The question is…Are they editor enough?

by Katrina on May 17, 2012

Are you mom enough?

Are you mom enough?

By now you’ve probably seen this TIME Magazine cover of the woman breastfeeding a child who looks about four (turns out he’s 3).

It’s caused quite a sensation, in part because half this country thinks breastfeeding is disgusting (especially when the child is old enough to request seconds) and the other half thinks the first half is stupid.

As you know, I am solidly in the pro-breastfeeding camp. I, of all people, should have no problem with the media showing images of women breastfeeding. In fact, several years ago I was photographed breastfeeding my daughter for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s the proof.

But the TIME photo struck me as simply obnoxious. The cover is such a blatant attempt to pit women against each other. There’s the photo, which is designed to provoke the squeamish (note the defiant stance, and the age of the child). But what really puts it over the top is the aggressive headline. (“Are You Mom Enough?)

Personally, I’m disgusted with the cover, not because of what it says about breastfeeding, but because of what it says about the editors. Really? You people have nothing better to do than try to start another food fight over breastfeeding? (Pun intended.)

I’ve been too irritated to write about it. Then yesterday I saw that MomsRising put out a very reasoned response, so I’d like to share an excerpt here:

What makes TIME’s decision to focus on fanning the flames of the fictional “mommy wars” so utterly shameful is the fact that there are so many real and pressing issues facing America’s mothers right now that aren’t being covered. Issues like the fact that childcare costs more than college in many states, that 80% of low wage workers don’t have a single earned sick day, that women (particularly moms) face rampant pay discrimination, and that over 176 countries have some form of paid family leave, but the U.S. doesn’t. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The question isn’t whether we’re “mom enough,” but whether our culture is prepared to value mothers and families beyond just Mother’s Day. TIME, and other media outlets’ compulsion to frame parents’ collective stress in personal terms, not only misses the reality, but also throws us all off track in working toward common-sense, real, and permanent changes for all American families.

Do you agree? If so, sign this: Tell TIME to cover the real issues that matter to mothers, women, and families.

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I’m curious what you think of the photo on it’s own. If it weren’t for the headline, what would you think?

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Here’s one more thing the editors could cover: the health effects of stress on working parents. Have you noticed the results of this poll I put up several months ago? Go here: What are you on?

The good news: 55% of us do not take anxiety medication. The bad news: 32% of us do.

I’ve left the poll open so if you haven’t answered it yet, please do. I’m planning to write about the results soon.

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Sources from the MomsRising excerpt:

[1] ”Parents and The High Cost of Child Care: 2010 Update,” National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.http://action.momsrising.org/go/825?akid=3286.193911.eSKB16&t=15

[2] U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (July, 2011). Employee Benefits in the United States: Selected paid leave benefits: Access, National Compensation Survey (Table 6). Retrieved 8 November 2011, from  http://action.momsrising.org/go/1831?akid=3286.193911.eSKB16&t=17

[3] US Census and NWLC Blog: State Wage Gap Shows Little or No Improvement since 2008

[4] www.RaisingtheGlobalFloor.org

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Happy Almost Mother’s Day (video)

by Katrina on May 10, 2012

The other day, I caught my kids arguing about who loves me more.

“…I love her to the moon and back.”

“Oh yeah, well I love her to the sun and back. The sun is farther than the moon.”

“Well, I love her eyeball!”

“You love her eyeball? That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Yeah. That’s the biggest number.”

“You mean google?”

“Oh, yeah. Google! I love her google times google. That’s even bigger than google!”

“I love her infinity! That’s bigger than any of the numbers, Jake.”

“I love her infinity times google, times another google!”

“That’s cheating! Infinity times google is just infinity…”

“I’m not cheating. You’re cheating!”

It was hard to break it up.

In that spirit, I hope you will enjoy the new MomsRising Mother’s Day video as much as I did. I recommend you watch it with you own name first (click on this link and you’ll see what I mean), then send it you your favorite moms.

