Read an Excerpt
Introduction
As soon as I heard my husband’s shower running, I changed my mind.
I’d been up since 4:30 a.m., hanging out on the couch, having a much calmer early labor than I’d imagined. My water hadn’t broken, and the pain wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I’d felt just not-right enough to get out of bed, proud of myself for resisting the urge to nudge my sleeping spouse awake. Ben, who was finishing up his first year of medical residency at a big hospital nearby, worked hard. We both did. And I wasn’t about to pull the rookie move of waking him up just to watch me have one manageable contraction every twenty minutes. If these things even were contractions. Surely I’d have at least one round of false labor, I thought.
By the time Ben’s alarm went off at 6:15, I was pacing the floor, as much as one could pace in our little apartment.
“Definitely shower and go to work,” I told him breezily, as he gave me a hug and wrinkled his forehead, looking one part skeptical, two parts impressed. “I’m fine. It’s going to be so many hours.” I figured—if this was even real—I’d call him when things got interesting. I’d grab a cab, and he’d leave his department and meet me a couple of floors down at Labor and Delivery. Simple. Low-maintenance mother-to-be. That’s me. Plus, it was a Monday. I’d finished up my last day of work on Friday, spent the weekend getting organized like a maniac (nesting . . . right . . . that must have been nesting), and wanted at least half a day to sit around and do nothing for the first time since college. Maybe I’d go to a movie or watch all the junk TV I’d never had time for. I didn’t even know which channels were the junky ones.
My cervix had other plans. Over the course of Ben’s four-minute shower, I had two contractions. And as I leaned over the desk chair in the living room swaying my hips—in a way I’d never been comfortable doing on a dance floor—I changed my mind. We were having a baby. Today. Now.
On our way out the door, Ben grabbed the bag I’d so lovingly packed a full two months earlier: a blanket, a first little “going-home” outfit, our good camera, nursing bras, maternity yoga pants. We looked at each other, wide awake and thrilled. Here we go.
“Oh my God, wait!” I said as we buzzed for the elevator. “I forgot my folder!”
“Your folder?” he asked. “Why do you need a folder?”
I ran back in toward the bedroom, stopping to have another contraction leaning over that same chair—sway, sway, sway, done— and grabbed a yellow folder that held everything I would not want to be doing during my time in the hospital: insurance paperwork; maternity leave disability information from my employer, a big media company; and, yes, some actual work that I took with me from the office before tearfully hugging my boss at Glamour magazine goodbye on Friday. I’d do it in labor, I thought. Ha! There was a famous story inside my industry about a particularly She-Ra–like editor-in-chief who’d faxed back edited copy to the office minutes before pushing out her fifth child. My own boss’s boss had taken a quick two-week leave with her first child, and was photographed and interviewed by The New York Times (dressed in Miu Miu, in her beautiful Soho loft) just days after having her second baby. This was what women did, I thought. They balanced!
You know how the rest of this story goes. I did not do any actual work at the hospital.
What I did do was: have a pain freak-out, then an immediate epidural (I’d arrived at four centimeters dilated—still proud of that). From the hospital bed, I did a little bit of texting, a lot of moaning, and made a couple of elated high-on-the-epidural phone calls to friends and family—not the office—and then, finally, I gave birth. Easily, thankfully, with my awesome husband cheering for me harder than he’s ever even cheered for his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers. Our son was born. And with eyes nearly swollen shut and a face full of baby acne, he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. That work folder? It sat.
I brought the folder home from the hospital, and it sat some more. On a table right next to the bassinet, actually (like I said, small apartment). Eventually, it was covered up by piles of baby detritus: gifts, half-written thank-you notes, an unused Boppy. Still, it haunted me a bit every day. I knew it was there, a little time bomb, just ticking off the minutes until my twelve-week maternity leave would be over. Worried about money, I filled out the disability paperwork, then shoved everything else right back under that pile.
Our baby, Will, was six pounds of wonderful, but over those three months, I had what is kindly referred to as “a hard time.” He wouldn’t nurse well or soothe easily. He seemed so tiny; that “going-home” outfit I’d packed for him was miles too big. My body was torn up from top to bottom for weeks. I worried and had crazy, frightening thoughts. Young for parenthood—by NYC standards, anyway—I had no close friends who’d been through this yet. It took all I had just to stroll the carriage one block to the drugstore for diapers. A perfectly capable person, I’d made it through college, moved to New York City, broken into publishing, and was on leave from an executive-level position at one of the biggest magazines in the world. In my real life, my work life, I led an award-winning team of editors. I negotiated with celebrities (or, rather, with their “people,” which is harder). I won awards and got promoted and edited stories urging the women of America to live full lives and demand what they deserved at work, and to do it all in fabulous shoes, damn it.
