Mid-March/St. Patrick's Day odds & ends

• It is St. Patrick's Day... and I am thinking about my all-time favourite Irishman, my maternal grandfather (who was born in Minnesota, but whose paternal grandparents came from the Old Country). For years I used to send him a St. Pat's card. After he died, I continued sending cards to my mom & her brother. She's spending the month of March down south, though, so I decided there wasn't much point in sending her one this year. Feels a little strange. And sad. :(
• I am not sure what my Irish ancestors would think of us celebrating St. Patrick's Day, since they were all Protestants, and some of them staunch members of the Orange Lodge, lol. My mother has my great-great grandfather's Orange Lodge songbook and yikes, talk about politically incorrect. Happily, times change. I think most of us these days think of St. Patrick's as a celebration of all things Irish.
• Still bummed out about the impending loss of Google Reader (although I guess I have some time to find an alternative).  I was checking into Feedly, since many people have been recommending it... however, it doesn't work on Internet Explorer, which I have always used as a browser -- you have to use Firefox or your smartphone (I do not have one). :p  (A techie I am not.) The search continues. I am still extremely pissed off at Google. :p  
• It was spring break last week in Ontario... quiet in some respects, busy in others.  Dh, who works a very busy, stressful job at the best of times, was doing the work of three people, covering for fathers who were off vacationing with their families. Perhaps those of us without kids should find a week where we too can leave the office en masse and let the parents worry about how to get everything done in OUR absence. ; )
• The thought flitted through my head one morning last week that maybe I should head up to the Eaton Centre mall on my lunch hour. Then I remembered it was spring break. Needless to say, I spent my lunch hour close to my desk. ; )
• It wouldn't be spring break without at least one ride on the commuter train (generally homeward bound, in the late afternoon after a long day of work) with a group of shrieking children.  (For the record, I had two.)  
• I have seen Facebook posts from mothers who are chomping at the bit, waiting till their kids head back to school tomorrow (because they've been driving them NUTS...) ...and others from mothers who ADORE having their children with them ALL THE TIME and are mourning the arrival of Monday. Needless to say, I cannot relate, either way. I think I probably would have fallen somewhere in the middle. ; )
• Spring break aside, I was incredibly tired and listless all last week. I think it was the time change, kicking my butt. :p  I didn't sleep very well. I made up for it somewhat by sleeping 10 hours last night!
• I can't seem to shake the February blahs yet (and it's already mid-March...!). The weather has been up and down, work has been "meh." I think I need a holiday...
• Maybe it's because there has been sad news all around me. :(  About three weeks ago, a high school classmate, M.,  contacted me via Facebook. Another classmate of ours, D.,  was engaged in yet another round of a long battle against breast cancer and needed some cheering up... so M. was contacting everyone she could who might have known D., asking if they would send her a card.  I hadn't seen D. since high school, but I remembered her as a warm and friendly person, and gladly sent along a card (and M. told me she was surprised and touched to hear from me).  I am so glad I did it, as she passed away late last week. :(   (If you ever get the opportunity to do something like that, do it. You will never regret it.) (I am imagining how I would have felt if I hadn't gotten a card off to her in time...)
• Two FB friends -- one I knew in university, another a longtime online friend -- also lost their mothers within the last week or so. 
• Really, aren't we too young for this to be happening?  :( 

Crap...

Just got a notice when I tried to open my Google Reader that it will no longer be available after July 1st. :(  I have been using Google Reader almost since I started blogging. I have more than 500 (!!) subscriptions -- albeit not all of them active any more (and not all ALI-related).

Any suggestions for an alternative?? :( 

What a pain. :p

More on women and work (including me)

It's International Women's Day... and I've been doing some more thinking about my previous post on women and work, and about Sheryl Sandberg's new book, Lean In. I haven't read it yet... but neither have a lot of people who have been writing about it, lol. And from what I hear, the people who have actually read it are being much kinder to Sandberg than those who haven't. 

