media).
How do we expect to raise empathic, caring, healthy, and loved kids if we are also being pushed to spend less than 30% of our hours with them? How do we want them to learn how to love their careers in the future if they are constantly affected by how our dedication to our work makes us more tired and absent from their personal lives? How do we want to invest in our own careers if we have so little support to take care of our kids while we work?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been (and continue to be) someone who loves to work and recognizes the importance of having some away time from my son (for me and for him). I also know how privileged I am to work in a company and with a team that allows me to work around the daily challenges of being a working parent. But I do believe that we are not balancing that the right way as a society. It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and the village is all of us. I am not talking about working more or less, but maybe working differently in a way where we could find quality time to spend with our sons, nephews, and grandsons.
The fight for a balanced work-parenthood life is a fight for all of us. Because even for those who don’t want to have kids, they are essential. Kids guarantee that you have a social security program in your country, that you can pay for private health insurance, or that you see new technologies being developed. If we don’t have new people literally coming to this world, life as we know it doesn’t sustain itself — and it will be less fair for those who can’t already afford this one.
My takeaway after one year of parenthood and work is a question for which I don’t have the answer for — but that I hope my son’s generation can find it: why aren’t we revisiting the way we work today to allow parents (or carriers) not only to have more quality time with their children, but to live their professional lives without the guilt of not being enough?