The Lilith Blog

January 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Mommy Wars

When I decided to work part-time, I was convinced I was doing it for my kids. Isn’t it best for young children to have at least one parent present in their lives at least half of the time?

But let’s be honest. I wasn’t thinking only about my kids. (Let’s put the financial issues at play aside for this one – though they are critical). I was thinking about myself, torn in two, wanting everything. Wanting to be the kind of mother Marilyn Robinson describes in the first, breathless chapter of her first novel, “Housekeeping,” a mother whose bread is “tender and her jelly tart, and on rainy days [makes] cookies and applesauce…[and] in the summer [keeps] roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripen and the petals fall, [puts them] in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.” AND wanting to be the kind of woman who changes the world, makes a difference outside the home, pursues her dreams and realizes her potential. I’m trying keep up both fronts. And I’m exhausted.

“There now exists a nationwide ‘mommy war,’” writes Caitlin Flanagan, in her book “To Hell with All That,” “…between the working and nonworking mothers of the middle and upper classes.”

The people raising their eyebrows and analyzing my decision, judging it, are not my kids. They’re other moms; and we’re all judging each other: How can she work full time? Doesn’t she ever see her kids? And how can she stay at home all day? Doesn’t she go mad? And her. She’s stuck at “intermediate.” One foot here, one foot there – but never totally present in anything, never excellent.

Flanagan writes: “For many women the decision to abandon – to some extent – either their children or their work will always be the stuff of grinding anxiety and uncertainty, of indecision and regret.”

One of my colleagues at work, who has built her own successful consulting business and who has twin boys, now in their early twenties, never took any time off at all. She told me that she carries constantly an indelible, heart-braking image of her twins when they were young, their noses pressed against the window pane, watching her leave the house.

My mother, who completed med-school in three years at a time when women, and especially observant Jewish women, didn’t go into medicine, and who has worked as a physician all her life, says that she’s ready to retire into grandma-hood. Bring on the ballet lessons, finger painting, and cookie baking. And her friends, who stayed at home to raise their kids, driving them to ballet lessons and baking cookies, are now completing Ph.Ds and going back to law school.

Maybe it’s time for us women to celebrate the kaleidoscope of our choices. This may help the broader world do so. And let’s remember that our children, with their wide eyes and generous smiles, admire us, respect us, celebrate us, and love us, no matter what, and, especially, when we are fulfilled and happy. Let’s be as kind to one another, and, dare I suggest it, to ourselves.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 13, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Jet Lag

Each Wednesday evening, after my kids are in bed, I switch bags.

I take my wallet, cell phone, and keys out of my work bag, the bag with my business cards and train pass that I use during the beginning of the week, when I commute an hour each way to and from my office. I drop them ceremoniously into the bag I use the rest of the week, the one with the crumpled diapers and wipes, old pretzel crumbs, crayons, and teething toys, my “mommy” bag.

This ritual marks my transition from professional to mother, from one time zone to another, and sometimes, at random moments during my week, I suffer from jet lag. Which time zone am I in today? Staff meeting at 10? Or morning nap at 9:30? Lunch meeting at 12:30? But aren’t I picking up carpool at 1?

Jennifer Murphy, in an article for the National Post on how to beat jet lag, writes: “Despite opinions to the contrary, the biggest cause of jet lag is not the number of hours traveled, but the time zones. Experts say that changing time zones throws off the body’s circadian rhythms.”

I live in two radically different time zones, between which I commute on a regular basis. Help! Does anyone have a top ten list for curing the working mother’s jet lag???

In a piece about Caroline Kennedy in last week’s New York Times Magazine, Lisa Belkin, the author of the Times’ “Motherlode” blog, writes about how our society’s expected work trajectory is not conducive to mothers, many of whom jump off the fast-track and then have trouble getting back on. “Someday, perhaps” she speculates, “work will become more a lattice than a ladder – a path that allows for moving up, stepping down a notch or two, taking a few large sideways strides, making your way upward but not necessarily at a sprint.”
She got me thinking. Maybe this working mother’s jet lag is actually enriching. Maybe our lattices ARE our ladders, and, no matter how we decide to juggle our lives as mothers, we never “get off the ladder,” or even step down a notch or two. We’re always sprinting forward. It’s just that our ladders have different dimensions. They’re broader, wider, stretching, like Jacob’s, from earth to sky – and it’s hard to adjust their margins to fit them onto a resume.
The distinction between the time zones of “mother” and “professional” is, to some extent, artificial. Okay – so I sometimes show up at work with a coloring book instead of a notebook. But I bring the innumerable skills that I’m developing as a mother into my work life. And my life as a professional, similarly, impacts my experience as a mother.

So forget the melatonin. Bring on the jet lag.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 5, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

When I Grow Up

I was a Russian Language and Literature Major in college. When I look back at the arc of my life, it makes sense, but at the time, it felt random, different, and, therefore, cool. It had more of an effect on me than I anticipated; I started spending all of my breaks – long winters and summers – in the former Soviet country of Belarus, working for Jewish camps sponsored by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which seeks to reestablish and reinvigorate Jewish life in central and eastern Europe.

This was in the mid 1990s, and one winter, all of the stores were out of eggs. Another winter, on New Year’s Eve, it was brought to my attention as camp director that that the coal-shovelers, upon whom we were dependent for heat, were drunk. We didn’t have heat for two days. The American counselors zipped up their polar-fleeces; the Russian kids wore their woolen gloves inside the dining room, the smell of fresh-baked bulochki and the steam from the tea warming our cold noses and red cheeks.

One summer, somehow, I met my husband; we fell in love picking little red berries in the forests outside Minsk, widening our eyes at the swans in the lakes, which we half-joked were radioactive, and stealing glances at each other one late-afternoon, on the back of a horse-drawn wagon, the horse a new mother who’s foal trotted by her side. Then we had to bump along the dusty road of translating our love from Russian to English.

People would ask my mother what I was up to. “What’s her major,” they’d ask. “Russian,” my mother would answer. “Hmm.” Pause. “What does she want to be when she grows up?” “An immigrant,” my mom would answer.

Well, here I am, all grown up, a mother myself with two daughters. My Russian comes in very handy with my Russian-speaking babysitter. And I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, or how all my pieces fit together. But, immigrant-like, I am engaged daily in a constant dance of navigation, translation, and interpretation. Defining myself over and over. In this sphere – a mother. In that – a professional. In the other – a wife. But always – an independent woman, riding her bike, wind in her face. Speaker of different tongues. Changing, constantly, sometimes elegantly, sometimes clumsily, my accents, and, with them, my very self.