MomsRising Mother's Day video image

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Hey, guess what? I was interviewed for a story about motherhood and feminism by writer Lisen Stromberg in this month’s Diablo Magazine: We Are Women. Hear Us Roar. Again.

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40 hours, 40 years

by Katrina on March 27, 2012

The number 40 has been on my mind a lot lately.

For one thing, I’m turning 40 this week. You would think I’d have had ample time to prepare for this milestone, but somehow it snuck up on me like the Norwegian rat that once scampered across my kitchen floor at 6 o’clock in the morning. Ew! How did he get in here?

The other reason I’m thinking about 40 is this Salon story my cousin sent me (Thanks, Logan!) called “Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week.” It describes research that proves long hours “kill profits, productivity, and employees.”

Since your boss probably hasn’t read the story, and chances are you’re still stuck, like so many Americans, working 50 or 60 hours a week, and since that leaves you very little time to read anything except this blog, I will share the highlights here:

  • Most people assume that if you increase your hours by, say, 50%, you will get 50% more work done. Not true.
  • Study after study shows that for industrial workers, productivity dramatically decreases after 8 hours a day.
  • Knowledge workers (people like me and most of my friends) have only 6 good hours of productivity a day. After that, we are cooked noodles.
  • Studies also show that when companies reduce workers’ hours back down to 40 per week, their businesses become “significantly more productive and profitable.”

Sometimes there are short-term gains when people work 60 or 70 hours a week. However, the risk of burnout begins after one week:

Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus. They spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that they’d never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they’re fried…[Some software teams] descend into a negative-progress mode, where they are actually losing ground week over week because they’re so mentally exhausted that they’re making more errors than they can fix.

Despite 150 years of research proving that working long hours is bad for everyone, Americans now work some of the longest hours of any country in the industrialized world. Shouldn’t we know better?

The author blames this on a culture problem created by a bunch of geeky, anti-social, workaholic software programmers from Silicon Valley who were upheld for their “passion” and made not working on the weekend seemed terribly old-fashioned.

Personally, I found that trying to work the minimum 40 hours when I was in that sleep-deprived first year of motherhood was impossible. And now that I’m sleeping through the night again, 40 hours is manageable, but I vastly prefer 30 or less. (Of course, that goes for my age as well.)

What’s your experience with working long hours? How many “good” hours do you have, before you are (as my friend Joan would say) “working stupid”?

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The Venn diagram of parenthood

by Katrina on March 1, 2012

I’m not sure why I put this together, but I thought it might make for interesting discussion.

Notice that “good” dads and “bad” moms occupy the same part of the chart?

I used to be heavily in the blue/green circles, no yellow. Now I like to think I’m closer to the Swedish moms, in the middle, but some days it feels all green, other days are very blue.

Where are you?

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A Care Revolution…in America?

by Katrina on February 9, 2012

The Second ShiftI read The Second Shift more than a decade ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, working at an Internet startup, newly married (to my first husband), and planning to have a child. That book scared the hell out of me.

It was based on research conducted in the 1980s by the prize-winning author and sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, and described the lack of equality between couples in households where both parents worked. The women in the study worked full-time jobs, then came home and made dinner, cleaned the house, bathed the kids, all with very little help from their husbands. Many of them went back to work after the kids went to bed. They were stressed, resentful, burning out.

I vowed never to be trapped like the women in Hochschild’s book, and immediately began to have heated arguments with my husband about sharing the mopping of floors and scrubbing of toilets.

Several years later, I lived my own version of the book. Although I was married to a man (my second husband) who pulled his weight at home and in every way imaginable was an equal and loving partner to me, I found the competing demands of a growing career and a growing family beyond grueling.

Every once in a while, I thought about Hochschild’s book, and felt a ray of gratitude that the author, without knowing it, had validated the struggle I found myself in.

A new version of The Second Shift just came out last month. Imagine my surprise and delight to find out that Hochschild had discovered a story I wrote here and on HuffPost and devoted three paragraphs to recounting it in the new Afterward.

!!!

But that’s not why I think you should read the updated version of the book. The author compares the status of working mothers around the time the book was first published to where we are now. Her conclusions are fascinating, heartbreaking, and important food for thought for any woman (or man) who cares about gender equality.

