The Anatomy of the High Powered Career

Are high-powered careers really what they are cut out to be? How mother-friendly is the working world?

Last month, I learned the hard way and I am still struggling to reconcile the managing a high-powered career with the demands of motherhood. I was so happy when I finally got a job, for 30 hours a week, at one of the most prominent boutique tax law firms in the state of California. Of course, I never did tell them I was a mother, or even married, for that matter. The truth did have to comeout inevitably when my one-year old daughter got a really bad cold and didn't sleep at night. As a result, I didn't sleep and the next day, I was not functional, even with three cups of coffee. In true Murphy's Law fashion, that was also the day a major Circuit Court Appellate brief was due, and to be informed that your new hire has a sick child at home was not news the firm took too lightly.

You see, even though I was only supposed to be working 30 hours a week, firms want to know that their young associates will be available indefinitely and at all hours. They want someone with no attachments who is devoted solely to the partners of the firm.

The result is that there just are not too many jobs in high powered careers which are condusive to the lifestyle of the working mom. It's not easy to be a mom and to work over 40 hours a week. The ideal would be the option to work part-time and have time for oneself but when starting out a career, these options are rare.

What's the solution, the, for women who wish to pursue high-powered careers? I see two possible options. One is for such women to spend their earlier years building their careers so that when they do have children, they are at a place in their careers where they are afforded the option to have a more relaxed schedule. These options are generally not available to those who are new and starting their careers, though. Thus, a woman would have to plan accordingly and spend at least three to five years building her career and then have her children. The result of this is that a woman would have to start thinking about having children a lot later in her thirties, since many of these careers only begin in the late twenties. And truth be told, it is much harder to raise children when one is in her late thirties than it is when one is in her twenties.

The second option would be to have her children early and then wait for the right job. Such jobs do exist, they are just few and far between.

I realize that this post may sound sexist to some who don't have children and may even lead them to ask "well, where is the father in all of this? Why must the mother be the one who is faced with career dilemma?". I, myself, would have asked such questions at one time before having children but the truth is that a mother deals with a separate set of emotions that the father does not deal with and a mother has a bond to her child that the father cannot begin to understand. The bonding that occurs during pregnancy and nursing is a strong bond that the mother shares with her child.

I always thought it would be so easy for me to leave my daughter in daycare. I have a husband who changes more diapers than I do when he is home and who never hesitates to eat out if there is no dinner on the table. I though I had it very easy. I found that it was really not the case. Even though he pulls his share of the weight in parenthood, I still found myself to have an inevitable bond with my daughter that he could not comprehend. Don't get me wrong, he loves her to bits. But he does not have as hard a time leaving her with his sisters or with the babysitter. I, on the other hand, sometimes feel like breaking into tears after I drop her off at daycare. I have strong feelings of guilt leaving her with my sister-in-law at bedtime, panicking that she would be frightened at bedtime if one of her parents did not place her in her crib.

In the end, I have foregone concerts, planning nights out with friends and have rushed home from class early, hoping that she has not already gone to bed by the time I came home.

The inevitable truth is that it is brutally hard to be a working mother, from a physical and an emotional perspective. To juggle the demands of career and family life demands flexibility and perhaps a change in the way we view our careers.