Spoiler alert, ladies: If you’re not exhausted, you’re not doing it right

Anyone can be a kick-ass working mom a la Sheryl K. Sandberg.  Just drop the Martha Stewart-suggestions for hand-made toilet paper, agree to stop competing for the “harder working spouse” title against your husband and be prepared for total & utter fatigue.

Yes, after biting my tongue for the last two weeks, this is my official response to the flurry of “Women-pull-up-your-bootstraps-marry-a-good-mate-bear-children-break-the-glass-ceiling” discussions running rampant around Facebook IPO news (you can only keep an alcoholic out of the bar for so long…)  Oh wait.  Those discussions have been running rampant around every “female near business” news story I’ve read since graduating from an all-girls highschool.  The hairstyle is different but the sentiment is the same.   The only real difference now… I order my drink straight-up and without an umbrella.

If you want to have it all, prepare to be tired and overwhelmed.

___________________

Oh look.  I just realized my title is a double-entendre.  Ha!  That’s funny, except when you think about it in a working mom kind of way.  Exhaustive sex & working mom life go together like peanut butter and cashmere.  But I so digress.

Back to my main point.

___________________

1.)  Who is Sheryl K. Sandberg?

I first learned about SKS last July in a detailed New Yorker article.  She’s the charismatic, smart, accessible, soon-to-be-billionaire COO of Facebook.  She’s a mom to two young children.  She’s an advocate for working women, especially in leadership positions.  Her 2010 TED speech has 1,000,000+ views.  Her opinions on getting “women to the table” and balancing work and family are both cult-able and divisive.  She is the current spokeswoman for the female executive with kids.  Love her or hate her, women should know her name.

2.)  The Simple Truth About Working Moms

It’s hard to be a woman.  Same way it’s hard to be a man.  It’s hard to be a productive, involved human-being — let alone a successful, attractive middle-aged one (that’s why plastic surgery exists… but again, I so digress).  The simple truth is that everyone has it tough.  No one is getting off easy.

This weekend, my husband and I duked it out on who does more juggling work and family.  I do the grocery shopping on Sunday nights and he makes the coffee every weekday morning.  I conduct conference calls at 8 pm (after the kids go to bed) and he responds to business emails at 5 am (before the kids wake up).  I pack the lunches.  He loads the dishwasher.   I check-in with the teachers.  He checks in with the stockbroker.  Neither one of us gets enough exercise or haircuts or compliments.   And we’re successful.  We’re in the upper 1%, we have a housekeeper who does the laundry and we send our kids to private school where we know they are getting a good education.  Yet, we feel guilty that we don’t spend enough quality time with the kids, we are stressed about the overflowing inbox that didn’t get completed today, we are annoyed that the other one didn’t bring in the mail, we wish we had more time as a couple (our love-life would be totally bereft without our nightly menage-a-trois with Jon Stewart) and we often bemoan the loss of our social life (who has the energy to go out on a Friday night for drinks with friends?)

Being a working mom means the score is even.  Everyone is stressed.  Everyone is exhausted.  Did you really think it would come easy?

3.)  The Complicated Truth of Stay-At-Home Moms

Sure, I have days when I think, “In my next life, I’m coming back as a man of the establishment married to me.”  That’s the gig.  All the freedom of being a man at the top of the pyramid with a woman like me running my house and family?!  I could then leave for my penthouse office with the calm certainty that my children were in the most capable, intelligent, caring-yet-firm, creative-yet-organized, playful-yet-mature hands.  You see, I’m hugely egotistical that no one could do a better job than me raising my kids.  That’s part of the problem that SKS doesn’t address.  If you’re a woman ambitious with her career, chances are you’re ambitious with your child-rearing.

I don’t have any solutions on how to juggle the two.  Truth is, I think I suffered low-level depression over the last 8 years of full-time stay-at-home momming and now, I am suffering from wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night stress of a business start-up.  Life is a catch-22.  Nothing comes easy.  I used to harbor resentment that my husband had a growing career while I excelled at block-and-crayon management and now, I harbor fears that my children are suffering from chicken-nugget overdoses & outsourced babysitter bus pick-ups.  Yes, I have all the responsibilities of running a business AND all of the responsibilities of raising two kids.  But so does my husband.  He might not be the one who’s buying the uniforms or making the cupcakes for the bake sale, but he’s explaining the concepts of electrons at breakfast and reading the stories at bedtime.