A few ways things have changed since 1975:

  • Far more mothers with children under age 3 work (from one-third to nearly two-thirds)
  • Men help more with the “second shift” of household and kid-related chores, but women still put in 5-7 hours more per week
  • Men still have more leisure time than their wives
  • Women still “feel more rushed” than their husbands

In other words, we’ve made progress since my mom was raising me, but we have a long way to go.

Hochschild says the women’s movement did a bang-up job empowering women to “stand equal to men”. But it failed to value the caring of others.

“Without our noticing, American capitalism over time embraced empowerment and sidetracked care. So in the absence of a countermovement, care has often become a hand-me-down job. Men hand it down to women. High-income women hand it to low-income women. Migrant workers who care for American children and elderly, hand the care of their own children and elderly to paid caregivers as well as grandmothers and aunts back in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico…[and those] at the end of the care chain pass child-care duties to oldest daughters. The big challenge in the years ahead–the challenge at the heart of this book–is to value and share the duties of caring for loved ones.”

What would it look like to value and share the caring of others?

Today, for most professionals–women and men–a full-time job means more than 40 hours per week. Many low-wage workers have to work more than one job just to get by–and studies show Americans work some of the longest hours in the developed world. You can have a perfectly equal marriage at home, but if you’re both working 40-plus hours, there simply isn’t enough time for the second shift.

How do we get that time back?

Having two working parents does not have to be at odds with our quality of life. Hochschild talks about Norway, which has both the highest rate of working mothers and the highest rate of child well-being. (The U.S. ranks a pitiful 20 out of 21 countries on child well-being, according to a 2007 UNESCO report.)

But Norway has built a society that supports both working moms and dads, with generous paid leave, subsidized childcare, and a 35-hour workweek. Meanwhile, we can’t even agree on whether the richest 1 percent of Americans should be taxed at the rate of Warren Buffet’s secretary, but I digress…

What do you think? How do we get our time back, so we can share that second shift?

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Speaking of how modern day couples and sharing the second shift, have you read about this survey:
Who Clips the Nails?

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I’m posting to this blog a few times per month.
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Advice you will never hear from a career counselor

by Katrina on January 31, 2012

Almost two years ago, I wrote my first blog post. As soon as it went live, I thought, I have quite possibly just ruined my entire life.

This was about a year after I went home sick from my job and then never went back. The whole experience still felt painfully raw. I was filled with shame for letting people down, for abandoning the career I’d worked so hard at. I didn’t know how to explain the fact that I was so completely burned out that it wasn’t a choice to stop working, it was a physical necessity. Like most professional women, I had always taken great pains to appear confident, together, in control, and I didn’t know where to begin with the truth. Instead I told people that I was “just really exhausted,” as if I needed a lot of sleep, not a year of medication and intense therapy.

During that year, in between the meds and the therapy, I did a lot of writing and reading and thinking. It became increasingly important, for reasons I will explain, that I share what I was writing about with others.

I thought about starting a blog, but realized all those people I worked with would probably find it. (Of course they would. They’re web consultants. They spend most of their time on the Internet.) They would lose any remaining respect for me. Or maybe even get angry, thinking my experience somehow reflected negatively on them.

And what about when I did start working again? What if potential new clients and coworkers read things I’d written and decided they didn’t want to work with me? I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get freelance work when I needed it.

By that time, I had realized that my nervous breakdown was not some isolated incident, or simply a flaw in my character. Trying to work full-time and raise three very young kids is terrifically hard for most people. The struggle to support a family and still have time to see them was the central angst of most of the women I knew.
I also knew, by then, that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of countries where women are guaranteed paid parental leave (actually, make that all developed countries except for the U.S.), and generous sick pay. There are many places where people are not expected to work punishingly long hours, where it’s the norm to take a month vacation in the summer, and where part time work is more abundant and less frowned upon than it is here.