And now, suddenly, simply crossing the street with my newborn baby gave me heart palpitations.
After a few days, Ben went back to work, and his life resumed some semblance of normalcy, except for the crazy wife who now greeted him desperately at the door when he arrived home. Used to be, I was the one who worked late.
I told everyone that Will was an easy baby, assuming the problem in this equation was me. When he was fussy I relied, appreciatively, on the bible of baby soothing, Dr. Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block. Dr. Karp advised swaddling, shushing, swinging, and a whole bunch of other S verbs meant to replicate the feeling of being in the womb. The first three months of a fullterm baby’s life, he explained, were actually premature. Because of the size of our brains and heads, human babies are born three months early and essentially have a “fourth trimester” outside of the womb. By around week twelve, the good doctor reassured me, my baby would start to wake up to the world. He’d laugh, hold his own head up, and look me in the eye and connect. He would be slightly less fragile and fussy, and maybe even start to sleep six hours in a row and nap at the same times every day. I just had to soldier on to week twelve.
Week twelve? The irony slapped me hard. That was exactly when I’d be going back to work.
***
And thus, the idea for this book was born right alongside my son. Sure enough, Dr. Karp was right. By about week eleven, the hormone clouds started to part over my head. I had loved my child from the beginning, but now he was giving something back. I experienced pure baby joy for the first time. And also, suddenly, work dread. I’d never disliked work, always loved the ladder climb and even the late nights. I adored the people I worked with: mostly women, a handful of cool, creative men. All so smart and funny. Incandescent personalities. These were people who preached the gospel of feminism and also gathered round the conference room TV together to watch the world debut of J. Lo’s twins.
But the thought of leaving my baby—who now, newsflash, loved me back—killed me. How could I trust this nanny I’d just hired? How could I possibly pump enough milk to feed my child? How would I not make an idiot of myself on the job running on only four hours of sleep a night? This going-back-to-work thing was going to be hard. Maybe even harder than what I’d just gotten through.
And if I—a person with a stellar partner, a decent-paying job, a fair boss, and a supportive work environment—felt this ambivalent about looming working motherhood, surely millions of other women did, too.
What I needed was what’s in this book.
(What I really needed, let’s be honest, was three more months at home with my baby. But that wasn’t an option because as the primary breadwinner back then, I also needed an income, and a career that didn’t move on without me.)
So instead: I needed camaraderie. I needed new ideas and solutions. I needed the actual words to have the conversations that were going to make this transitional period surmountable.
I needed to know that it really was just a transitional period, simply a Fifth Trimester.
***
As predicted, reentry was rough at first. I hardly recognized myself. I sat in the same office as before, with that same yellow folder of work poking out of the pocket of my breast-pump bag on my commute, but I was a changed person with new priorities, and a new identity. I saw myself differently now that I was a mother. I could tell that my colleagues saw me differently, too. I’d never, ever, ever been the kind of worker to “just get by,” and now that’s what I felt like on a good day. At the office, I mostly kept it together. But at home, I picked fights with my husband over little things that were really about one big thing: He didn’t feel as completely at the end of his rope as I did 24/7. I resented friends who made us all reservations for 9:00 p.m. dinners. On the phone, I worried my poor mother endlessly and only took her good advice after rejecting it, tearfully, first.
Thank God, it was all temporary. Just like my baby, this working mom had been simply thrown in over her head about three months too early. Maybe you’ve seen the pie charts friends post on Facebook about the United States’ maternity leave policies compared with the other nations in the world. It’s abysmal. In Croatia, women get more than thirteen months of paid leave. In the U.K., it’s fifty weeks, also largely paid, that you split up with your spouse. In France, workers are paid for at least sixteen weeks at 100 percent of their salaries. Even Japan—a country that employs people with sticks to smush commuters onto the crowded subways so they get to work on time—grants mothers fourteen weeks at 60 percent pay.
