I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (33 page)

In hindsight I realized I’d made mistakes with each. But I learned something from those mistakes. I’ve also gained wisdom from watching colleagues and subordinates handle their own leaves—successfully or not.

My first piece of advice: before you even tell your boss your news, determine in your own mind how things should be handled in your absence. If you have a plan in place, one that you can quickly bring up after you’ve broken the news, it will diminish that internal “Oh, no” response that your boss is bound to have as you speak.

When should you tell your boss? Before you begin to show! Though all women are different, you generally start to show around the twelve-week mark. Your coworkers are on the lookout for baby bumps in the workplace almost as much as the paparazzi are at celebrity events, and trust me, someone will spot the change in your waistline if you wait too long. That will lead to gossip, and if your boss learns the news via the office grapevine rather than from you directly, she will feel totally blindsided. And don’t tell anyone else at work before you tell your boss. As I learned the hard way, you can’t count on people to keep the secret.

If you do need to wait until after you’re showing to tell your boss, there are ways to disguise your bump. The celebrity stylist Samantha McMillen says you should buy tops one size up so they won’t be tight on the bump but then make sure your pants are fitted or wear leggings. “Loose on top of loose just makes you look big all over,” she says. She thinks that in general dresses are best—especially ones with a tie at the waist to camouflage the protrusion. Also, a “fun big necklace or scarf draws the eyes up.”

When you feel the moment is right, grab private time with your boss—not when she’s super busy—and tell her the news. Express your happiness with the situation but quickly emphasize how committed you are to your job and that you have a solid plan for how things will run in your absence.

Many women choose to wait to break the news until they hear the results of the amniocentesis. The procedure can’t be done until you’re fifteen weeks pregnant, and then you must wait two weeks for results, which means you won’t be announcing your condition until you are more than four months pregnant. When you tell your boss you’re pregnant, you may want to explain that you didn’t want to break the news until you were sure everything was okay with the baby.

Whenever you announce, provide key details about your pregnancy: the due date, as well as anything else that’s critical. Women sometimes fail to offer important info (or else leak it out in dribs and drabs), partly, I think because they’re nervous about how a boss will respond. Sometimes, too, they assume that a boss should know the ins and outs of pregnancy when he or she simply does not. If you fail to divulge information in a timely way, it will make your boss feel even more hyper about the whole thing.

At one magazine, a key editor of mine who was expecting twins mentioned in passing that her last day in the office was just a few weeks away. “Wait, what do you mean?” I asked, totally baffled and panic-stricken. As far as I knew, she wasn’t due for three more months. She went on to explain that with twins, women often have to go on bed rest as early as five months. But I’d had no idea. Suddenly I was scrambling.

Once you go on leave, it’s important to try to maintain regular contact with your workplace, especially, of course, if you are in a major position. I think I made a stupid mistake by going cold turkey with my first leave. My boss, I could tell, was uncomfortable with my pregnancy and even made remarks such as “Oh, you’ll be so bored at home you may want to come back in a month.” I decided to disabuse her of this idea by having as little contact with the office as possible. But it would have been better for me to touch base with her and my department during my leave. I could have kept it to brief calls, and that would have reassured her.

But don’t get sucked into more contact than you should have. Set guidelines about the type of e-mails and calls you want to receive so you don’t have too many and they occur at times that are best for you. And if you pick up a hint that a nasty coworker is trying to poach your territory, remember what I said in part II about nipping bad behavior in the bud. Call the person on it. Say something such as “I hear you’ve been asking a lot of questions about the Stanton business. You may not be aware of it, but I’m overseeing that business on my leave. If you have any questions, please e-mail me.” The very fact that you’ve gotten wind of that person’s actions all the way from Babyville should give him or her pause.

Don’t be a martyr and do more work than necessary. Yes, people will have a bigger load in your absence, but there’s nothing wrong with having a baby and you shouldn’t be penalized. When I took the job as editor of
Working Woman
, the owner knew I was pregnant and told me that there was a “big enough orchestra to handle things” when I was gone. Since he’d reassured me, I should have asked for backup freelance help to make my leave more manageable.

Speaking of asking, don’t hesitate to try to do some negotiating for what’s best for you. Do you want four months off instead of three? If you think your workplace can handle it, go for it. Also, let me tell you a little secret. Though many companies have policies guaranteeing to cover your salary for only six weeks, some bosses manage to cut under-the-table deals for female staffers. If you have a good boss, there’s nothing wrong with hinting a little. (“Is that the best that can be done, do you think?”)

The best time to negotiate is early on, when your boss is worrying that you might not come back, not two weeks before you burst.

What if you decide during the leave that you prefer to be a stay-at-home mom for a while? That will make your boss pissed as hell because, in some cases, he will assume that you knew and didn’t say anything because you needed the health insurance coverage and workman’s comp. But it can be hard to know for sure what you want until you’re in the thick of it.

If you find you can’t bear to leave your baby, arrange to go in and talk to your boss as soon as you’ve made your decision, and don’t beat around the bush. An executive editor once called me a week before she was coming back from her maternity leave and asked if I’d ever consider making the (hugely demanding) job part-time. Huh? I wished she’d raised the issue much earlier. So cut to the chase. Explain how much you appreciate everything your boss did, but you didn’t know until it was time to return that it wasn’t going to work for you.

And you know what? I’d send a gift with a nice note thanking your boss for being understanding. That way you’ve done your best not to burn any bridges.

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My Kids Aren’t Serial Killers—Yet
 
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I
’m not going to lie: If you decide to combine motherhood with a successful career, there will be times when you are more bone tired and stressed than you have ever been in your life and there may even be moments when you wonder if you should toss in the towel and just take care of your kids. Or scale back. Trust me, I’ve been there. But due to the fact that my husband worked in a precarious business—TV news—I decided I couldn’t even consider an option such as becoming a freelance writer. I will be eternally grateful for the fact that I stayed on my career track, because it would have been tough to maneuver my way back on. Plus, now that my kids are young adults, I see how much they benefited from the fact that I worked.

