Epilogue

So I did find a job. (And good thing I didn't post while hunting because it was not pretty!)

And I did return to IM. (Corporate work, what was I thinking? 6 weeks at a well funded "start-up" put things in perspective.)

And I love Seattle! (It's my people out here.)

So I do have unfortunately early hours but I get paid nicely to sit around and think on the top floor of a downtown skyscraper with a view of the sound. Not bad. I'll take it.

And I do think Booth helped me come into my own as an old school fundamental investor. I do see a difference from pre-MBA. So the regrets are subsiding.

The kids are awesome ... absolute joy of my life.

I hope you all are well ... if anyone's checking.

To bed with me. Happy Friday.

So what did I want?

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others ... -W.E.B. Du Bois

During my time at Booth, in person and on this blog, I talked about the need for more resources and support for female student parents which sounds more burdensome than warranted. Really what I wanted and what I think many women in business want is normalization, which is simultaneously very simple and very challenging.

I unfortunately got off to a very bad start with the school because of my need to accommodate my newborn during LOE and as a result my first 48 hours at the school left me feeling unwanted, distrustful and not at all "normal". I did receive an apology but my sense of abnormality mounted as the school year progressed and the distaste for the childed among some classmates and staff became more apparent. (Consider my interview for a leadership position with CWiB in which I was asked whether I could handle the role given the fact that I had a child … oh, the irony.) Some students were lovely, others were oddly clueless (consider the first-year who asked me how long pregnancy lasted - 6 months, he ventured. I wish! I laughed. Then he went on to tell me about his 11 month old son … errr …) and some were downright mean. The worst came during my second year when I was pregnant. The incessant, often scathing comments about my girth were exhausting. On the one hand, it would have been strange to have no one comment on the fact that I was pregnant, on the other hand, that my entire existence revolved around my uterus was depressing. I just wanted to blend in.

Toward the end of my second year it occurred to me that this matter was not just about my experience as a student but also the experience of the future colleagues and employees of my more clueless or mean classmates. Why should a significant portion of the world's "future leaders" be so ignorant/disdainful of one of life's most fundamental experiences? And furthermore, as an employer itself, why wasn't Booth modelling better human resource practices? (That the school did not think to include a lactation room or provide childcare resources is understandable given the low number of female students with children but then I realized there were plenty of employees with children!)

It is a man's world. I say this without ill will - it has historically made sense to be so. But making it a human being's world requires more than just adding women to the mix and expecting men and childless women to understand the practical reality of birthing and bearing babies.

As I've said before, the only important difference between men and women is babies. All the other alleged differences are trivial. The baby factor affects all women, even if they never have children, as it weeds women out of the public realm. Accommodating women and their wayward uteruses (uteri?) is not about entering a new touchy feely world or lowering the bar, it's about finding clever ways to overcome the inescapable physical burden of motherhood. My pet theory is that women are more risk adverse than men because to possess a uterus is to live in a world of tremendous uncertainty. You have no idea when or if you will become pregnant, how the pregnancy will fare or how long it will last. You have no idea when labor will strike and how it will progress. Will breastfeeding come easily or become a nightmare? How will post-partum recovery evolve? How will your newborn take to the world? And god forbid you become pregnant unintentionally. Taking big career or financial risks is far more dangerous with these realities looming over your head.

I happened to run into a woman who had graduated from law school at BYU (yes, Mormons) and was in Chicago while her husband finished law school at the UoC. Consider these radical measures that BYU took to accommodate their female students. Women could bring a sleeping baby to class. They could request in advance videotapes of any class that would be missed or an audiotape of a class after the fact. If needed, they could come to campus and watch class live in a special family room while nursing or playing with their baby. These family rooms were study rooms with priority given to students (male or female) with children. Let's say you were in class with a sleeping baby which suddenly woke? Just leave class and head to the nearest family room and watch the class on t.v. Compare those attitudes to the experience of a female Booth student who received a lot of snide comments after her baby cried in the Winter Garden.

So what can/should business schools do?

1. Drop the excuses - telling female students that you've never had to deal with the child thing before insulting and irrelevant. Well, now you are.
   
2. Get real feedback. Don't just listen to the women who tell you everything is going great and groovy. Find the women who are pissed.
3. Be radical! Be creative. Tell recruiters who give a pregnant student a hard time to go to hell. (Not, oh that's none of our business.) Tell staff who trivialize a new mom's needs to shape up or ship out. Tell women's groups who over politicize motherhood that they're no longer needed. Let women hear from all the women out there doing baby + work. Reassure women that their physical needs come before recruiters' needs or professors' needs or classmates needs'. Set up a proper mother's room already. Include families!! Help figure out childcare. Provide recordings of missed classes. Etcetera! (Do some brainstorming already.)
   
4. And don't trivialize this - it's not a Mommy MBA already.
5. Women have babies - it's normal. Now act like it is.

What everyone should know about breastfeeding

Try the following experiment:

1. Set an alarm clock to ring every 2-4 hours around the clock.
2. If you are at home when your alarm clock rings, stop what you are doing and a sit down for 15-30 minutes, pretending to have a small human being attached to your bosom.
3. If you are not at home, find somewhere private where you can sit down for 15-30 minutes, pretending to have a whirring plastic contraption attached to your bosom (which you keep with you at all times outside of the house.)
4. Repeat for about a year or so …

Hanna Rosin's The Case Against Breastfeeding in last April's Atlantic raised a lot of hackles. I read it and cried.