In my previous post I said, "Some mothers (and non-mothers) are perfectly happy with "average jobs." Not everyone is cut out for the C-suite. Not everyone WANTS a C-suite job."  (Also, there are only so many C-suite jobs to go around. Someone has to do the actual work, after all. ;)  )

And I don't want to let men, and corporations, off the hook. They have a responsibility to level the playing field in the office, and to step up their own game at home.  It's just plain common sense. (I recently saw a hockey analogy about women's equality that went something like: "A team isn't going to be playing its best if half the players are sitting on the bench.")

Apparently Sandberg does acknowledge this in her book. But her focus is on what women themselves can do to advance in the workplace. And I get what Sandberg is saying, or at least, what I think she is trying to say. Too many women sell themselves short. We don't ask... and so, often, we don't get.  We close off our options, sometimes without realizing the long-term consequences of what we're doing. As Sandbery put it in her infamous commencement address to Barnard College graduates, women too often "leave before they leave." 

I will admit it: I'm one of those women who leaned back (probably prematurely), instead of leaning in. If I had put a little more thought and effort into my career and what I wanted out of it, I probably could have advanced further than I have. I'm not genuis-smart (although I was known as a "brain" in school) -- but I think I am fairly bright. I just never had a huge ambition to manage people and budgets.

Why?

Partly, I think, because my interests lie in the work itself -- in the content, in writing. And right now (more than ever, it seems), it's all about the process. Meetings upon meetings, project plans, background briefs and (of course) round after round of  approvals. (But that's not something that's entirely within my control.)

Lack of self-confidence?  Yep, that's definitely me. ... I have never been one to shout "Look at me!" and increasingly, the people who get ahead are the ones who are good at self-promotion (if nothing else...!).

Laziness? Well, yes. ; ) I'll admit it, lol... Don't get me wrong, I do my job and there are plenty of days (particularly at certain times of the year) when I am run off my feet.  There have certainly been times when I have stayed late &/or taken work home with me.  But (thankfully) it's not a regular thing -- and that's just fine with me. I find that a standard work day -- which stretches to 11 or 12 hours most days, when commuting is factored in -- is definitely enough.

I have a friend who is a high-powered corporate lawyer for a big law firm. She routinely puts in incredibly long hours and works weekends. Yes, she gets the big bucks, but... I like being able to leave at a decent hour, and leave my work behind me. I am just lowly enough at work that I don't have a work-issued BlackBerry. I remember when my former boss got promoted to a level where they gave her a BlackBerry... I told her, "I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or offer my condolences," lol.

Part of it, I think, is that I am a product of my times. Yes, I am a proud feminist and I grew up in the age of Ms Magazine, Gloria Steinem, the fight to ratify the ERA in the U.S. (defeated) and the successful battle to ensure that women's rights were included in Canada's new constitution in 1982. 

But -- I did get my start in the 1960s. Mindsets and roles were still pretty traditional when I was growing up. I was told -- and I (mostly) believed -- that I could be anything I set my mind to be. And one of the things that I wanted to be, assumed I would be (besides being a writer) was a mom. I knew that I was going to school, and that I would have a career. But I thought (for awhile, anyway) that I would stop working when I had children. As time went on and the economy floundered, I came to realize that I would likely have to keep working once I had a family. But in the back of my mind, marriage and family still loomed large. I still saw my future primarily in terms of the family I would have.

I hoped that I might be able to afford to work part-time while my children were small. (Whether I could have actually afforded to do so is another story...) In fact, around the time that I got pregnant, I had some tentative discussions with my office best friend/coworker about job sharing -- she may have even brought the subject up. I saw part-time work as an ideal way to spend some extra time with my long-awaited baby and still keep one foot in the workforce and in the company where I had already established myself. She was in her 50s, hoping to retire at 55, and thought she could ease her way gradually into retirement with such an arrangement. Job sharing was relatively new to our company, but I had done some stories for the staff magazine about several such arrangements that were working well.  I think we could have made it work. We worked well together. We figured we could each work on our own projects, for the most part, and each put in two full days a week, and figure out how to split the fifth day. We would keep each other updated, and would be accessible at home if there were problems.

But then I lost my baby. :(  And the stock market tanked with the dot-com crash of the late 1990s/early 2000s, and the investments she was counting on to help fund her retirement lost value, and she wound up working until she was 59. And that was the end of our job sharing discussions.