We’ve gone through various stages as a culture in terms of how we view working mothers. In the 1970s and ’80s, the media often glamorized the concept; magazines did cover stories with titles such as “Having It All.” Then the media became fascinated with the supposed underbelly of the concept. Working mothers were pictured looking harried and wailing things such as “My baby likes our nanny more than me!”

Things have finally settled down a bit. So many mothers have no choice but to work these days and research has shown that children of working moms not only do okay they
thrive.
We’re more realistic, however, about the challenges and sacrifices. Most new mothers who plan to continue working have enough advance info to know that life with both kids and a job can be nutty at times.

One of our favorite family stories involves my son and the dentist. When he was about twelve, he started going to his cleanings alone and I was always delighted to learn from him that he had no cavities. When he was about eighteen, we discovered that he had never actually gone for all those cleanings (my husband and I had been too busy to notice that the charge had always been for a no-show). I nearly blew a gasket. I told Hunter he
had
to go in for a cleaning—I think I might have also threatened to not pay for his college education—and quickly made an appointment for him. When he returned home that night and recounted the experience, he made my husband and me howl with laughter. He explained how a wide-eyed dental assistant had guided him into a child-size examining chair, placed a small bib around him, and then asked if he wanted blueberry- or strawberry-flavored mouthwash. Without thinking, I had booked him with the same pediatric dentist he’d used as a child.

Laughing that hard helped me forgive myself for not being totally on top of his dental care. You will make mistakes. You will feel guilty. But you will get over it. Here are some strategies, most of which I learned from other working moms.

On the Job

If you want the work-family equation to make sense, you need to love your job. According to former
Working Mother
editor in chief Judsen Culbreth, study after study shows that the working mothers who are happiest are the ones who feel passionate about what they do.

You must also work (1) for a boss who doesn’t bust your chops about your need to balance and (2) in an overall work environment where the idea of bearing and taking care of offspring isn’t viewed as weird or annoying. A professional friend of mine told me recently that when she was employed by a very forward-thinking nonprofit company (you would recognize the name!), some of the moms who worked there in high-powered jobs always left their coats on another floor so that when they departed for the day, it wouldn’t be obvious. It can be draining to have to function that way or to work for a boss who doesn’t respect your situation. My advice, if that’s your situation, is to do what you can to find a more hospitable, mommy-friendly environment that lets you flourish professionally.

A week after I returned from my first maternity leave, my boss called me into her office and told me she didn’t want me leaving at five every day. Her attitude really worried me—she hadn’t even allowed me a week of adjustment—so I found a new job three months later. My new boss, a father of two, had no concern about when I left as long as my job was done right.

But sometimes even the most seemingly sympathetic bosses have only so much sympathy to spare. People you work for (or with) may secretly assume that you have less to give because you are doing the balancing act. You know that isn’t true, but avoid behavior that might inadvertently reinforce that view. Keep kid talk, kid pictures, and kid videos to a minimum at work. And I’m a firm believer in using statements such as “I have a doctor’s appointment” or “I need to leave at four thirty today,” rather than “I have to run my daughter to the pediatrician.” Be vague. Also, I forgive you here and now for any white lies you tell in the name of motherhood, okay?

Though you don’t have less to give in terms of talent and effort, you probably will have less to give in terms of time. If you have a baby or young child, you are going to want to arrive home at a reasonable hour most evenings. The one thing I will tell you with absolute surety is that no one will ever announce to you in a meeting, “Oh, my gosh, it’s five thirty. Don’t you have to get out of here?” So you have to take a deep breath and dare to set your own schedule. Yes, be cognizant of your boss but also of your
own
needs. Remind yourself that some of the people who clock long hours are there not because they have work to do but simply because everyone else is. Try to figure out the plan that will suit you best, and don’t feel bullied by offhanded comments or looks from coworkers.

How can you get your job done brilliantly and still manage to leave at a reasonable hour? Letena Lindsay, the head of L2 Public Relations, a mother of young twin boys, and one of the most fabulously pulled-together women I’ve ever worked with, says she learned her main survival strategy from a baby nurse who helped her for a few weeks after the boys were born. “My life was suddenly split into all these different facets,” she says, “and I wondered how I could handle everything. The baby nurse told me, ‘You have to work smart and not hard.’ That just stayed with me from the moment I heard it.”

So many working moms have told me that they became far more efficient when they had kids—and turned ruthless about their time. Take a look at what’s on your plate, and figure out what can be eliminated, delegated, or shortened time-wise. Lindsay says that in the PR world, clients are often given regular reports that list every voice mail message left on their behalf. That was something she unloaded. “I tell a new client that I appreciate the fact that other agencies do these kind of reports, but I don’t think it’s a good use of my time. I’d rather spend time focusing on getting coverage.”

And
do
work late sometimes. A colleague of mine told me that the best advice she acquired about going back to work after her child was born was not to become caught up in a rigid new schedule. “I worked a bit late one night a week,” she said. “And not always the same night. So there was never this sense of ‘Oh, she’s always out the door by six.’ ”

Of course, if you work for a business where it’s essential to put in maximum hours (i.e., a law firm), you have some deciding to do. Will you be okay with seeing your child a minimum amount of time on weekdays? Could you arrange to do your job part-time?

When you first return to work after maternity leave, your brain may feel a little fuzzy, but that will clear up soon enough. Try not to coast. Look fully engaged, even if you have to kind of fake it. Review the tips in “Beware of Sudden Promotion Syndrome.”