But the biggest reason I decided to write about my experience is because I don’t think we can truly solve our problems until we understand them. What discussions of “work-life balance” usually leave out are the throbbing, chaotic, emotional realities of what life is like when you don’t have it.

I launched my blog in March 2010 and held my breath.

A few days later I got my first email from a former coworker. He thanked me for being so honest. He said that even though he didn’t have kids, he, too, was in an ongoing battle to keep work from kidnapping his life. Then I got a similar email from another former coworker. And then, one from a former client who told me he’d quit his job for the same reasons I had described.

Flash forward two years …

So far, 17 former coworkers or clients have contacted me through email, phone calls and blog comments to show their support for what I’m writing about. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is.

And so far, (knock on wood!), I’ve had a steady stream of freelance work coming in, which in this economy is something to be grateful for. If anyone has decided they don’t want to work with me because of the things I write about, well, I’ve been too busy to notice.

In fact, some of my more interesting job leads have come, not in spite of my blog, but because of it. One entrepreneur who runs a local agency practically stalked me with job offers after reading this Mother’s Day post. He, too, was struggling with how to keep work from swamping his life. Just the other day, I mentioned in a blog post that I was in between freelance contracts. Almost immediately, I got a Twitter message from someone I haven’t talked to in years. “I LOVE your blog!” she said. “I’m looking for freelancers. Interested?”

Career “experts” would tell you to never be as frank as I’ve been. They’d advise you to transform your nervous breakdown into a ‘sabbatical,’ or perhaps an ‘ethnographic study of the behavioral health care system’ — anything to hide the fact that you were not in complete control of your life at all times. But I didn’t follow that advice, and here’s what I’ve learned instead: When you speak open-heartedly, when you are authentic about your own experience, when you are honest about what went wrong, a lot of people will like you and want to work with you, even more than if you pretend to be floating sublimely above the messiness of your life.

I’ve worked at places that spent ridiculous sums on company retreats and internal “messaging campaigns” to get people to work together better. But imagine how workplace culture would be transformed if everyone decided to stop posturing, playing stupid turf wars, and desperately trying to look like flawless mannequins and instead inhabited their own humanity and the truth of their experience.

Last week I got a call from a recruiter. I frequently get calls from recruiters, so this one struck me as unusual. Instead of launching straight into his project pitch, he said something about being a new dad.

That’s odd, I thought, Recruiters never do that. But then he brought it up again a minute later.

It dawned on me that he’d been reading my blog. Rather than scaring him away, he was eager to find a way to work together. Soon we were deep in conversation about the sacrifices you make to be home with your kids.

You know what? That’s really cool. It’s really cool to be yourself in a job interview.

This is my career advice:

  • Stop pretending to be bulletproof, invincible, and perfect.
  • Stop pretending your personal time doesn’t matter.
  • Know your limits, and be honest about them.
  • Inhabit your own humanity at work, warts and all.

It will feel weird at first, but you will be giving permission for others to do the same. You might find that work becomes a healthier place to be.

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Cross-posted from the Huffington Post

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{ 20 comments }

Song for mid-week overwhelm

by Katrina on January 25, 2012

Ze Frank wrote this song for a fan who was swamped with anxiety and needed a song to help her calm down. It’s the perfect thing to listen to if you’re feeling overwhelmed. I found it through Monkey Mind Chronicles, but you can read the full story behind the song on Ze Frank’s site.

Any other calm-me-down song recommendations?

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Speaking of overwhelm, did you take the poll yet?

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What are you on?

by Katrina on January 19, 2012

A story in the New York Times caught my eye recently. The author questions whether we really live in “the age of anxiety” as it is often said.

Earlier eras might have been even more jittery than ours. Fourteenth-century Europe, for example, experienced devastating famines, waves of pillaging mercenaries, peasant revolts, religious turmoil and a plague that wiped out as much as half the population in four years.

OK. Fair enough. But then he points to modern day statistics like these:

  • 18% of American adults (40 million) are affected by anxiety disorders
  • 46 million prescriptions for Xanax (an anti-anxiety medication) were written in 2010

He also linked to these statistics by the National Institute of Mental Health, which I found really really interesting.