And while I haven't got a family as my "excuse" for not climbing the corporate ladder, I can't discount the impact that pregnancy loss and infertility have had on any ambitions I might have once had. I don't think I was hugely ambitious, pre-Katie.... but I think it's safe to say that I have never felt quite the same way about work and my job in the years since then. There's nothing like death, like stillbirth, to drive home what's really important in life -- and believe me, it's ain't work. I am a firm believer that nobody lays on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office.

But... we all have mortgages or rent to pay, and food to put on the table. And so we work. At least I had a good job to go back to after my loss. I heard numerous stories, as a pregnancy loss support group facilitator, and as a longtime frequenter of pregnancy loss & infertility forums, from women who made career choices based on what was best for the hypothetical family they hoped one day to have. They "left before they left." Some of them actually quit their jobs when they became pregnant. And wound up with neither job nor baby. :(  And, sadly, sometimes without the partner they had hoped to build their family with, too. So I think we need to think carefully about the choices we make at work, and why we're making them, and keep as many options open for as long as we can.

As for me -- right now, I feel like I've painted myself into a bit of a corner at work. I've been in the same department doing much the same kind of work at more or less the same level for almost 27 years now. For a long time, 15+ years, I worked with the same core group of people. There wasn't much in the way of specific job descriptions or established procedures (that has since changed), but we all knew each other well, and what we could do together. They knew me, knew what I had done, knew my capabilities. I remember one of the senior managers once told me he had such tremendous confidence in my writing, that he knew he could throw anything at me and I could quickly turn it around into something lucid.

And then, one by one, they all left. :(  

(Retired, fired, moved to another department or another company altogether.)  I can remember when I went in for a "getting to know you" chat with our new senior VP (who has since left herself) and she told me that of all the people in our department she was having the hardest time figuring out exactly what it was that I did. "I do anything and everything that anyone asks me to do," I told her, which was basically the truth. I thought I was being flexible, and I thought that was good.

But so much has changed in the past 3-5 years. The department was restructured, and many of the projects that I used to work on or assist others with are now the responsibilities of others. People keep coming and going.  I'm having to prove (and re-prove -- I will soon be on my fourth direct manager in three years!) myself over & over again. While there are still a core group of us 40 & 50-somethings, the department has gradually been overrun with bright-eyed, ambitious, energetic 20 and 30-somethings -- kids, young enough to be my own children. 

Sometimes it's hard to keep up. It's hard not to feel old and tired, and sometimes overlooked and unappreciated. It's hard not to look at the calendar and start counting the days until I might be able to retire. 

But that's still at least three years away. What to do between now & then?

I don't particularly want to take on more responsibility at this point in my career. But at the same time,  I'm not entirely sure my my talents are being well or fully used, either. :p

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?" Sandberg asks. I'm not entirely sure. It's something I need to think about.

But I'm glad she is asking these questions, and making me think about them.

I'm hoping to pick up the book soon... if/when I read it, I'll definitely let you know what I think about that!

Daring to build families differently

Carson Rennick, welcome to our world.

Last week, the Toronto Star featured an article about Rennick, a 35-year-old man who wants to be a dad.  He feels ready, at this point in his life, to be a father. He hasn't met Ms Right yet -- but he's decided not to let fact that get in the way, and take matters into his own hands. 

Rennick is seeking a partner to bear and help raise his child. He's not looking for a romantic relationship, but a co-parenting arrangement -- facilitated by a website called Modamily.com. The woman would agree (via legal contract) to conceive a baby with him through IUI or IVF, and then share the responsibility of raising the child.

I'll admit, when I first read the story, I thought it sounded a little... clinical.  And I still think that the proposed arrangement might not be as cut & dried as it sounds. This is still a pretty new way to parent, and there will likely be consequences that nobody has yet realized or complicating factors that haven't been taken into consideration. When you're dealing with human beings, you have to factor in emotion. We don't always act in rational ways.

But I also found myself thinking: how much different is this from some of the other relatively new ways that we are building families today with the help of reproductive technology? I've read about parenting arrangements in the gay community where a lesbian gets pregnant using sperm from a gay friend to get pregnant, and involves him in the child's life. Is it any different (or any worse) than couples who get married, have a child, then divorce and share custody?