As I've alluded to in prior posts, the biggest shock for me about motherhood was how much I HATED breastfeeding … and, most of all, pumping. And how long I stuck with it anyway. Formula seems like a paltry substitute (physically and emotionally) for the real thing, but I wish that someone had given me the heads up that if you are planning to leave the house before your child's first birthday - breastfeeding is an incredible pain in the ass. It just is. Rosin's article captured my mixed feelings perfectly.

So if you are ever planning to bear babies, work with someone who bears babies or marry someone who bears babies, here is what you should know:

• Lactation consultants (yes, I too snickered at first), use them soon and use them often!
  
• Mothers are not milk on tap. This means, sans baby, often milk will not come out when you want it to and milk will come out when you don't want it to.
  
• Milk supply may plummet unexpectedly.
  
• Lactating breasts do not sleep.
• God forbid you leave the house and forget your breast pump. Do. Not. Let. This. Happen. … Ever.
• Breastpads! Keep 'em handy but Kleenex can work in a pinch.
• Milk is perishable and bulky. Your pump is bulky and may require electricity. Logistics matter!
• (As someone who spent virtually all her pumping life standing around in bathroom stalls) "Mother's Rooms" are not a luxury, they are the humane way to treat employees!
• Working and breastfeeding is easiest done by the organized and informed. You are now informed.

Baby Love (The Two Year Transformation)

So interestingly, it appears that my "Working vs. Stay at Home Mom Myth" entry (written mid-way through my first year) is one of my more popular posts. And though I might come across as quite certain and resolute, these sort of posts are in a way a pep-talk to myself to counterbalance my uncertainty and lack of resoluteness. In fact, the recent flurry of "mom" posts are an attempt to acknowledge more of my internal struggle and relax some of the cheerleading I forced myself into over the past two years lest I discourage anyone from taking a similar path.

The last Bertrand study tidbit I'd like to share is the finding that women's workforce participation dropped off not immediately after childbirth but about two years later. Fascinating. In my experience it takes about two years for the denial to wear off. Initially, the memory of your childless self is fresh in your mind. You're just waiting to "get back to normal". And then month by month, as you forget what it's like to be able to leave the house on a whim, or lose yourself in a thought for five hours uninterrupted, the permanence of the new arrangement becomes undeniable. Maybe you begin to like parenting more or start to allow yourself to hate your job more or just feel resigned to a new existence. But what does a woman with a 9 month old know about working motherhood? Not much frankly. And while I found my summer internship schedule a complete relief compared to the 24 hour slog of being in school, getting a bad grade is not really comparable to being wrong on a big trade. So I understand the limitations of my perspective over the past two years.

Interestingly, I find that I am enjoying Baby X's new babyness much more than I did the first time around. She is an easier baby I think, but mostly I am just a better parent. Parenting is a skill and having some recent experience makes a huge difference in my state of mind. So that's lovely. The thought that this is my last baby ever is very sad for me. Although these days the thought of parenting more than two babes gives me hives.

And then there is the baby love. With Y's absence, Baby Y is turning the full force of his affections on me. In every moment that I am not breastfeeding or diapering #2, I am either consoling or applauding #1. Our neat and tidy 30 minute bedtime routine (usually performed by Y and followed by a 11 hour respite) has turned into a 2.5 hour soap opera, followed by an encore at about 1:00 a.m. and another at 5:30 a.m. It's exhausting but their adoration is undeniably endearing as well.

p.s. I randomly discovered Jonniker's blog who, in turn, sent me over to the following heartbreaking blogs (here and here) which remind me in my moments of feeling completely overwhelmed with packing and preparing to move 2,000 miles and job hunting and momming two babies sans hubby that I don't have much to complain about

Female Machismo

(Apparently there is no good feminine corollary for machismo, for better or worse.)

Three stories.

Story Number One:

When I was pregnant with Baby Y a supervisor, upon learning that I was a just say no to drugs in childbirth kind of lady remarked, You know, you don't have to prove anything. (His wife apparently had a similar idea with her #1 and then gratefully went for the epidural with #2 and #3.) Frankly, the side effects ("disadvantages") of an epidural scare me more than the contractions.

But then, once Baby Y was born, I had to be honest with myself. I wanted to prove something to myself! I like to think that very little in ordinary life can break me and wanted to put that theory to the test. (Life 0, MaybeMBA 2)

Story Number Two:

Typical conversation with stay-at-home moms (particularly the wives of classmates ... no offense to the lovely partners I have met).

Her: I don't know how you do it!
Me: Oh, I have lots of help. It's not too bad.
Her: I could never do that!
Me: ... [well, you could ...]

Story Number Three:

While searching online for a completely unrelated subject, I came across a BabyCenter forum thread venting about the smug superiority of women who birth "naturally". As if luck were just the differentiating factor ...

The Point:

Don't forget to distinguish between can and want. While I firmly believe that it is highly improbably that women will ever be fully represented in all portions of public life, this does not mean that you, dear blog reader, cannot achieve extraordinary things on the professional and personal front. Women will not be fully represented in public life because they do not want to. (My earlier post was to explain why this was quite reasonable.)