I’m happy that SKS has gone big and it’s great that she’s talking so openly about her experience.  I just think the discussion is getting bogged down in semantics.  Rich or poor.  Male or female.  Working or not-working.  Having a family is a HUGE responsibility that takes time and resources.  Having a big career is a HUGE stress that takes energy and focus.  Both require sacrifice.  Both require supportive spouses. Both require getting out there and being tired.  Is any of this really new news?

4.) The short rant about Martha Stewart

No blog post about moms in the boardroom would be complete without a mention of Martha Stewart.  In order to juggle the demands of  a working mom’s life, all reference and knowledge of Martha Stewart needs to be expunged from the cerebral cortex.  Otherwise, the burden of “pretty-ifying” life threatens the entire species.  It is impossible to make cupcakes that look like ladybugs, wrap christmas presents with hand-stamped papers, disinfect your bathtub with hand-squeezed lemon juice, and throw a Superbowl party with homegrown heirloom tomato salsa AND raise two kids AND get the VP promotion AND have a meaningful marriage.  Something has to give.  I love that Martha Stewart was a working Mom and a successful entrepreneur but if you look closely at Sheryl Sandberg’s many speeches, she never once shares a recipe for shaping a shrimp skewer into an origami swan.

I’m just saying… women can have it all but you have to be very careful how you define “all.”

Christmas Lights In January

My “New & Improved” 2012 desktop

I’ve become that house.  The one that still has its Christmas lights hanging on January 20th.  Actually, I’ve become that woman.  The one who appears to be operating under the direction of a water-soaked manual.  This morning, I drove the kids to the bus-stop wearing my pajamas.  Threw on a pair of sneakers and my husband’s sweatshirt and a gathered my hair in a pony-tail, as if I was going to workout.  Let’s be clear here.  The only “Breakfast of Champions” occurring in my life is two cups of a coffee and a multi-vitamin.  The vitamin, I usually defer until lunch.

For as long as I can remember, I criticized others who didn’t run their lives orderly.   Yes.  I was totally arrogant and dismissive of those who couldn’t manage the details of their family life in an elegant, organized fashion.  Kid bikes strewn around the front yard?  Line them up in descending order of size along the driveway’s edge.  Not sure what to serve for dinner?  Pound some cage-free poultry and schnitzel that breast with organic breadcrumbs.  Have a kid’s birthday party to attend on the weekend?  Shop a week early for a theme-gift.  Garage overflowing with camping gear, thrift-shop giveaways, beach toys and baby keepsakes (you know, memories to pass on your future grandchildren)?  Buy some Sterlite 64 gallon boxes, grab your label maker and line them up alphabetically along the rafter shelf.

Yes.  It’s true.

I used to be that woman.

How things have changed since I’ve started Totefish.   There are NOT enough hours in the day to start a company, raise a family and organize life to the standards of the DIY network (or any Martha Stewart-inspired website designed with a letter-pressed, lower-case font).  The challenges of balancing work and family are difficult enough without keeping to a standard that is picture-ready, magazine-worthy and presentable to visitors who drop in unannounced.  Thankfully, the tradition of “I just dropped by because I was in the neighborhood” doesn’t exist in our neck of Los Angeles.

There are hand-smudges on every wall.  Shoes are strewn under most couches.  Piles of laundered clothes rest not in drawers but on side-tables, so close – but yet too far – from their home in the closet.  The freezer is stocked with chicken nuggets and tater tots.  The Netflix movie hasn’t been returned in over two months.  I can’t see the bottom on my inbox (let alone the wood surface of my desk).   The paint is peeling on the wooden house shingles.  A badminton birdie is wedged in the storm drain.  Dive toys litter the bottom of the deep end of the pool (leftover from an unseasonably warm weekend in November).  The front-porch light is burned out.   An undelivered Christmas present sits on the floor of the passenger car seat (it’s for the owner of the dry-cleaner…)   Things just aren’t pretty anymore.

My life has taken a new turn.  In the past, I concentrated on either just work (in my post-college years) or just family (for the last eight years).  But now, I have two priorities — Family & Work.  The tension is there and the struggle for balance is constant.  The only way to accomplish it is by letting go of everything else.

So, I apologize to all those people who I so callously dismissed as lazy, unorganized, unfocused or mis-managed… and I join them in letting the lights hang.  Sure, I can “have it all” so long as “all” no longer includes hand-made party invitations, book shelves arranged by the colors of the rainbow or customized photo books highlighting each family vacation.  How’s that for a New Years resolution, 20 days into the fray?!

Now, I’m got to get back to work on Totefish ’cause in a few hours, I’ll have to change out of these ‘jams and pick up the kids from school.