We all like to think that every child will be conceived and born the old-fashioned way, to a set of parents who love each other. But things aren't always that simple. And, as those of us in the ALI community know all too well, sometimes the desire to have a child leads us to places we never in a million years thought we'd go.

Rennick is back in the Star today. The reaction to the first story will sound somewhat familar to any of us who have dared to try to become a parent by anything other than the conventional way:

"...he received a torrent of feedback from Star readers, suggesting he get everything from a puppy to a life. In comments posted on thestar.com, almost 200 of them, he was labelled frequently as selfish, told his quest was “creepy” and lambasted as an “emotionally immature knucklehead.”

(Of course, if he stayed childless (and especially unmarried and childless), he'd probably be labelled "selfish" & "emotionally immature" too, right?)

"In all honesty, I thought there’d be a stronger response in my favour,” Rennick told the Star, sounding somewhat bewildered. “There was a huge uproar. I thought it would be more accepted.” (I felt a bit sorry for him and his naievity (sp?). As I said, welcome to our world, Carson...!)

"A lot of people seem to think I’m selfish,” Rennick says. “But I’m as selfish, I guess, as the readers’ parents, your parents or my parents for having us.

“This isn’t the death of our society. Oh my God, guys, c’mon, I just want to have a child.”

The Star plans to check in with Rennick on his quest to become a (co)parent. Should be interesting...!

End of February odds & ends

• It's February 28th. The one saving grace of this month is that it's short. :p
• Thank you for your kind comments on my recent post about my co-worker. So far as I know, she is doing about as well as can be expected. A collection was taken up to send flowers and some of her favourite treats, and a card circulated for everyone to sign. The usual platitudes, but thankfully, no real clangers, at least not at the point when I saw it.
• Our VP, who made the announcement, later apologized to me for dropping the bombshell in the way she did, which was nice of her.
• There have been a number of changes at work recently, stemming from my co-worker's impending maternity leave:  one colleague was appointed to cover her job during the year she was off, another colleague moved in to take that vacant slot, etc. etc. -- sort of a domino effect. I asked the VP what was going to happen now and was told the arrangements in place would still stand for the year -- even though my coworker will almost certainly not be off that long (I believe she is still entitled to 17 weeks on Employment Insurance maternity benefits) -- and that when she returned, we'd just have her as an additional resource. I said that was probably a wise thing, since (based on my own experience), she likely won't be entirely "here" for quite awhile to come.
• Unfortunately, one of the dominos was my own manager, who has been "seconded" to another job for a year. (She called me and coworker into an unexpected meeting & I immediately figured she was either telling us she had a new job, or she was pregnant. My guess is she won't be returning to this job in a year from now because she'll have either found something else or... she'll be pregnant/on maternity leave.)  Her job has been posted, and when it is filled, I will be dealing with my third new manager in as many years. (The fourth retired in April 2010 after being my boss for most of the previous 16 years).  I know it's rare today for people to stay in one job/area as long as I have, and I certainly don't expect my next boss to hang around for 16 years. But SOME continuity would be nice... :p 
• Did anyone watch the documentary "Makers" on PBS on Tuesday night -- a history of the women's movement? (If you didn't, you can still watch it online.) I missed the first half hour, but watched the rest. (Until 11 p.m. I also stayed up until 10 the previous night watching Dallas, 12 on Sunday watching the Oscars, & 11ish on Saturday & Friday because... well, it was the weekend!  So I am dang tired this week...!)  Nevertheless, I am glad I did. It was so inspiring seeing all those old clips -- a great history lesson, and a great reminder why "feminism" is not and should not be a dirty word. Brought back a lot of memories...! 
• (But yikes -- what has Marlo Thomas done to her face?? I almost didn't recognize her...)  :(  
• I have seen Gloria Steinem twice. I stood in line during my lunch hour to buy her book "Revolution from Within" when it came out in 1993, and had it autographed. And about a year later, my visiting mother & I went to see her speak at an HR professionals conference (a friend gave me the tickets). Afterwards, we saw her walking by us in the hall outside the auditorium. She was incredibly petite. And I think she is still beautiful in her 70s.
• Speaking of "Dallas" (a few bullets back -- and I wrote about my longtime love for the show here), next week's episode will be the true end of an era:  the death of JR Ewing.  Rumour has it he is murdered ("who killed JR?"). The week after that, "Dallas" stars of the past & present will gather for his funeral, including Ray, Lucy, her parents (Gary & Valene of "Knots Landing"), JR's second wife Cally and his former mistress, Mandy Winger. Part of me can't wait, and part of me is dreading it, because it truly is the end of an era, and the series will never be quite the same without him.
• I saw and flagged this article a few weeks ago & still wanted to share it with you, if you haven't already seen it. The New York Times Motherlode blog featured a beautifullly written guest post on breaking the silence about stillbirth. Some excellent (& almost entirely sympathetic) comments, too.
• Also, re: my last post on women at work and flexible workplaces, I found this great article. The title reads "Single People Need Work-Life Balance Too" but it's actually more about all people without children (including empty nesters) than simply singles. First paragraph:  "Discussions of American work culture tend to focus primarily on the difficulties parents face balancing work and caring for their kids. But a new study points out that there's more to life than family, and conversations that focus solely on child rearing are leaving out the many ways that too much work can affect the childless."
• Tracey at La Belette Rouge enlisted me and a couple of other childless/free bloggers to help her respond to a comment urging her to consider adoption. You can find our collective thoughts and perspectives (along with some great comments) here.
  