Bertand found (no, I'm not quite done with this study yet!) that the labor supply of women with higher earning spouses was more flexible in response to the birth of children than that of women with lower earning spouses. Intriguing ...*

You can "have it all" but you might not want to.
It's a choice.

Human beings are designed to prefer the path of least resistance. Almost every woman (there are genuine exceptions to the rule but they are a true minority) can give birth naturally, but most (in this country, at least) do not want to.** Same thing can be said of parental labor force participation.


*Her initial interpretation was that this indicated lack of discrimination as it seemed inconceivable that employers would be discriminating more against women based on spousal earnings. However, many of us were pleased to hear her acknowledge in a Becker lunch, that this could reflect the fact that women with higher earning spouses had more choice in response to discriminatory attitudes/practices and could more easily drop out of the labor force to get away from it.
**It's my understanding that epidurals are used quite rarely in most parts of the world, including countries which suffer no lack of babies being born ... and mothers surviving the experience.

Just to be clear

I was reflecting on my last post and wanted to reiterate that my thoughts about women's opportunities in working life are from the perspective of attaining parity in the most prestigious, highest paid professions/positions. High levels of female workforce participation have already been reached and are here to stay, in the U.S. at least. But it is a well known fact (too lazy to cite, look it up yourself ;) that women make less money in less secure and prestigious positions. (Also, perhaps largely less challenging and interesting one might say.) In other words, they work for less money and recognition. That's fine for many but this conversation is for those who want more.

Just wanted to clarify.

I have about 3-4 more posts on this subject coming up.

So where are all the women??

When I was a much younger woman (oh, 3 years ago), I would look around at my coworkers and think, "where the hell are all the women?" From the moment I decided (belatedly) to major in Economics in college, suddenly I was virtually the only woman in the room. It was perplexing. What were they doing??? (Although I did enjoy breezing by a long line of men outside the bathroom into the always vacant ladies room at conferences.)

Then I had a baby.

Oh.

I see.

As Bertrand's study points out there are two types of working people in the world. There are men (with and without children) + women without children. And there are women with children. This began to dawn on me once I had my own baby but until I read her study it was hard not to feel (particularly given people's reactions to this idea) that perhaps I was just biased by my recent descent into motherhood.

Pre-baby I thought it was just a matter of finding good childcare and presto, I'd be back to my old self again. What I didn't realize was that many of the challenges/changes would not just be mental and logistical, but would be physical. (In other words, much harder to transcend.)

Even if you have the healthiest of pregnancies, odds are you will feel like retching or crawling under a desk to nap for much of 9 months. You will spend countless hours in waiting rooms at the mercy of your ob/gyn/midwife. You will doze through the requisite birthing class to which you frantically race to after work each Tuesday for a couple of months. If you do not have the healthiest of pregnancies ... well, let's just say making your quarterly numbers isn't going to be top of your priorities. (And that's assuming you get pregnant easily and don't have to go through the hell of fertility treatment.)

And then there is birth. Let's just say you won't be racing around the office 24 hours post-partum. (And those myths about Super Biz Woman rocking her 40 hour newborn to sleep under her desk while she catches up on emails ... people, after you push a honeydew sized human being from your nether regions, you're going to need a long nap!)

And then there is breastfeeding which may leave you unable to leave the house for a couple of months. But more on that later.

And then there is the moment when it dawns on the babe that you're walking out the door. And they don't like it one bit. And they've got the lungs to show it.

Point being, I now know that getting "back to work" isn't just about attitude and egalitarian marriage or a good nanny. And much as I hate to play pessimist here - having a baby changes women's physical reality in a way that makes in impossible to resume life as normal for a long time, if ever. By my calculation, at the very least each baby wipes out a good year in a woman's working life, if not several years, no matter how involved her partner is.

When it comes to just a good, solid working life, working motherhood is completely doable. But if your goal is to be truly extraordinary, then it's going to be a rough road. Excellence requires extraordinary time and selfishness, neither of which accrue in abundance to women who birth humans. Not to mention, getting "to the top" at the expense of this gorgeous little person you created becomes increasingly unappealing.

So, while some radical changes in working life might help mitigate some of these inevitable challenges (and I have some ideas on that front too), as long as women bear, birth and breastfeed babies we are never going to see parity at the top. Never.

It's not just a matter of time. It's not just about discrimination or bad husbands or lack of female role models or fear of math (ha ;). It's just a hard a load to bear for a human being. And the human beings bearing the load happen to be women.

Motherhood: The bane of thoughtful women?

In college, I never expected to get married, let alone have children.* As it happened, I got married about a year after graduating and, on my 27th birthday, became bent on having children ... IMMEDIATELY.

I am not what one would call a "kid person". That is, I harbor no special love for human beings based on their having lived a relatively short time on earth. I prefer people with an opinion on the trade deficit, an appreciation of artisan breads and the ability to sit quietly through the full duration of the most recent Coen brother movie. If you meet this criteria and are under 12. Fine. I have never once babysat and had never held an infant until Baby Y was placed in my arms.

Pre-baby I was put off by the way in which female parenthood seemed to obscure all else from a woman's identity to those around her and perhaps even to herself.

One thought (realized post-baby) is that it is partly due to the way that biological parenthood engulfs women. From the moment of conception, willingly or not, I was at my body's mercy. Pregnancy, birth, post-partum - nothing in my life has been so mammalian. So physical. So utterly devoid of intellect.

