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round a walnut table in a small conference room of a rapidly growing electronics firm, a group of working mothers are gathered for a bag-lunch meeting. They are the “moms’ group” of a larger organization of women managers from the largest computer companies in Silicon Valley. Among themselves it is safe, it seems, to talk about the antifamily atmosphere of their workplaces, about the pull away from work at home, and about raising a small child. The subject of quitting first arises jokingly. “I might as well quit,” volunteers one mother of two in a jovial tone, “I’d probably turn into a mush brain and gain twenty pounds.” “What would we do staying home, if we didn’t have kids? Eat bonbons in the morning, work them off at the gym in the afternoon?” There is a round of easy laughter; if it weren’t for children, no one would want to stay home. But it is Ann Myerson, a thoughtful, tall, slender, red-haired thirty-four-year-old, and a highly paid vice president of a large firm, who first raises the issue of leaving her job in a serious way:
I’m on the verge of quitting. Right now my twelve-month-old daughter is very clingy as a result of an ear infection. She was colicky to begin with and now if I don’t hold her, she screams. I’m supposed to go on a business trip tomorrow, and I have a strong urge to say, “I’m not going.” I told my husband, but
I cant tell my boss my child’s sick. The worst thing I could possibly do is to acknowledge that my children have an impact on my life. Isn’t it ironic; Гт on the verge of quitting the company but I cant even tell my boss I don’t want to go on this trip because my child’s sick.
There is a round of sympathetic nods and no sign of surprise. “It’s all right to take time off to baby a client, just so long as it’s not your own child,” says a divorced mother of two. Another mother tells about the time her boss invited her and her husband for dinner: “I asked if I could bring my daughter, explaining she was quiet and would probably just sleep. He said no. He has a teenage daughter himself; he should know what it’s like to have a child. But I think his former wife brought her up.” Heads shook as if to say, “Boy, what a world.” After a pause, one woman commented, “I think they hand-pick management for their antifamily attitudes.” When I visited Ann at home, I met the Myersons’ oldest daughter, three-year-old Elizabeth, an outgoing child dressed in a ruffly skirt, with long red cuds and a bad cold. She quickly recruited me to a game of “cooking dinner”—chicken paprika. The Myersons’ second child, Nora, a twelve-month-old, was wideeyed and fuzzy-haired, toddling, falling and squealing with delight at her new walking legs. The phone rang: it was a woman who worked for Ann at the office. When Ann hung up she commented wryly, “Now that’s a sad story. That woman calls almost every other day, around dinnertime, or on Sundays, about something to do with work. Or else she catches me at work at five- thirty just when I’m packing up to leave. She’ll say: ‘Oh, I forgot you have to take care of your kids.’ She’s thirty. She’s single, no kids. I’ve asked her to stop calling me at home but she won’t. Maybe she cant. It’s annoying but it’s also sad.” Looking at her two young children, Ann said with feeling, “I would not trade my problems for hers.”
At the same time, caring for two small children and working
full time has become an unbearable strain. When I visited Ann at home one evening, Robert was away on a trip, as he usually was two or three days a week. Ann had raced in the door at 5:58, “because my baby-sitter turns into a witch at six.” Ann explained, “Sometimes I bargain with her, Til ask for sick leave on Thursday if you let me come home half an hour late this week/ But she works an eleven-hour day as it is, IVe had a series of disastrous baby-sitters, and I need to hold onto her.”
As Ann prepared dinner, she patiently addressed a series of slightly anxious requests from Elizabeth: “I need Kleenex. I want to take my leotards off. IVe pooped in my pants.” Since the last baby-sitter left, Elizabeth has begun acting like a baby again, soiling herself and waking at night. Ann said, “Last night I counted eight times. And the baby wakes up twice a night too.” Utterly exhausted at the end of her day, Ann only answered Elizabeths requests without initiating much play or talk. Not having seen her mother since 7:45 that morning, Elizabeth was especially sensitive to the fact that her mother was paying limited attention to her. The more Elizabeth sensed this, the more she thought of something to ask for: “I need a drink. This isn’t the right book.”
Ann was a gentle, loving mother and right now she was doing her best. But for the moment, she was only giving Elizabeth a promissory note of better things to come later. Their request — answer conversation reminded me of other end-of-the-day, emotionally thinned-out times when a tired mother hurried her eager children through their bath—“Quick. Quick. Let’s see who’s the first out!” Such moments reveal the emotional cost of fitting family life into a second shift in an era of social transition. Ann was looking for a way to avoid this cost.
Later, when the baby was asleep and Elizabeth was getting to stay up late in her bed, listening to a story on her tape recorder, Ann reflected: “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I don’t like what’s going on at home. My husband is terrific. He’s generous. He’s cooperative. I’ve had all the help money could buy. I’ve had
a fifteen-minute commute and it still hasn’t worked out. I feel like a failure. How do single mothers cope when someone with my advantages can’t?”
Over the past three years, Ann had tried nearly all the strategies working mothers use. She worked a 7:45 to 6:00 work day and then kept Elizabeth up until 8:30 to spend time with her (a supermom strategy). She’d turned over a great deal of care to the baby-sitter, reducing her notion of how much time her children needed with her or her husband (redefining ‘needs” at home). She’d cut back her mental commitment to work (cutting back work). She cut back time with old friends, seeing them only in the friendly chaos of children’s company (redefining personal needs). Even so, life couldn’t go on like this.
Yet it wasn’t easy to quit her job; her career had long been basic to her identity. A brilliant and hard-driving student, Ann had worked since she was fourteen, developed an ulcer by eighteen, and worked her way through college and graduate school by twenty-six. Work had been both a refuge from a lonely social life, and a source of great pride. So when she had taken maternity leave to have her first child, she felt suddenly uncomfortable at home. She mused, “Even though I had a newborn, I was still ashamed not to be working. Carpenters were remodeling the house. I had boxes of my mail delivered to my house because I didn’t want the construction workers to think I was just a housewife.”
Despite the importance of working, Ann had quit her job, by the time I visited her a month later, and without betraying to her employer that she needed time with her children. She explained: “I would lose every shred of credibility with my male colleagues if I told them I needed time with my children. In their world, needing time with children doesn’t count as a ‘real’ reason for any decision about your job. So I told them my husband got a more lucrative offer in Boston. They understood that. They said, ‘Oh, Boston. That sounds good.’”