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April 6 - April 14, 2017
This isn’t just goodwill. Vodafone commissioned a report from auditing firm KPMG that showed that the money saved by retaining talent—by not losing good workers and having to search for and train new ones—would far outpace the cost of this new benefit. Globally, the report claims, businesses could actually save $19 billion per year by offering sixteen weeks of paid leave.
That was my rule, at home with the baby, at work with my colleagues, and wherever betwixt the two worlds met. If something would take five minutes or less, I’d do it right then and there and avoid the heavy psychic weight of a longer to-do list.
DECIDE WHAT’S SACRED.
GO HOLLYWOOD ON ’EM. If all else fails, just fake like you know what you’re doing.
EAT A FROG FOR BREAKFAST. That is, do the hardest thing on your list first.
STOP OVERPRODUCING. This one’s also from Jennifer, who calls herself a “time management ninja” (love that). “It’s so important to develop a filter of what really matters,”
DON’T WASTE TIME PRESOLVING PROBLEMS.
DECIDE EXACTLY HOW MUCH YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR BABY’S DAY.
PRIORITIZE FOOD. If you’re breastfeeding, I’d totally make this one of your three rules.
ALSO: PRIORITIZE FACE TIME…It’s really important, especially after your colleagues have been missing your face for three months.
Know that this transitional time is temporary, and it will hurt less. Every learning curve has an apex.
Simple but true: “Women’s perception of their work as rewarding” is the single biggest predictor of whether they’ll resume their employment. More than their occupation level. More than their education. More than their husband’s paycheck!
In the end, I found a very happy medium. I looked like I cared, but deep inside I knew that I didn’t care so much that I was neglecting my new sense of grand life priorities as a mother. It all added up to what I called my New Generous Minimum. It wasn’t “good enough”—it was just one notch above that. Because if doing something good enough makes you feel like you’re simply checking off a box, going even one tiny step beyond that makes you turn that check into a check-plus, and then you feel great.
If you gaze in the mirror before going back to work and suddenly feel like you look older, you’ll find this (scientific!) study interesting: Makeup makes you look four years younger. If you look in that mirror and worry at all about what your coworkers are going to think when they see you again for the first time, know this, too: Makeup has been shown to improve the first impression you make on people by 37 percent. (I’m not saying that’s fair. But apparently it’s true.)
Here’s the key: When it comes to fashion trends right now, you get a pass. You do not need to buy the Pantone color of the year or the new skirt shape. But when it comes to style? Absolutely yes, you can have great style without spending your baby’s fledgling college fund or mummifying your midsection in Spanx. It might even make you feel better at your job. Like it or not, “style matters,” says former Facebook exec Debra Bednar, “because the way we dress affects the way we think, the way we feel, the way we act, and the way people react to us.”
Here is your goal for the week before you go back to work: Create a mini-closet within your closet of pieces that fit and look good for work right now.
the easiest way to streamline your morning is for you to genuinely love, without reservation, every item in your clothing arsenal.
Sarah Serafin, a work-at-home mom and medical transcriptionist in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, describes this as “America ‘shoulding’ on new parents. Whenever I get on a mentally self-destructive kick,” she says, “I always think of an old favorite therapist saying to me, ‘Quit shoulding all over yourself.’ ” I love that and am adopting it immediately.
General consensus among the experts I talked to: You’re experiencing more than just the baby blues when it lasts more than two weeks and gets in the way of daily functioning.
Those two weeks don’t have to occur right after the birth. Postpartum issues can crop up months after birth, particularly during transitional times, like when you go back to work.
One more thing: All of this talking? All of this asking, what do I need, and is this normal? Let’s do it for one another, not just for ourselves. “We have to treat this as a public health problem, not just an individual one,” says Dr. Drake, who feels like we’re on the cusp of real progress. “We’ll all now talk to our friends about ‘Did I take off the baby weight?’—now we need to ask one another: ‘Do I seem okay? Do I seem like myself?
Prepare for the fact that you may have a short fuse, or get teary over something that might not have bothered you previously. Then when that exact thing happens, you’ll think: Right. I told myself this would happen. I must know myself well. So my plan will work, too.
VIA Survey online (viacharacter.org
So instead of giving you tips on how to get your baby to sleep, I hunted down expert, scientific advice about how to deal with sleep deprivation. You know who’s really good at that? The military.
Troxel has also studied sleep among couples and families, and she says the sleep challenges new parents face really are somewhat akin to those of soldiers at war. “You feel the weight of the world on your shoulders to protect this precious baby,” she says. “In some ways, this is similar to the experience of service members: There is a reduced opportunity for sleep, but the need to be constantly vigilant is overwhelming. The sleep deprivation and high-stress environment feed into each other.
GIVE YOURSELF FIFTEEN MINUTES OF WIND-DOWN TIME BEFORE BED.
DO NOT USE SCREENS DURING NIGHTTIME FEEDINGS.
STRATEGIZE NIGHTS WITH YOUR PARTNER.