"I'm more than just a uterus"

One thing I have always believed, both pre- and post-loss and infertility, is that "I am more than my uterus" -- something I have expressed in this blog, and on the recent Bitter Infertiles podcast. I strongly believe that my life -- and women's lives generally, whether you ultimately reproduce or not -- is, and should be, about so much more our children, and our ability to bear children. Children are wonderful -- but they are not the only thing that can (or even should) give a woman's life meaning and purpose -- and motherhood should certainly not be the measure by which a woman's value is determined (by others, and certainly most of all by ourselves).

So my interest was piqued by this headline in the business section of Saturday's Globe & Mail:  "Ask about my job, but not my uterus." It was an article by Leah Eichler, who often writes about women's issues in a business context.

"It’s surprising how much we, as a community, think about what’s happening in a woman’s uterus," she writes. (Aside from me:  Or NOT happening.)

Eichler expresses her disappointment at recent comments by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, encouraging women to be open with their employers about their plans to have a family. She (Eichler) points out that women are still taken less seriously by male decision makers because of their ability to have children, and that forthright declarations about their intentions to have a family aren't likely to change this.   

"We need to stop seeing women as either baby factories that generate our future work force, or as primary caregivers. Both images work to keep women out of the C-suite. For the record, I love my children more than anything but I’m more than just a uterus and the sooner that more people understand that, the quicker we can all get down to business." (Emphasis mine. Guess I didn't invent the phrase, lol.)

Eichler is somewhat kinder to Ann-Marie Slaughter, whose article in the Atlantic titled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" created a huge buzz last year. More recently, she wrote "Don't Rule Out Having Children Because You Want a Career."  Slaughter suggests that society needs to redefine success. "I tend to agree, so long as “redefining success” is not code that mothers should be content with an average job," Eichler writes.

There is so much going on here, and I have mixed feelings. Let me try to express a few of them.

Some mothers (and non-mothers) are perfectly happy with "average jobs." Not everyone is cut out for the C-suite. Not everyone WANTS a C-suite job. (Me, for instance. While I wouldn't call my job "average," it's still a loooonnnnnggggg way from the C-suite.  I've never been particularly interested in taking on responsibility for managing other people, or budgets.) (By the same token, not everyone is cut out for motherhood, or want to take that on either.)

But at the moment (as the title of Slaughter's latest essay implies), women who do want those C-suite jobs -- and a family -- too often find that it's an either-or situation. How many men have to make those choices?  Women shouldn't have to either, just because they're the ones who get pregnant.