Here’s one of the graphics:

Notice that women are 60% more likely to suffer an anxiety disorder than men, and the age group who are most likely to suffer anxiety are those between 30-44 years old. You know, the years when we are raising young kids and still slogging through our work-a-day lives.

Hello! Can you say Working Mom Syndrome?

Yes, I know. There are many ways to interpret this data, but it made me wonder: Would these statistics be higher for women with young kids, particularly the ones who work full time?

So here’s a poll. Please take it, and share it with everyone you know. Then leave a comment below about your answer.

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Limping along

by Katrina on January 9, 2012

I can’t believe how crazy this time of year is, every year.

Intense work deadlines right before the holidays, during which I caught some new strain of Monster Cold that hung in there for over a month. It was so bad that at one point I lost my voice completely—I could not get any sound to emit from my vocal cords for about three days. I ended up running a 3-hour meeting with a client by WHISPERING. (Career tip: Losing your voice can work to your benefit. I think it actually gave me a more commanding presence. Very “Godfather.” Every time I whispered, everyone would fall silent and lean in.)

The day my project ended was my kids’ last day of school/preschool. I was home with them for 2+ weeks which was fun but intense in an entirely different way—play dates, art projects, park trips. You know the drill. My husband, who has been freelancing for 10+ years, recently took a full time JOB-job, so he had to work for much of that time… (Marriage tip: Take turns having “real” jobs or you will be in crisis during every school holiday and fight about who has to take the time off.)

Somehow we got it together for Christmas—presents, nice dinner, happy kids—and then suddenly it was Ruby’s birthday, which comes the week after Christmas, and always seems to catch us by surprise. By then Brian was back at work, so I tried a new Risky Mom Move: I asked Ruby to babysit her baby brother in the store while I bought her birthday presents. (Parenting tip: You CAN pull this off if your oldest child is 9, and the youngest has had his nap. Unfortunately, Jake missed the nap, so by the end of our shopping trip, I ran out of Candy Bribes, and he flung himself face down on the floor of Old Navy, sobbing.)

Now the kids are back in school, and I’m looking at all the things I have to catch up on—paying estimated taxes, bunch of things going on with my son’s preschool, lining up my next freelance project, planning Ruby’s big birthday party, a gazillion broken things around the house to be fixed. And as I look out at the calendar, I can see all these random days-off piling up—professional development days, MLK Day, etc. Also, Jake started coughing last night, which means the next round of winter colds is descending.

So I thought I’d revive the following story, which I originally posted around this time last year. Details are different, but otherwise, I could have written it this year.

How’s your year going so far?

* * *

Originally posted March 14, 2011:

Ruby on crutchesIf you’re a working parent and you feel like you’ve been running in place this year, it’s probably not your imagination.

Last week my daughter broke her ankle. It’s kind of a long story, but the central event involved a giant flying leap over a pile of backpacks on the school playground. Girls will be girls…

I’m trying to look on the bright side. For instance:

  1. Ruby is not in a lot of pain. Also, she’s thrilled that she gets to wear a cast for a month. All the second graders in her class think she’s exceedingly cool.
  2. At age 8, she’s the perfect size for breaking something. Just big enough to use the smallest pair of crutches her pediatrician could dig up. Just small enough to fit in her baby brother’s stroller, which is now Ruby’s makeshift wheelchair whenever her armpits hurt from the crutches.
  3. I’m not working full time.

Number 3 is a big deal.

I took this opportunity to add up the number of days either my husband or I have been home during a work day with kids.

In the first ten weeks of this year, we’ve missed 11 days of work due to school holidays or a sick kid. We’re not even through the first quarter yet. If the rest of the year is like this quarter, we’ll miss more than 40 days of work by the end of the year. How can that be?

When Brian and I both worked full time, every cough, every fever, every bout of stomach flu was a major crisis. Who’s going to stay home from work? What if the other kids get it? What if we get it? I had 6 paid sick days a year—generous considering half of American workers don’t have any. But it wasn’t close to covering all the days one of our kids was sick. Of course, I could always use my vacation time, but I needed that to cover the random holidays the kids had off from school.

