“This whole career thing is really at odds with being a new mother,” a woman said in the privacy of my office. New to my team, she had just returned from maternity leave after her first child and was juggling first-time motherhood and a new, demanding career that pushed her to work long hours and take long business trips away from her newborn. I knew she was right, but it was the first time in many years of management that I had heard it stated so succinctly and powerfully.
What I experienced that day was illuminating for both of us. For me as a male professional, it justified what I had so often thought when having other conversations with female coworkers navigating pregnancies and motherhood. For her as a young female professional, it was obvious that she felt a burden lifted and could admit what so many other female professionals seek so desperately to resist, deny, or control — namely, that modern careerism and motherhood are in deep, perhaps irreconcilable tension.
A Sympathetic Supervisor’s Constant Quandary
I’ve been in various supervisory positions for almost the entirety of my marriage. When we first married, my wife had her own career. But not long after the arrival of our first child, she traded that job for life as a stay-at-home mom. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that — playing the role of breadwinner was a lot for a twenty-something guy to contemplate, and in the back of my mind, I hoped my wife would, in time, reenter the workforce. Now that we have a litter of kids, her homeschooling and motherly duties far outpace the stress levels I could manage … and I work two jobs, usually clocking in about 70 hours per week!
Over those years, I’ve supervised a good number of women who are either pregnant or caring for a newborn. Because I know what it’s like to help a wife with a newborn, I’ve gotten a reputation as someone who is sympathetic to mothers’ experiences. And, as someone who is pro-family and pro-life, I try to foster a work environment that accommodates the needs of pregnant women and nursing mothers. But, admittedly, it’s never an easy fit.
I remember one woman under my supervision who, after her first child, was regularly trying to find a place to breast-pump. There was no nursing mother’s room, so she would try to find an empty conference room. Multiple times, other coworkers would interrupt her and apologetically explain that they needed the room for their meeting. I would advocate for her, but it was obvious coworkers bristled at adjusting their schedules to accommodate her pumping schedule.
Another time, I was asked to take on a new employee who had gotten pregnant (seemingly to the frustration of her management). She had been expected to do some long hours and even some extended travel, but as her due date approached, that was obviously impossible. What she interpreted (perhaps correctly) was that the baby in the womb was perceived not as something to be celebrated, but as an inconvenience to be managed.
When the Light Clicks for New Mothers
And, finally, there was the new mother I mentioned above. When she returned from maternity leave, we sat down to discuss job expectations. I told her I would do everything I could to shield her from long hours or travel, but it would be impossible to indefinitely postpone the inevitable. “They’re making me choose between my baby and this job,” she said, frustrated. Then she declared: “I’m going to be answerable to God for this child.”
I don’t think you necessarily need to be religious to appreciate her comment. The value of a child is so infinitely beyond the value of a job, and — despite her multiple degrees from prestigious programs — she perceived the unavoidable tension every mother avoids, denies, or tries to address with the latest “hack.” Indeed, there is a massive cottage industry of literature devoted to navigating motherhood and careerism.
There’s book-length advice on how to “baby proof your career,” how to “make motherhood work” with your career, how to “thrive” while being a working mother, and leveraging “prioritization” and “delegation” to be a “savvy working mom.” Regardless of how sophisticated that advice might be, it all confronts the inevitable fact that babies need their moms. And not just for weeks or a few months. They need them for years.
As political philosopher Harvey Mansfield argues in his new book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, true freedom is not defined solely by achieving rational control over ourselves and nature via the latest “life hack,” but by fleeing “back into the arms of God and nature.” Mansfield explains: “Perhaps the original mistake was to define an opposition between freedom and nature, which tried to compel us to escape what cannot be escaped.” That seems an apt description for women’s attempts to juggle parenthood and high-octane professions.
Careerism Is a Joy-Suck For Everyone, But It’s More Than That for Moms
No doubt, my role as a dad is essential to the well-being of my children. They need me, and they need me to be integrally involved in their lives, right from the beginning. Every time I take a business trip I feel the tension not only of leaving my tired and overwhelmed wife, but of missing out on being a daily source of love and stability for those children. I know they need their dad.
But for young children, the need for mom is amplified multiple times. Some of this is simple biology — babies need to be nursed. As female subordinates have told me, breast-pumping at work is soul-crushing, because it undermines mother-baby bonding. But that mother-baby relationship is also social and interpersonal — there’s mounds of anecdotal and research-based evidence that kids whose mothers are deeply invested in their early development do better across a host of categories.
That’s why, as much as I am happy to support working mothers and expectant mothers, there is a profound, inescapable conflict between their careers and their kids. They should be home with them, not navigating nursing mothers’ rooms, breast pumps, and debilitatingly expensive day care where strangers raise their kids.
This has nothing to do with the feminine ability to be a competent professional. But it has everything to do with what makes us most human. Being a new mother isn’t something to be technocratically managed, but to be honored for the beautiful, ennobling, and soul-enhancing experience it is. The career can wait. Your baby can’t.