The other thought is that it is partly due to the insipid, cutsification that women cast upon the mother role. The endless pink (in moderation, a perfectly fine color) and other mild shades. The obsession with little beyond the minutia of familial life. The insistence that life as you knew it will cease to exist once children make their appearance. I was determined to avoid such a fate. (And think I have.)

And as I penned posts for this blog and talked to other women about my experience, I swung between two ideas.

The first being that this whole thing, babies + life-as-usual, was eminently doable. Piece. Of. Cake. Nevermind that I spent my first year on the verge of a nervous breakdown and year two chronically depressed. I was determined to tear on as though life had not changed a bit.

The second being that I had just erected a permanent hurdle to professional success. Competing as a childless woman was hard enough, throw in life encompassing experience of baby making = doom. Never mind that I did just fine in most of my classes and got a great internship. (Though I am currently unemployed ... hmmm)

Point being, I am very sympathetic to childless women who are not very inspired by the realities of the child making route. It's not easy. It does change you. For me, old age without grandchildren (Baby Y and X, are you listening??) was not palatable. But if it were,and I thought it might be for a long time, it would have been much easier.

Honestly yours,
M

*Though, paradoxically, I expected that if I did have children that I would be a stay at home parent until they went to kindergarten. Ha.

Life these days

Was about to pen one of my uber serious posts but don't have the brain power (lucky for you). Really, I should definitely be sleeping.

I am now a "single mom" (when my mom isn't here, that is). The good news is that Y has a job (with a real pay check and a not crazy boss). The bad news is that he doesn't live in Chicago any more.

Happy Father's Day!!

I am very much looking for a job. But also trying to enjoy the kids and summer. And the last month of Hyde Park. But really, it has become really impossible to imagine that I will ever be employed again. Sigh.

Baby Y's bday is upcoming and I just made a gorgeous double chocolate layer cake that I am planning on bedecking with June strawberries tomorrow morning. That and some delicious crustless quiches, one with and one without mushrooms, fresh fruit salad and bagels etcetera will be make for a lovely Monday. Can you believe he's almost two years old?? He's as old as my MBA ;)

Baby X is the most amazing sleeper ever but I think we deserve a good sleeper after what we went through with the first!

Happy Summer Solstice!!

Women are people too

Obviously. But maybe not.

I think of myself as a human being who happens to be a woman. One would think that this is rather obvious but our every day language suggests otherwise.

If women (especially women with children) are just people then why do we not have daddy bloggers or dadpreneurs or daddy MBAs? Why is there no 50 Most Powerful Men in Business or the Gentlemen's Professional Golf Association or "men's issues"?*

Ok - so these are rhetorical question - I understand why but the fact that we are so used to this language pattern is very meaningful.

There are two reactions to this state of affairs. The first (and more common among my childless peers) reaction is to avoid any special labels or preferential treatment by gender. This would include eschewing women's organizations, decrying gender based merit scholarships, and doing everything to reiterate the idea that men and women have few meaningful differences.

I am highly sympathetic to this approach but there are two problems. First, is that it verges on reinforcing the idea that male = normal and non-male = aberration. This would be the panelist at a women's conference who exclaimed "Men don't sit around discussing 'work-life balance'!" (Who cares! I'm discussing it! And btw men like to have lives outside of work too. But again, who cares what "men" are allegedly not discussing???) This woman then went on to encourage us to read Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office (or was it Play Like a Woman, Win Like a Man ... or similar obnoxious title?) Perhaps these books have a more interesting and nuanced message inside but I can not get past the loaded titles. This would also be the fellow female student who in a round table discussion on the meaning of CWiB (our student women's group here at Booth) declared somewhat randomly "I'm not on the mommy track!" (Am I on the "mommy track". What the hell is the "mommy track" anyway?)

But there is a second more important problem with this approach: sans babies gender is a completely useless distinction.** But when it comes to babies gender is makes a huge difference and trying to pretend that you are just like everyone else as a woman with children is a great way to drive yourself to despair. (As I have slowly realized.)

Last year I attended a talk by a very well-known woman (former executive at now collapsing enormo-bank) who responded to a question about family/career issues by first saying "Men cover your ears" and then went on to imply that men would not be interested in this side conversation.

But these are not "women's issues". These are "human issues". Motherhood is a fundamental human experience. I think you can simultaneously stand up for the idea that men and women are mostly similar but also incredibly different without undermining social progress.

This was all a preface to say that I'm finally going to post a series of thoughts on gender and babies over the next week or so that have been rattling around in my head for 2+ years. But don't for a moment think that they are a side conversation! If you are a women, have known a woman (or have never known a woman ;) They are for you.


*A search for "daddy blogger" returns about 4 million hits compared to 20.6 million for "mommy blogger", similar story for the other terms.
**I take the somewhat radical position that there is just as much intra-gender as there is inter-gender variation therefore one cannot make meaningful predictions about intelligence, behavior and career prospects based on gender alone. Do men and women have real biological differences that impact behavior? Yes. But in a civilized society where intelligence is more critical than brute force for professional success, I'm not convinced that it matters.

Re Discovering My Self

(major post backlog is losing to major life to do list backlog. finals week. graduation this sunday which i am attending solely for my mom's benefit. opting for less ponderous post in the interest of expediency)

The hardest thing about the past 12 months I've realized is not knowing what it is that I wanted.