My kids’ pediatrician explained to me once that children get 8-10 colds and fevers a year. What does that mean in sick days?

Let’s say on average your kid has to be home from school one day per illness (although some illnesses don’t require any missed days of school, while others can knock your kid out for a week, easy). That’s 9 days per year, per kid.

Let’s say you have two kids, and their 9 sick days a year overlap by a half. That means you need to take a good 13 or 14 days off a year to be home with a sick kid. That’s not including all the random “professional development days” and holidays that only school children and postal workers get (Cesar Chavez Day, anyone?). Nor does that number include the days when you, the parent, are sick. And no matter how many green smoothies you drink for breakfast, if you’re up all night with a sick kid, you’re bound to get whatever is keeping him awake.

At my last job, I almost never took a sick day when I was sick. This garnered sympathy from some of my coworkers, and the stink eye from others.

“Why are you exposing me to your germs?” they wanted to say.

And I wanted to reply, “I can’t afford to take a f***ing sick day for myself. I have three kids!”

My husband was one of those Americans who didn’t have any sick days. He was a freelancer, so any day he took off meant a day he didn’t get paid.

The pay wasn’t really our problem, though. Our main problem was that we had too much work to do, and couldn’t afford to get behind. So usually, when one of the kids was sick, we worked from home.

It was generous of my employer to let me do this, but let’s face it. It sucks to be fielding conference calls on mute while your kid is moaning from fever on the couch. It just does. You feel like you’re neglecting your kid when she needs you most, and you feel like you’re letting your coworkers down, too.

I used to do just about anything to avoid losing a sick day. I canceled play dates if the other kids had even the slightest cold. I cajoled my kids into drinking various herbal remedies at the first sniffle. And I’m not proud to admit it, but on more than one occasion I gave my kids Tylenol for their flushed cheeks and sent them to school anyway. I also had an alarming capacity for denial. That little fleck of something I saw in my kid’s hair wasn’t really a lice nit—probably just dandruff. Here’s your lunchbox, Sweetie!

I’m curious to hear how other people handle sick days. What do you do?

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* * *

Just for kicks, I went through the calendar to see how many days the kids have been out of school sick or for random holidays. It averages about 1 day/week for the first 10 weeks of this year:

Days our kids were home from school

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Win a free tagline or bio!

by Katrina on December 7, 2011

For those of you who run your own small business (or want to start one..?), check out this holiday giveaway by my friend Laura Scholes.

Laura is a many wonderful things, including a “solopreneur” who runs her own small business called StoryHouse Creative, a talented copywriter, a speed walker, and a working mom based in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you’re lucky enough to win, you can choose one of two services.

Here’s her description:

A Twinkling Tagline

You’ve got an amazing service or product, but its name alone isn’t enough to take the world by storm. You need an unforgettable tagline to give it oomph and sticking power.

What I’ll do
An in-depth call with you where we get to the core of who you really are, what makes you and your service unique, and how you’re going to change people’s lives.

What you’ll get
•Five soaring tagline options
•Help in picking the perfect one
•An MP3 of our call

If you were hiring me price: $350

-OR-

A Bright & Shiny Bio

If you’re the heart and soul of your business (president, bookkeeper, receptionist and everything in between), it is absolutely crucial to have an irresistible About page. People buy from people they like. I can make them like you by creating a real, compelling and totally you bio. (Read more on my take on what makes a good bio here.)

What I’ll do

An in-depth interview with you about your career, your beliefs, your accolades, your inspirations, and anything else that will make your bio sing.

What you’ll get

•A first-person bio that’s so good you’ll want to read over and over again to remind yourself how awesome you are

•An MP3 of our call

If you were hiring me price: $500

To “enter” just leave a comment on Laura’s site.

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I know, I know. I haven’t been posting much lately. I hope to pick up speed a bit when the holidays are over. If you want to stay in touch with the blog but don’t know when to check it, I invite you to connect in these ways…

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