These days, Shira is executive director of a major Jewish nonprofit, the 14th Street Y in New York City,
A shocking percentage of new moms, 87 percent, say that they experience feelings of isolation.
The irony of that story doesn’t even begin to compare with this one’s: Shira, the young rabbi, found herself desperate to pump while officiating at a winter funeral that had gone on far longer than expected, in twenty-degree weather. With nowhere to go and her breasts so full she felt close to vomiting, Shira holed up in a car in the snow, covering the windows with her coat. “My job was to bury someone when they needed to be buried, and that trumped my baby’s need for food, but eventually my physical need to relieve the pressure had taken over,” she says. “I remember calling my rabbi friend
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When in doubt, think, “save a bottle for dad” This one comes straight from my mom, “Doctor” Grandma Susan, and the takeaway is crucial even if the specifics don’t apply to your own circumstances. She made sure with all four of us Smith kids (three breastfed, one adopted and thus formula-fed) that our dad gave us at least one bottle a day from the very beginning.
Bringing Baby Home’s Pirak, she mentioned a study that the institute’s founder, John Gottman, had done about the relationship tasks that come up after a baby is born. “There were approximately three hundred additional tasks per day,” says Pirak. “If you were at work and your boss came in and said, Hey, we just acquired a new company, and you’re going to have three hundred additional tasks per day, the first thing that you would do is say, ‘I need help—and a raise!’ ”
Either way, the same takeaway applies. Know what you want, and ask him for it; don’t expect him to read your mind.
“I always encourage a frustrated mom to tune into what kind of support she wants from her partner and to communicate it really clearly,” says Sarah Best. “Because ‘I need you to help more’ is definitely a heartfelt plea, but it’s not particularly instructive. For one mom, it might be, ‘I need you to unload the dishwasher so I can get a little more sleep.’ For another, it might be, ‘I need you to sit and listen to me vent when I get home from work about what a terrible mom I feel like because I’m not with my baby during the day…and then I need you to tell me that I’m crazy to feel like a bad
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Here’s an easy rule of thumb: Whoever is better at something (or enjoys it more, or does it well enough) should do the task. If that leaves you with a wildly unbalanced list, start changing your definition of “well enough.”
Crucial side note: let him do it his way (and you do your stuff yours)
Work is a language two working parents have in common.
A whole slew of (now incredibly dated) studies from the 1980s and 1990s found that marital satisfaction was higher for men whose wives didn’t work after the birth of a child. La la la la, fingers in my ears, not listening!
If income were no issue at all, 58 percent of dads/partners wouldn’t want you to work at all during the first year of your baby’s life. And 50 percent guess that you feel the same way. In fact, the number one reason he thinks you went (or are going) back to work was because of your current or future income. (Your passion for what you do was a fairly distant second.)
To keep your relationship happy, you need to be able to acknowledge that this transition is temporary—and to see that distant, sparkling glimmer of why you first became a couple and why you want to continue to be one.
JAY R. SMITH’S ORDER OF LIFE PRIORITIES Take care of your country, after you take care of your community, after you take care of your friends, after you take care of your extended family, after you take care of your work, after you take care of your children, after you take care of your partner, after you take care of yourself.
Out-of-whack actually is the norm when you look at your life in tiny bites. But with a longer-term view, you can assess your attempts at prioritization (I will never call it “balance”) more clearly. It’s reassuring to see that you actually are doing “it all.
The answer? Let’s expand our definition of “me-time.” It encompasses a lot.
However you choose to define your me-time, get in the habit early on in your baby’s life. The payoff as they grow is significant—and not just for your own sanity. “I think showing my children that I set aside time that is just for me is very important,” says single mom of two Sarah Serafin,
Four factors significantly predict women’s adjustment to motherhood, research suggests: “Feeling unconditionally loved, feeling comforted when in distress, authenticity in relationships, and satisfaction with friendships.” Sure, a quality marriage can provide these things as well, but friends were key. Specifically mom friends made right after childbirth.
“The sympathetic nervous system is ‘fight or flight’—that’s the stress. Its counterpart, the parasympathetic nervous system, we call ‘feed and breed,’ so pleasure is how we counteract stress,
Of course you can and should make your boss aware of the law if there is no space for you, or if you’re being forced to pump in the bathroom: Section 4207 of the Affordable Care Act covers your rights (and even companies that have fewer than fifty employees are obligated to comply unless they can prove that it would be an “undue hardship”). One added complication: Only employees who qualify as nonexempt under the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) are covered. So if you’re management, and not paid hourly, federal law might not be on your side.
“Hopefully, long before anyone takes parental leave, you and your partner have had a conversation where you start to imagine your roles and what life looks like with a baby…and later on when you have a toddler, or a grade schooler,” says DeGroot, who likes to cite Stephen R. Covey’s message from his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “Begin with the end in mind.”
You’re using formula?! Your child is in daycare?! Your husband didn’t take a paternity leave?! You’re traveling so soon?! You put your baby to bed late just so you can see her?! People tend to speak at you in a lot of italics. Honestly, shame on them.