For the first half of my internship last summer I was thrilled. Except for the less than ideal (but acceptable) geographic location, the position and firm were perfect and the perfect capstone to many, many years of preparation. Then, as things began to get more tense and strange on the desk (I'll not belabor the details), I was shocked to discover one summer evening that I was pregnant. (I thought all the free food was just making me fat!) When I returned to work the next day the firm had just instituted the first layoffs in its history. My little team of 4 was now a team of 2. I knew I would not be coming back.

I've begun to wonder if my abrupt turn against IM was a way to protect myself from the reality of job hunting as a pregnant woman in a collapsing market.

As I return to some semblance of my pre-maternal self, I realize my metamorphosis is not only physical but also mental. It's nice.

Regrets, Reflections and Responsible Blogging

I started this blog in 2006 essentially as a letter to myself. It was to be the blog I wished existed then. But as my fortunes became tied to the Booth brand, this became more complicated. What I have tried to resolve for myself over the past month or so is to what extent I want to speak freely about this experience and to what extent I should. What do I owe myself? What do I owe the school? And what do I owe to the younger me's out there? And what is worth saying?

I realize now that it is difficult for prospective students to get a frank view of the MBA experience because it is so difficult for insiders to speak frankly. When I was speaking officially for admissions I was completely sincere but very guarded in my comments. I never mentioned the hard parts and over the two years I began to feel guilty for portraying this experience in such a one-sided manner. Students who are not sufficiently warned about the hard parts are likely to be far more disappointed. So, for better or worse, this blog was a space for me to come clean. (And while it is true that my less flattering comments are my opinion, not fact, this is just as true of my or anyone's flattering opinions as well.)

But if competing schools don't have frank bloggers airing complaints, it's not particularly balanced. And it can be hard to discern as a blogger when to convey a strong opinion and when to let the moment pass - what is worth sharing and what should be ignored.

One reason I chose Booth was that I found the students to be very genuine. At some schools I felt like they were reading off a script. I think the views about business school in general and Booth in particular, within the Booth community are more nuanced, unexpected and diverse than an outsider might expect.

I somewhat regret starting this blog in the first place and I regret blogging specifically about Booth. Far more interesting is the discussion of the value and place of a business education, gender and babies in an MBA world, the moral complexities of the pursuit of money, etc. If you think this is interesting too, stay tuned ...

Farewell.

When I was an MBA applicant, blogs had a huge impact on my decision to pursue the degree. In particular, those of female applicants. I consider myself an atypical MBA in several respects and thought it might be worth telling my story. And as my family life evolved, I thought it would be beneficial for folks to get the student parent perspective which is largely absent from MBA blog-land. And frankly, I think that attracting more skeptics and student parents would be a good thing for business schools ... and the world.

But it has come to my attention that my posts are distressing to some and upon further reflection I have decided to stop blogging about my experience. I don't know how to blog any differently than I have been and I don't have the time and energy to worry about the appropriateness of each post. My goal was not to persuade or un-persuade anyone from an MBA or from attending Booth, but simply to give a frank portrayal of an experience that is too often painted as an easy golden ticket. And I think the sort of folk that choose Booth are likely to appreciate that most of all. I have considered quitting blogging many times over the past 3 years anyway. Now is a good a time as any.

But before I go I want to set a some things straight.

1. I have a deep affection for Booth and think it's absolutely one of the best MBA programs around. It was the only program I applied to and the only program I wanted to attend. I have blogged about the silliness of the GSB stereotypes, that my biggest regret was waiting so long to apply, my love for my fellow students, a Booth MBA is worthwhile no matter what the economy is doing, career services is stellar (and here), GND is the best policy, despite the challenges there is payoff in the end, my appreciation for the school's attempts at addressing student parent concerns, why my reasons to MBA > reasons not after the first year, and why I like living in Hyde Park.
   
2. My complaints center around the academic experience and the student parent experience. I may be the only Booth student blogging about this, but I am not alone in this opinion. And I imagine any reasonable candidate would realize that these two issues alone do not rule out all of the positive things found in point #1.
   
3. The remainder of my posts have centered around the ups and downs of my MBA experience that have little to do with the institution. That is, crappy economy, tough IM recruiting, self-doubts about career path, frustration with corporatese, are not an indictment of Booth but simply musings on the world around me. Dear readers, I hope you all get that.
4. Although I blog anonymously I don't say anything on this blog that I haven't or wouldn't say to the administration, fellow students, friends, family, etc. Trust me, there is a lot I do not put in here. But I did not fully appreciate how negatively my posts would come off. And that is unfortunate.
   

The Academic Experience - class supply, professor quality, and bidding can be quite frustrating. I understand that these are big issues and that the school is probably doing the best that it can and I have said explicitly that these facts would not have changed my decision about Booth. But I think it's something incoming students should be aware of and to plan around.