Here in the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to hold a job for you for twelve weeks (if you’ve been there longer than a year, and work full-time, and your company employs more than fifty people)—unpaid. Zero dollars. The only countries with lousier stats than America are Papua New Guinea and Suriname. (Oman, which used to be on this naughty list, recently got with the program.)
The reality is that stronger parental leave policies do not negatively impact the economy at all. Of the seventeen countries in the world with the highest consistent economic performance, the United States is the only one that doesn’t guarantee paid leave for new mothers. And the United States and Switzerland are the only ones of the bunch that don’t also have guaranteed paid paternity leave.
Why? Why do American parents get so little when 182 other countries around the world prioritize paid leave? We’re a young country, and we were founded on the American Dream: Work hard and move up fast so one generation laps the next. Don’t look back, don’t press pause. It’s not that different from how I felt working in magazines in my twenties. I worked insane hours, often until 2:00 a.m. at one start-up. As a twenty-two-year-old editorial assistant in 2001, my annual salary was $30,000, but I took home nearly double that thanks to overtime. It was an investment in my future, I thought, and I got a lot of experience very quickly and moved up and out to bigger jobs at bigger magazines. I didn’t realize back then that things actually would get less flexible as I advanced in my career.
The problem with U.S. maternity leave policies has become front-page news and talk show fodder as the situation gets more and more obviously wrong. More than half of mothers of infants under one year old are currently in the U.S. workforce. And as HBO’s John Oliver so perfectly put it in his 2015 Mother’s Day episode of Last Week Tonight, there’s “nothing we wouldn’t do for moms, apart from [this] one major thing.” In late 2013, and again in 2015, the Family Act, a bill led by New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, proposed twelve weeks off at two-thirds pay, financed by a minuscule 0.2 percent salary contribution to Social Security by all workers (to give you an idea, that would have been $60.00 of my editorial-assistant base salary annually). Sounds sensible, but it hasn’t passed yet. Representative Carolyn Maloney from New York has been proposing some form of a similar bill on the federal stage, regularly, doggedly, since 2000. And in the 2016 primaries, the issue burned bright. Bernie Sanders cosponsored the Family Act, Hillary Clinton called for paid leave and affordable childcare as key components of her campaign, and Marco Rubio proposed tax credits for companies that offer paid leave. The plans were debated, but the general consensus on both sides of the aisle was that something must be done . . . or, at least, as Donald Trump put it, “Certainly there are a lot of people discussing it.” But no dice, yet.
Meanwhile, that leaves the private companies out there to decide to do better than required for new moms; perhaps you work at one of them like I did. Even still, only 11 percent of American workers in the private sector are eligible for paid family leave.
A few companies, blessedly, bravely, are sticking their necks out extra far to redefine the norm by offering much more. The tech and big finance industries in particular—booming, competitive, healthy companies fighting to woo and keep the best and the brightest workers—have made enormous strides recently. And guess who runs those companies? Parents. Sons and daughters. People who get the importance of supporting the next generation of workers and thinkers—and the mothers who turned their bodies inside out to give them life. When Richard Branson announced in June 2015 that Virgin Management, a division of his Virgin empire, would extend the new shared parental leave, nearly every news outlet showed pictures of him with his own three grandbabies, all born within the previous year. “As a father and now a grandfather,” Branson blogged, “I know how magical the first year of a child’s life is, but also how much work it takes.” Hopefully soon that magic will be offered to the tens of thousands of Virgin employees who aren’t top executives, too.
In March 2015, Vodafone, a massive telecom conglomerate in thirty countries, changed its policy globally to grant a minimum of sixteen weeks paid maternity leave to women who would then return to thirty-hour workweeks (at 100 percent pay) for the first six months they’re back. 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.
And for those economists who argue that these kinds of “accommodations” ultimately harm women’s earning power and seniority—because businesses will be less likely to burden their budgets by hiring women—I offer up these two rebuttals:
1) Paid paternity leave. For every month of parental leave a father takes, a mother’s future earnings increase by almost 7 percent. And . . .
2) the sunny state of California, which began offering paid family leave in 2004. By 2010, 91 percent of businesses said that paid leave had a positive effect on profitability or no effect at all. And get this: Between 2007 and 2015 the percentage of women in director and highest-paid executive positions for companies based in California increased by 40 percent. To be clear, the percentage of women in those highest-level positions is still crap, at just over 12 percent (just under the national average), but the graph is headed northward, and fast. (It’s also worth noting here that longer maternity leave has been shown to increase job satisfaction.)
