Two years ago, when Fishy was about five months old, I went to a half-day mini-conference for women in business. There was a keynote speaker and a panel discussion followed by a series of one-on-one mentorship sessions that would last about five minutes each.
Perhaps I went into the conference with my ideas about what I need already formed, and that clouded my judgement of the advice I was given. But I felt like the advice I got wasn’t helpful, for me or for my family.
Mentor 1
The first woman I spoke with was the owner of an electrical repair company. She was the only woman owner in her industry in town at the time. I was excited to talk to her because on paper she seemed like a take-no-shit feminist who held her own in a male-dominated business. When I sat down, she repeated much of this story, telling me she had started her company when her kids were in elementary school, and she built it from the ground up.
I told her a bit about myself: I’m a content marketer and a writer. I have a five-month-old son. I’m in the middle of writing a novel, and I’m not sure if I should go out on my own as a freelance writer. It would give me more time to write, but I don’t love the hustle that comes with freelancing.
She listened and paused before responding. “You’re doing a lot. I think you’re doing too much. You have a baby. An infant. Slow down and take care of your son. That’s a full-time job on its own.”
I don’t remember much of the rest of the conversation, but my notes on the conversation are telling. “Focus on what matters. Simplify. Align with values—minimize those that don’t align.”
They’re nice sound bites. That advice feels intuitively correct. And maybe it is for some women. But what I remember from that conversation was that she told me to slow down.
Slow down? I had been living slowly for the past 14 months. I had taken it easy for my health and my son’s health. I had also spent the previous 30-something years trying to find a job that gave me the inspiration that I felt every time I got into a good writing flow.
I felt disappointed at the end of our time, but I told myself that it was just one woman’s opinion. I would meet with my next mentor in a few minutes.
Mentor 2
After a brief break, I sat down at the new mentor’s table. She was a solo business owner with a couple of kids. She also had started her business after her children were off to elementary school. I posed a new question: How do you find balance with family, creativity, and work?
Her advice was more concrete than what I got from Mentor 1. My notes say: “Plan and then replan. Keep work during the day. Cut it off. Boundaries. Get used to it.” Her advice was to work at work, then shut it off when I’m at home. Seems safe enough, but it still felt like something was missing.
I had another mentor to speak to, so maybe I would get some helpful advice there.
Mentor 3
The third mentor had some similar wisdom. Again from my notes: “2 most important for next year. Best you can be in those 2 things. Networking and opportunities--later. Simplify.”
There it was again. Simplify.
On the surface that advice feels right. If you can focus on one or two things, then you have priorities. You can ask, “Does this support my goals?” If it does, work hard at it. If it doesn’t, then you can excuse yourself from it.
But I don’t buy it.
All of that was sound advice, but it never resonated with me. I left that conference feeling hollow, like I had more questions than answers.
That’s probably because the advice they gave me was the opposite of what I stumbled into—and what works really well for me now.
Now, two years later, I have two kids. I work hard at my day job. I thoroughly enjoy eating breakfast at the table with my kids, eating dinner together after work, splashing and laughing during bath time, and spending sweet cuddly moments together at bedtime. I spend weekends playing with my kids and trying to scrounge out an hour or two to myself during nap time. But I’ve recently realized something that I missed out on earlier in my life.
There is time for everything.
There is time for me to write this newsletter once a week. There is time for me to throw a couple of bowls on my pottery wheel on the weekends. There is time for me to run 10 miles a week. There’s time for me to produce a podcast with a friend and write about marketing for a blog I respect. And all of this can happen outside of the time I devote to my job and my family.
What I’ve found is that the more I create, the more I want to create, and the easier it is for me to find time to create. My writing and editing and thinking and creativity across the many areas of my life feed on one another. When I slow down, the flywheel stops spinning. I lose my momentum, and so do all of my projects.
I’m very lucky that I can do these things because I have a partner who wants to share the childcare load and supports me in all of my creative pursuits. But I also know that if I didn’t have all of these other things going on, I would micromanage the household. I would try to make myself feel useful by putting the kids to bed every night, cleaning up after dinner, and making sure I did all the daycare transportation.
That’s not fair to me, the kids, or my partner. By narrowing my focus to my family and maybe one other project or job, I don’t get to live the fully realized life that I want to live. My kids don’t see that Mom can have lives outside of just being a mom.
And the little-discussed repercussion is that in the scenario where I slow down, my partner is also trapped in the working-dad provider role. He would feel pressure to keep a job even if it didn’t satisfy him. He may feel like having any identities outside of his work self would be detrimental to his career, and therefore not worth the risk.
Giving in to the social pressure to slow down, narrow our focus, and put the family at the center of every waking moment traps all of us.
So maybe we stop telling parents that they should slow down. Maybe we should encourage mothers to do the things that they want to do. By telling women to slow down and focus their attention on their kids for the first several years of their lives, we imply that women are responsible for primary childcare during that time. We imply that women should put themselves second to their children.
Those implications have deep cultural and economic ramifications: Women feel pressure to reduce work hours or quit their jobs. Men feel more pressure to pursue high-pay-high-stress positions to bear the financial responsibility in the family. The work, pay, and financial gender gap persists.
I don’t mean to say that we should tell women to do more. Many women are already doing enough, if not too much. Maybe what we should be doing is encouraging partners to share the work. Encouraging parents to continue to be human adult beings. Encourage them to show their children that they can have several identities.
We tell parents of young children to slow down
Thanks for sharing this. I was once you, and juggled, loved juggling different passions as well as be with my daughter, however, was often judged, and now my daughter is that young woman with a young child. She is a creative soul with her own online French classes, and is an animator. When she did give it all up for Violette, she was deeply sad. Now she has found a great balance and an energy, working all this out with her partner.