The Student Parent Experience - I am not complaining that being a student parent is hard but that the school has the capacity to make it easier and seems unwilling to do so with any sense of expediency. And that only so much of the fixing should be up to students. I have worked tirelessly since the summer of 2007 to create support and resources for student moms and moms-to-be and my post last Friday comes after email after email after meeting after meeting with CWiB co-chairs from 2008 and from 2009, with student advisors, with admissions, with career services, with various deans, with UCWBG and CWiBAN, and the Partners group and the law and medical schools and NAWMBA and Forte. After organizing events and attending UoC feedback sessions and conducting a survey of nearly 300 female MBAs and combing the GMAC data and writing a 21 page paper and collecting stories from alumnae and trying to market a Google group and begging CWiB for 50 bucks for a thank you gift for a speaker and moderating a panel on work-life balance comprised of 2 ibankers with no apparent lives to speak of and making myself available to prospectives and incoming students and putting my family story in the viewbook and putting together a website and waiting 5 weeks for Interactive Media to respond to a request to update our internal website.

I get it that Booth has a lot of things to deal with and that this might not be top of the list but my frustrations arise out of the challenges of trying to enact change, not simply a lack of perfection on the institution's part. And last Friday, after reading Bertrand's study and reading a Chibus article in which a former lead facil complains about students who have the audacity to bring their kids to LPF and struggling to find any co-chairs for MaB which meant all this effort was at risk of being for naught, I just broke down. I couldn't pretend any more that all was well and progress was being made. I was out of energy and out of fresh ideas. And angry.

• On Becker: my beef comes after a conversation with him after a presentation last spring on the returns to women's education.
  
• On CWiB: absolutely no beef with the co-chairs. The 2009ers have done a fantastic job of reviving a neglected group. I have high hopes for the 2010ers. However, I believe CWiB would be more effective if the school took on a more active role rather than expecting 6 students to do everything. (The website for a key group should not be left out of date for years, for example.) Membership should be free and universal to all female students, subcommittees should be formed to handle various initiatives and events, leadership should be voted in not appointed for greater accountability and members, not co-chairs, should decide which initiatives they feel are worth pursuing. And yes, I've already shared these opinions with CWiB and others long ago.
• LOE, recruiting, lactation room, internships: all true stories. Improving the lactation room is on my to do list but given how challenging it was to get the thing set up in the first place and how busy I've been, I've just not gotten back to it.

I get that institutions are imperfect. I get that making change is hard. I get that one should try to effect transformation before complaining. And I expect that any person of reasonable intelligence reads this blog with a grain of salt. I represent just one woman in a sea of women with a myriad of stories to share. I would love to hear more of them. And never thought my opinions would be that controversial.

This was my story and I've shared it. As graduation draws near I am excited to embark on the next phase of my life and have no qualms about choosing to MBA in the original question.

Just wanted to clarify.
Best to all in their MBA journeys or otherwise.

The waiting game

For the last couple weeks my midwives have been saying "any day now!" and I've been thinking "ha!" I remember how excited I was when Baby Y's due date arrived ... damn, I was tired of being pregnant ... then passed. Darn. Then the next day passed. And the next day. Then a week passed. Argh. So let's just say I don't have high expectations that I'll be giving birth any time soon. But it would be awfully nice. What's with these punctual birthers? I am envious. I just hope I don't have to miss my Friday classes.

Woman, Help Thyself (or the real story of MaB, and, I Quit)

Haven't been blogging much this week because I've been preoccupied and behind in sleep but also because I've been a bit low in spirit and I don't like to blog when I'm in a bad mood.

Quite predictably, on Friday evenings I find myself frequently anxious and unsettled about various Booth happenings in my life, largely related to student parenthood. And I thought perhaps finally coming clean with nearly two years of frustrations might help me sleep.

I've had many good experiences at Booth but nearly all of my bad experiences have been tied to being a student parent. I naively entered Booth thinking that I could turn my experiences into constructive feedback for the school and contribute to making the program more friendly for moms and moms-to-be. I had some facts to share and thought the feedback would be welcome. And all the strange set-backs and dead ends and unexpected politics and meaningless lip service just made me all the more stubborn and more determined about the mission. But I certainly didn't mean for it to become a core part of my MBA identity and such a huge expenditure of time and energy. And as an unrepentant cost-benefit calculator, I have to admit at this point that it's all cost and no benefit to me.

Selfishly, I want to see the world change. I want to see Booth in 10 years have a graduating class that is 50% women. I want to see 50% of the top ranks of the business world populated by women. I want "work-life" balance to no longer be considered a "women's issue". I want to see pay parity by gender. I think all of these things are interrelated. I think all of these things matter. And I think until business schools address the baby factor that no true progress will be made. (Hint: women's ROI on bschool is substantially less than that for men ... largely because they have babies. Apparently the women can do the math but the bschools cannot. And Bertrand gets it but Becker does not ...)

I'm tired of the lip service business schools and women's organizations pay to the issue of low representation of women while trying to ignore the fact that women have babies and it changes their lives in important ways. And I am astounded by how politically controversial such a relatively matter of fact issue seems to be.

MaB should not be a student group. It should be an administrative initiative. It should have been taken on by CWiB. (They refused.) (Which btw should not be a student group either but also an administrative initiative - but more on that later.) The success of this endeavor should not live and die by a few overtaxed students trying to scrub up pennies for a lunch and learn while the school doles out free booze every Friday afternoon. Student moms are an extreme minority at business schools by design not by coincidence - schools do an abysmal job of attracting women at all, let alone women with children. At least at Booth, student moms are reminded time and time again, sometimes subtly and sometimes outright, that fitting into the pre-existing mold is much preferred to falling outside of it. (Pregnant during recruiting? Try to hide that. Have a 10 week old during LOE? Please leave him at home, thanks. Drinking beer and climbing ropes is critical to your peer bonding experience. Need to pump between classes? We have a nice storage closet for you. Not able to do a summer internship for family reasons? You are messing with our numbers!)

