Category Archives: Work/Life Balance

Benefits to Kids of Mom’s Career (part one of two)

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When we discuss the challenges of balancing family and a career and the desirability for a mother to work full-time outside the home we often hear about the negatives.  In my experience as a daughter and a mother I must say that I see many positives.  I’m not talking about the ones the psychologists study and report on (e.g. that children of working moms have higher reading scores and better social skills – there are negatives on this front as well).  What is on my mind are the specifics – what specific experiences did my children have because of my career.

The one that is most obvious for our family is travel and international experiences.   I was interested in international relations since college and international marketing and sales since I started my business career.  When I started my career here in the valley I wasn’t able to find a position focused on international marketing from the start so I began in product and channel management but I was looking for international opportunities from the start.

I worked quite a bit with the European sales teams at Informix then when Informix started its Latin American division I joined.  I ended up moving to Sao Paolo for six months to open the Informix office and Derek (6.5), Todd (4) and our nanny Susan came with me.  It was an incredible experience for all of us.  The boys got to experience school in Brazil, play on a local youth soccer team and briefly live an urban lifestyle.  We traveled every other weekend all over the country.  The school was an international one so we made friends with people from all over the world.

Steve and his partner Gus Spanos had just formed a company to purchase 2 Miller beer distribution franchises so they were incredibly busy.  Of course the separation was very hard on all of us, especially the boys, but Steve was able to come down and spend 2 weeks with us in the middle.  We took a great trip to the Amazon and several other regions of Brazil.

I wrote previously about my experiences traveling with Margot in Latin America. I continue to take the kids with me when possible.  Margot joined me at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona two years ago and last year Adam, Margot came with me to Tokyo.  We’ve also had innumerable international visitors to our home for dinners and meetings and the kids have gotten to know them.  I believe that there is something different and more educational being exposed to a foreign country and culture when connecting through work (or volunteering) rather than simply as a tourist. You get to know people and about their day-to-day lives – not just the tourist sites, although those are great too which brings me to my next point…

There is that second order benefit.  I’ve racked up literally millions of frequent flyer miles – it’s been several years since I received this card in the mail.  Steve has earned his share of miles as well and that has funded the air part of a good many of our trips – South Africa, Vietnam, Europe, Peru – you name it.  Of course there is the downside to all this travel.  Time away from home is not without consequences – there are things I’ve missed and it’s hard on the spouse at home.  But even that has some benefits – the kids learn a bit of independence and see that Dad is competent to keep them fed and productive and even tucked in with bedtime stories at night.

It’s hard to know exactly how these experiences have affected the kids.  I have to believe, though, that given how small our world is becoming, familiarity with other places, people and cultures will only be more important.  Derek and Todd, as physicians will be taking care of people in a country where more than 10% of the population are immigrants – that percentage is certainly much higher for their likely patient populations during residency.  Margot is considering a foreign language major (among many possibilities).  Adam is enjoying Spanish 3-honors – who knows where this can lead 🙂

The “Car Mitzvah”

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Last week was a rite of passage in our house.  Adam got his drivers license!  Our former Rabbi at Beth Am used to call this the “Car Mitzvah” acknowledging that this milestone is probably as important to the teenager (and parents) as the “Bar Mitzvah”.  Joking aside, given the nature of our cd copying suburban lifestyle this milestone represents a significant change in the parent/child relationship.  Much more independence for the teen and actually more independence (and worry) for the parent.

Adam has been awaiting this moment with excitement.  He shows no ambivalence on the matter – he wants to drive himself rather than have mom or dad chauffeur.  I, on the other hand, feel a bit more mixed – a little nervous, a little sad that I’ll miss out car chats but, oh my gosh – after being a chauffeur for 26 years…freedom!  I still don’t think I’ve fully internalized this new status.  Saturday night Steve and I were discussing our plans for the morning – my exercise class, his pickup basketball game – I was mentally girding for the “who drives to Sunday school” argument.  I started to explain why I thought Steve should drive that day and he laughed – Adam would drive himself – hooray!

As with many transitions this one is bittersweet.  I like being needed by my children (I guess if I didn’t like it I wouldn’t have had 4 of them).  Car time is a great time to chat – some of the time is mundane but some of the time it is serious and significant.  Maybe the fact that mom is looking at the road (so no eye contact) and that the ride/conversation has a known end time makes it easier to bring up sensitive topics.  But not all of the driving time is so “meaningful” – like the time last month when I needed to leave work early to drive 20 minutes to school, pick him up, spend 5 minutes of driving him to guitar, spend the next hour on a conference call in the guitar lesson parking lot and then go home.  Drives like this are necessary but the parenting ROI is not very high.

So now is my opportunity to make the most of this transition – to enjoy the logistical freedom but pay attention in the day-to-day to have quality non-driving time.

Got Ambition?

