The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Success After Baby

by Lauren Smith Brody

[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. —JIM HENSON

Your feelings are your feelings. I can’t argue with that; only you know what’s right for you. But your baby’s feelings are your baby’s as well. Let him have them.

Compounding the issue is the fact that “your caregiver knows significantly more than you do about your newest and most-prized possession, so you are learning from an employee,” says Andrea Olshan, mom of three and CEO of her family’s real estate business, Olshan Properties. Andrea learned to deal with this imbalance by thinking of how she’d handle a similar situation at work. “In business, you have to manage people who have a specific knowledge of something that you might not—but that doesn’t make you unqualified. For instance, I manage construction people. If they tell me we need to use a certain kind of more expensive concrete because the soil quality is poor, my instinct is to ask, ‘Well, did everything else built there need this same kind of concrete?’ You have to always remember, ‘I have common sense.’ ”

Being okay with it doesn’t mean that you’re giving it some big thumbs-up,” she explains. “It’s saying, this is where we are today and this is just what it’s like today.” It’s finite. Tomorrow (or tomorrow’s tomorrow) will be better.

VIMTs (Very Important Missed Things),

Admit what’s hard and brag about getting through it.

If you want something done well and fast and reasonably, give it to the busiest mom to do.

(Tell me: Is a baby’s sleep regression even a regression if the progression lasted only a week?)

But we are living in a massive, woman-wide epidemic of outsized expectations and minuscule resources that contributes heavily to the emotional distress of returning to work with a newborn.

“I wish that I had had more understanding that becoming a working mother was a creative problem to solve, but the problem to solve is not ‘How do I be a perfect mother?’ The problem to solve is ‘How do I maintain my emotional wellness?’ Get creative about it, talk to your friends and confidants, go to a counselor, brainstorm! Working mothers would never hesitate to have a meeting to talk about a project, or to bring in a consultant. It’s almost like working mothers put all this proactive creativity into their work life, and in our home life, we try to use a bad working model.”

Except for this one: □ THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU NEED. □ ASK FOR IT.

“In society now, we put so much pressure on women to bounce back, physically, obviously, but also mentally to get it together and move forward,” she says. “There’s a bit of intolerance of negative emotion. Give yourself permission to feel that in-between feeling.” And know that you’ll get past it, too.

“During the first couple of weeks, ask your caregiver to write down the timing of the bottles and the number of ounces,” instructs Cole. She should feed on demand, but if it’s 6:00 p.m. and you’re seven minutes away from home, most caregivers can hold a baby off—if they know that that’s what you want.

All any supervisor ever wants to know is that you have a plan that allows you to get your work done well. Now it’s your job to sell him or her on the specifics.

Be ruthlessly, almost cluelessly (but actually stealthily) transparent.

We are all C-level at home. Manage accordingly and give your employees the same flexibility of schedule and respect for their conscientiousness that you’d hope for from your boss.

It’s about giving each other the benefit of the doubt in the smaller moments, about getting past resentment, about realizing that your individual career and parenting goals have to matter to each other for you to succeed as a family.

Allow your partner the privilege and burden of being helpful.

Ask yourself this: If you allowed him to be more helpful with the logistics, wouldn’t that help your emotional well-being, too?

You haven’t changed. Your circumstances have.

Take the nurturing time. You can’t nurture and work simultaneously.

“You’re actually not supposed to know how to do all of this,” says Cedar. “Grant yourself that grace!”

“We call it a ‘work redesign,’ looking at your work to say, How could I do this work very effectively in a new way?” explains DeGroot. “You’re not asking for a favor. You’re saying here is a logical solution.”