I applaud companies that recognize that their employees have lives outside of work, and are willing to be flexible.  (It was highly disappointing to read today that Marissa Mayer -- the new CEO of Yahoo, who famously got the job when pregnant and took just two weeks off work after the birth of her son -- has ordered all Yahoo employees who currently work from home and other remote locations to head back to the office.  That includes those who only work from home a day or two a week. I can see mandating a certain number of days a week for meetings, etc., when all employees must be present, but this certainly seems like a step backwards -- not to mention a slap in the face to employees who joined Yahoo because of its flexibility.)

But when most people talk about flexible workplaces, they're usually talking about women who are mothers. I strongly believe that workplaces needs to be flexible for *everyone* -- not just moms (or dads). Non-parents have lives and obligations that are important to them, too. 

When my company first introduced a policy on flexible work options, some 15 years ago, I wrote about it for the staff magazine. And, as I may have written here before, one of the people I interviewed was a woman who worked a longer day, four days a week, and then took a fifth day off. When I probed into her reasons for wanting such an arrangement and what she did with the extra time, I fully expected to hear about her children.

Instead, she told me she had no children, and used her days off to run errands, attend theatre matinees with friends and work on her novel. "My time is just as valuable to me as a parent's," she said. And while I had not yet begun my struggle with infertility, and fully expected to be a parent someday myself at that point, I thought that her logic made perfect sense.  In fact, the policy does not ask why the flexible arrangement is being requested, and the reason(s) are not considered by the requester's manager in deciding whether to approve the arrangement. What matters is the work and how it will get done. (Such arrangements are, sadly, still relatively rare at my company... but that's another story...)

Somehow, somewhere, there has to be a way to balance companies' needs to serve their customers and employees' (equally legitimate) needs for a satisifying personal life (which may or may not include children). 

Some people may want to put more emphasis on climbing the corporate ladder than having a family (and vice versa). There may be certain time(s) in your life when you want to focus on your career and others where your priorities may be elsewhere. Some people might require more flexibility at certain times of their lives, when their children are small or parents are aging, or for other reasons (like going through infertility treatments). That doesn't mean they can't or don't want to contribute, or that their past contributions to the company (or potential to contribute in the future) should be discounted. 

Put the mechanisms and supports in place that allow everyone to succeed -- however they define success -- and then let's get on with working and living.

My worst nightmare :(

One of my worst nightmares came true today. :( 

I was at a meeting late this afternoon with about 25 coworkers, and at the very end, our senior officer said she had some very sad news: one of colleagues has lost the baby she was expecting (in April, I think). Her office baby shower was going to be in a couple of weeks. :( 

Everyone gasped. I clapped my hands to my face, dropped my head & promptly started hyperventilating. :(  I kept thinking, "Don't make a scene, it's not about you," but I couldn't stop gasping. Someone handed me a Kleenex, I think?  My mascara was coming off in it. I couldn't move. I could hear people around me leaving, and then I felt someone hugging me.

When I finally looked up, there was just me and two longtime coworkers, both women also in their 50s. They remembered. Bless them both.

They stayed with me until I could collect myself enough to leave & we walked back to the office together. I hugged them both again before we went our separate ways. My mouth was dry, I was hot & red & shaky. (I wondered what my blood pressure reading would be.)  Another longtime coworker came to my cubicle with more hugs. She said she'd had to leave & go to the bathroom to collect herself, because she immediately thought of me & could see how distraught I was.

Well, if people didn't know before that I lost a baby, I guess they know now. :p  I'ts not like I've tried to keep it a secret -- but at the same time, it's not something I've talked about openly, either -- especially in an office filled with idealistic young singles, newlyweds and expectant parents. It kind of seems like bad taste to bring up around them -- and even if I did talk about it, nobody ever thinks it's going to happen to them, right?

My boss kindly asked if I'd like to stay home tomorrow. I don't think I will -- it's not about me -- but I'm not sure how productive I'll be. :p   I am still feeling a tad shaky. And exhausted. 

I've crossed my fingers & toes & other body parts through many, many office pregnancies these past 15 years. This is not the first coworker who's lost a baby since Katie -- but they have (thankfully) been very far & few between. As I said, this is one of my worst nightmares come true. I am devastated for her.

I'm going to talk to her boss tomorrow & pass along my contact info. What else is there to do? :( 

Katie's LMP date was this past week. February 8, 1998. The cycle begins anew.