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“Got Ambition?” as first appeared in http://www.womenonbusiness.com December 13, 2011  Preview here: http://www.womenonbusiness.com/got-ambition/

I recently stumbled upon a women and workplace survey from MORE magazine which raises the question of the ambition of women, and lays out data from the survey related to what we really want from our careers. A few stats especially caught my eye, including “When asked point-blank, 43 percent of women described themselves as less ambitious now than they were 10 years ago; only 15 percent reported feeling more ambitious.”

I discussed this with a fellow (woman) colleague and we both reached the conclusion that from our experience woman are not less ambitious, just giving voice to our conflicted emotions while we seek the ideal work-life balance for our stage in life.

Read more here: http://www.womenonbusiness.com/got-ambition/

Sleep or Football

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No, I have not taken up 6:00am Football, nor am I watching it on late night TV.  Despite the irony of my having met many famous pro-football players (more on that in another post) I am blissfully ignorant about the game.  I cheer loudly, take pictures of my sons while playing, chat with the other families, and, most of all, pray for no serious injuries.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago entitled “Sleep or School”.  The basic point was that juggling parenting and work is sometimes really hard – there are only 24 hours in the day and sometimes that juggle means giving up sleep.  Well our family had a similar issue this week, only this time, I got 40 winks in my bed and my husband got 5 hours of sitting straight up on a plane with his eyes closed trying to approximate sleep.

The situation was not very complicated.  The HBS Health Care Alumni conference started today in Boston.  My son’s high school football game was yesterday afternoon.  My husband absolutely loves attending the kids’ sports events and helps the coach out quite a bit doing the “stats”.  This conference is interesting for him both from a content and networking point of view (he is CEO of a healthcare startup).  Due to lack of human cloning technology the only solution was the “redeye”.  The point being that juggling work and family is not just a woman’s issue.

Fitness and Friendship

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Here is a link to an article that ran last week in the Wall Street Journal.  It was a fun story.  The author read my blog post, passed to her by a friend, where I mentioned combining socializing with exercise.  She interviewed me by phone then they sent a photographer out with us to do a shoot while we hiked.  The print version actually has more photos than online.  The photographer who had to leave his home in Berkeley at 5 to meet us at the Dish at 6 said he had never been up before sunrise since he lived in the area.  We got a lot of funny looks during our walk as he was taking photos – I think he took a few hundred.  Fortunately our Cooper Hawk friend posed for a photo.

It’s A Family Affair

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Last Saturday was the SugarSync company picnic.  That event was a great reminder that one of my favorite parts of building the SugarSync team is getting to know the extended team.  I love getting to meet the partners, children, parents and friends of our employees, investors and consultants.  Our team is so talented it’s no surprise their partners are equally bright, talented and interesting. I love to hear about their jobs and backgrounds – where they come from (we are truly a global team) and what they do which has a side benefit of helping me get to know the employees better.  My favorite is meeting the children.  I must say that we have an awfully cute bunch of kids in the SugarSync world ranging from newborns to teens (see pictures below).   Certainly the cutest, I’m sure, of any company in the personal cloud space!

More importantly, as anyone in a startup knows, it is an intense experience with long hours.  The families and friends of our employees, by picking up the slack are so important to our success.   This event and others we do during the year aim to be a small token of appreciation for that support.   We’ve also done an intro to SugarSync event with babysitting for the younger kids and a demo and example “pitch” for the teens and adults.  I got the idea for this latter event from a conversation with Diane Green – it was 2009 and many of my employees were telling me that their families were nervous about them working at a very small startup.  I knew we needed to make not only the employees but the families as excited as we were about our future.

When possible I like to host these family events (and other offsite meetings) at my home – it’s a way for the team to get to know me and my family better and – while we did have a caterer for the big items it’s a chance to put a bit more personal effort into the appreciation aspect.  While I’ll be very excited for SugarSync to be too big to fit in our yard I’ll definitely miss that element!

Sleep or School?

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Classic working parent dilemma – important business meeting tomorrow morning in Minneapolis – back-to-school night tonight at my sophomore son’s high school. You know…the meeting where the teachers go over the syllabus, lay out their expectations for the year etc. Given that this is tenth grade of child number 4 I figure that between the two of us we have the equivalent of 49 nights of back-to-school night under our belt. My husband can definitely cover back-to-school night. When we had two in high-school we split up for the evening and each covered one. But…it’s never the same as if you hear it for yourself. More importantly, for Adam it’s his first (and hopefully only) Sophomore year. I may know Ms. Portman and her curriculum for world history but does it send the right message if I blow it off? With enough coffee, I can manage to be alert after a redeye. So the choice is school not sleep – I really didn’t need to think about it.

Green Cadillac

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A funnier side to the first year story popped into my head when I was thinking back on that year.

Derek and Todd were in school – Kindergarten and second grade – so for a big chunk of the day our nanny Susan was home alone with Margot.  We lived quite close to the office.  Susan would bring Margot to the office every day during my lunch time so that I could nurse her.  At the time we had a 1978 green Sedan Deville as our nanny car, a hand-me-down gift from Steve’s grandmother.  It fit the bill perfectly – big, comfy and, hopefully, safe but it truly looked like a ghetto car – something like this

She would park in the far corner of the parking lot and I would feed the baby in the car.  Then I would go back to my desk and go back to work.