Women between 28 and 30 have babies. Even well-educated, high achieving women have babies. It's not a coincidence that they shy away from business school, it's the result of systematic failure on the part of business schools to address the root issues which make business school an incredibly poor investment for many women if they are not fully prepared and informed for/about the ramifications of childbearing. Most women in business school these days will go on to have children after graduation. And they are in for some nasty surprises.

So I thought I'd like to do something about all of this. But I can't do it alone and it's been an incredibly lonely trek. I hear over and over again from alumnae and students how important this issue is to them but no one seems to want to do more than talk about it. Greater than my disappointment with the institutions is my disappointment with my fellow women. If the women who cared about this issue would step up and help, we wouldn't need to rely on the institutions.

So I quit. I need to turn my time and attention to my career and my family. I certainly don't need help. I've figured it out for myself. I'm going to have all the kids I want. I'm going to enjoy my life. I'm going to make a hell of a lot of money. (Sorry so crass, but that's absolutely top on the agenda.) And gender and family status is certainly not standing in my way. I thought it would be valuable to make this a shared learning experience but it looks like women prefer to learn on their own and the school is happy not to stand in their way on that.

So fine. Good luck to all. I quit.

New student group at Booth for moms and moms-to-be

Well, we actually launched this in winter quarter but I was waiting to settle some logistical things before announcing it here. So spread the word! www.mothersatbooth.com. Bet you can guess who I am :)

Some days I'm really excited about finally getting it off the ground. And some days I don't know why I spend the time. I'm really worried that we're not going to find first-years to take over the leadership :(

Which is why my preference was for it to be an initiative under CWiB ... but that's another story!

Mother Guilt

Guilt is a popular topic in mom-world. (First Google "mother guilt". Now Google "father guilt". Notice a difference?**) It comes up in mom surveys and mom blogs and mom books and mom anything.

Perhaps I'm just too early a parent to know better or I'm in denial. But I don't get it. And I'm tired of hearing about it.

A classmate and I were reflecting on how whenever we express some dissatisfaction with our lives, our mothers' first response is "Oh no, I've ruined you. It's all my fault." Err, no. We're doing just fine, thanks. Maybe the guilt is inescapable. Ultimately, I will succumb. But I have my doubts. Here's why.

I am actually well acquainted with guilt. I feel bad when I snap at my mom, forget to call my dad for months, choose yet again studying over an afternoon with my husband, buy too many plastic bottles, fly in a jet (all those emissions!), decide not to contribute to NPR this year, or email birthday greetings rather than send a proper gift. But I don't say that I have "daughter-guilt" or "eco-guilt" or "cheapskate-guilt". (Well, maybe eco-guilt.) These moments do not take on an all-encompassing identity around which I feel obliged to rearrange my life activities. I feel bad. I try to do better. And I call it a day.

I feel distress when Baby Y wails at my departures or absences. But he wails just as much when he's not in the mood for bedtime some nights or has his heart set on consuming nothing but raisins and chocolate milk and watching Sesame Street for six hours some days. Since when did good parenting become oriented solely on preventing all instances of wailing?

But my bigger quibble is that guilt is completely useless. Only action matters. Mother guilt is self-indulgent and ineffectual - an emotional release without real purpose, moored in a bygone notion of proper womanhood. Parents should feel guilty for abuse and neglect. But far more important is that they rectify abuse and neglect, not just feel guilt. No abuse or neglect? Then no problem. Stop annoying the public and your children with the lip service. And stop spreading the myth that this is inevitable part of motherhood. The cure can be found in a little logic.

Surely I cannot be the only one to observe that stay at home mom <> bliss for child or mother. Or that maternal self-sacrifice too often results in a creeping resentment that leaves everyone worse off. Baby Y is better off than probably 99% of the world's population. He's better off than I was as a child. He's never known nutritional want in his life; spends his days playing in the park, reading books and indulging his Elmo obsession; has two happily married parents; will attend the best educational institutions in the world; and receives a daily stream of affection and love. Who in her right mind would feel guilty about providing this life? But this is the life that most women penning about parental guilt are providing for their children.

And so I remain happily guilt-free. I highly recommend it.


**Under "father guilt" we get incest, infanticide and alcoholism. Undoubtedly bad parenting! Under "mother guilt" we get not creating the perfect life for your child, taking time to care for oneself, family fun party ideas and Gwyneth Paltrow. Errr, I missed it. There was a problem?

Anonymous Mama - WWYD?

When I do all my "mom stuff" on campus, I use a pseudonym. The reason being I don't want employers to Google my (one of a kind, literally) last name and find out my family status. This makes me a little bit sad since I wish it didn't matter. On the other hand, it doesn't make me in the least bit sad because I prefer to keep my personal business (such as fertility decisions) out of the public realm. On the other other hand, maybe it would actually open up interesting opportunities (and I'm proud of the work I'm doing for moms and moms-to-be). On the other hand, I don't want parenthood to be my defining characteristic.