After several months of this one of the sales managers who had a window-office overlooking the above-mentioned parking lot called me into his office.  He sat me down and began to tell me that he “knew about my problem” had “faced a similar problem himself” and wouldn’t tell my manager if I “got help.”  Of course I had no idea what he was talking about.  After a few moments of my blank stare he said “you know, your drug problem.”  He told me that he had observed my daily visit to the dealer’s car.  Of course I promptly burst out laughing and when I calmed down told him that, in fact, I did not have a drug habit, just a habit of being with my baby during lunch.  I explained why and he still wanted to know why a bottle at home wouldn’t suffice.  When I started to describe some of the realities of breastfeeding he became red-faced with embarrassment and shooed me out of his office.  I still chuckle when I picture his face.

The First Year

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I had a lot of time to reflect last night.  I finished moving Margot into her dorm, helping her unpack – then we said our tearful goodbye’s.  After that it was just me and my thoughts (with some showtunes music background) for the 260 mile drive from Hanover, NH to my parents house in Great Neck, NY.  It was a mental trip down memory lane and I think some of my experiences the first year are what I want to share as they relate closely to one of my themes of the work/life juggle.

Margot was born in June 1993.  At the time I was working as a sales rep managing the Andean, Central American and Caribbean region for Informix Software.  I started my maternity leave on my due date but returned to work when a heat wave struck.  I decided it was actually more restful to work in the air-conditioned office and close out the quarter then to swelter at home worrying about the numbers.  It was a treat having most of the summer off to be with the baby.  I then returned to work when she was about 8 weeks old.  My plan was to breastfeed for a year as I had for my older two children.  The tricky part was travel.  My closest customer was 10 hours away and there was no replacing time with them in-person to make the deals happen.  Given the distance of my customers it was impractical to go for less than a week – not compatible with nursing.   Plus I really didn’t want to be separated from any of my children the first year if possible.  I believe that is an important part of the bonding experience.

My solution to this challenge was to bring Margot with me.  She ended up coming with me on about a dozen trips throughout Latin America.  It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done but it was certainly one of the best.  Logistics were not easy.  Carrying an infant carseat through airports (this was 1993, before the era of the “all in one” carseat/strollers) was tiring.  Babysitting was an issue.  When I traveled with newborn Todd 5 years earlier my mom met me in DC to watch him and once my cousin Ellen subbed.  This was trickier.  I arranged babysitters through the hotels where I stayed.  I requested that it be a longtime employee of the hotel (typically a housekeeper) and I interviewed them over the phone.  A few times one of my distributors who I had become friends with would help me find a sitter.  Of course all this took some extra planning.  My friends would ask me if I worried about not knowing the babysitters personally but inevitably she was completely doted on when I was working.   The funny part was that these Latin ladies were not happy that my bald baby girl did not have her ears pierced.  They were concerned she looked like a boy.  They also consistently thought she should be dressed up in fancy dresses even though she was just staying in a hotel room.

The best part was my time alone with her – precious one-on-one time that you don’t usually get with a third child.  I’m enjoying thinking back on those memories now.

Here are 2 pictures from her first passport.  That passport is one of my treasured possessions as a reminder of her first year.

How do you do it? Part II

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Picking up where I left off…

Third – get the best childcare situation you can possibly afford. Childcare is incredibly expensive, especially for very young children, and even more so early on in one’s career when you are not earning as much. Sometimes if feels like you’re a hamster on a wheel, just working to pay for childcare. But if you get past that and focus on the long view of your career, childcare choices can have a huge impact on minimizing the day-to-day juggle. Depending on where you live, once you have two children in daycare it can actually be less expensive to have a nanny. Yes, I know this is a complicated choice with many factors, but as it relates to work/family balance, not having to worry about getting the kids fed and dressed and dropped off at daycare in the morning while trying to get to the office for a big presentation is really a godsend. If in-home childcare isn’t right for your family, at least make the logistics the easiest possible (see my last post regarding commute).

Fourth – cut the cable. And by that, I mean the cable TV. There are simply not enough hours in the day. According to AC Nielsen, the average American watches 4 hours per day. Not even touching the controversy over how harmful this might be, cut this out and suddenly you have a chance of fitting in the more important stuff.

Fifth – is there a “two for” in your day? When my kids were little, like a lot of working moms, I really missed having time just to socialize with my friends. I also wasn’t getting enough exercise!  My “two for” solution was to start hiking with friends, sometimes with the stroller (a “three for”?). Years later this has become one of my favorite activities – I hike most weekend days and many weekday early mornings before work. I don’t have time to do many lunch dates but I really enjoy my hiking dates – it’s a great way to catch up with friends, not to mention enjoy the outdoors.  In fact here’s a picture I took with my iPhone of a beautiful Cooper Hawk I saw during a recent early morning hike at the Stanford dish.