The trouble is sometimes stuff gets posted online under my real name, not the pseudonym, and it gets tiring trying to clean up my Google history and worrying about it. And having two last names for different realms of my life is confusing. And I'm not looking for a job anyway. And if someone were to not hire me because I had kids - well so be it. And I can't help but feel this is sort of cowardly and deceptive. But it is a tough economy. I might need to find a job and I don't need any extra hurdles. And, as I said, mostly I'm just trying to cling to some privacy in this GoogleWorld I live in.

Am I being silly? Should I bother with this name charade? I'm especially interested if any men try to keep their family status secret. And what about you moms out there?

What would you do???

Mother Love

It strikes me that women who express concern that they don't love their newborns as they should might be being a bit premature. Although I found newborn Baby Y pretty remarkable, my feelings were more of astonishment and curiosity than deep love. For me, the love grew over time, as it does with any relationship. And it has grown to become overwhelming. Additionally, my feelings about working as I approach graduation are definitely more complicated than they were when I entered school. And unlike the opinion-less newborn I arrived at Booth with, I am now mother to an increasingly opinionated little boy.

The week before last I skipped virtually all my classes and hardly moved from the couch which Baby Y thought was just fantastic. We read books and cuddled and whenever he went out with Grandma, I was right there on the couch when he he got back home. So this week with me back on the regular schedule, was a hard adjustment. And I actually thought on Thursday that he might be mad at me. I didn't think 20 month olds could get mad but he refused to have anything to do with me when I got home that night which was crushing.

It's been an incredibly unproductive weekend. And I don't mind. I just want to spend time with Baby Y. Every homework assignment just seems trivial and useless compared to foregone or distracted hours with him. Normally, Baby Y goes down for bedtime and naps without a peep. We put him in his crib, wave good bye and go on with life. But today he was completely beside himself if left alone. We held him and sang and rocked for a good hour. And that's all I wanted to think about. So many times during my life at Booth, I have wanted Baby Y to take only the pre-allotted time in my daily schedule so I could get right back to homework or interview prep or stock pitch research. My reasoning at the time was that it was all for him. Ultimately, the preparation would turn into a good career for me and a college fund for him and happiness for my family.

What I'm wondering these days is how it will be with two little ones. How I can bear to send them to daycare once we leave Chicago, assuming my mom returns back to her normal life, and is no longer full-time grandma. Will entrepreneurship will give me the freedom and flexibility to be with my babies or whether the all-consuming nature of starting a business will prevent me from feeling as though I'm ever fully present for children? Would a summer spent as a full-time mama leave me satisfied or frantic and bored? But it's interesting to reflect on how much I'ved changed during bschool: month by month my childless identity grows fainter in my mind, and the mother love grows deeper. It's an interesting ride.

Pregnancy reality check

Someone (childless) asked me this weekend what the best thing was about being pregnant. I couldn't think of one thing. Allegedly there exist women who enjoy pregnancy (for example, surrogates). If you are one of these women - please let me know the secret! But at best, I find pregnancy tolerable. My sacrum is killing me, tying my shoes is a great physical feat, my belly button feels as though it might burst open at any moment, my ankles are stiff and puffy, I can't exercise normally, Baby Y doesn't fit into my lap, my clothes don't fit, fat is accumulating under my chin (which I find especially annoying), and at school I have to endure at least one comment a day on how "enormous!" I am. Thanks. (Folks, the old "if you don't have anything nice to say, shut up!" statement is never more true than in the case of pregnant women.) Obviously, I could be dealing with real problems such as gestational diabetes or hypernausea or preeclampsia instead, so I shouldn't complain.

There are quite a few pregnant women at Booth this year, I know of at least 5 besides myself, not including the 2 or 3 who have already given birth. So at least I'm not entirely alone. But being around all this pregnancy and childbirth has made quite an impression in terms of seeing how radically different women experience this whole process. A friend recently delivered her first baby in 1/4 the time that it took me. And then I've had more than a few friends who've endured days of on-off labor, 5 hours of pushing ending in a C-section, etc. I met an alum this summer who is still in a great deal of pain 18 months after her daughter's birth. While being healthy and having a good attitude is helpful, unfortunately it just isn't enough. Mother Nature is fickle and unfair and yet it seems hard for most of us not compare our fate/fortunes to that of others, even when our rational mind knows better. (Even more so when our peers are forever comparing us to one another.)

Baby Y's birth was on the extremely hard but doable end. I was so relieved to make it through and then found out the pain had only begun. Breastfeeding was/is the most painful thing I've ever endured in my life. All the consultants and doc's and La Leche League advice couldn't help me. Ultimately, I nursed for 15 months and the pain evolved from excruciating (2mos) to manageable (maybe 3mos) to occasional (the rest). And now I know why so many women give up on breastfeeding. I used to think they just didn't want to. While that is true for many, for many more, it comes at a far greater physical price than they can bear. If I wasn't such a masochist I would have quit after 2 weeks of the 24-7 misery.

In my birth class for Baby Y, the teacher chastised me for not making a birth plan. I said that my plan was to not have a plan. I'm a busy woman! I don't have time to make plans for the unplannable. But mostly, trying to plan birth and motherhood seems like an exercise in disappointment. While we can't help but try to learn from others' experiences - your pregnancy/birth/motherhood experience is unlikely to be like your mom's or your best friend's or your neighbor's. If there is one thing I learned during the first go-round it is to give up my expectations and just hope for the best.