The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself

By Whitney Casares

Learn how to thrive—not just survive—as a modern mom.You love your kids. You're proud of your professional accomplishments.You have hobbies and friends. And you're tired. So tired.Working moms often feel like they're failing on many different fronts. Butwhat if there was a guide to reenvisioning, reprioritizing, and restructuringto build a vibrant, intentional life?As a practicing pediatrician and mother of 2 young daughters, Dr. WhitneyCasares understands balancing family and career. She shares honest insightsabout her own challenges combined with her professional expertise aboutchildren of working moms—they thrive!—to create a reassuring guide tonavigating modern motherhood.In this practical plan, you'll learn to set priorities, cultivate self-care, establishan equal parenting partnership, delegate whenever appropriate, and more.With help from Dr. Casares' advice, it's time to make motherhood joyful again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: American Academy of Pediatrics
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781610024877

Book preview

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Introduction

Why a Book for Working Moms?

It’s not looking good for my children’s gold star status on the behavior board today. One of my children is at the indoor play gym posturing for her position in line for the slide. The other is grabbing her sister’s toy out of her hands, seemingly oblivious to the shrieks of offense and horror coming from her sibling. I’m trying to stay focused on managing their behavior as an urgent text comes through from my office, dividing my attention and making my attempts at manhandling 2 rascals much more difficult. I’ve been up since 5:30 am, when I woke on my third alarm in time to make it to an exercise class and get some me time in. It’s technically my day off today, but it sure feels like my day on.

That’s the story I hear day in and day out as I connect with working moms in my pediatrics practice, and it’s how I’m tempted to feel too. Raising children is hard. So is working full time, taking care of a household, maintaining a thriving romantic relationship with a partner, and taking care of yourself. No amount of education or expertise makes this thing called modern motherhood any less challenging, even if you’re a Stanford-trained pediatrician and run a website on the topic on the side. Just like the next mom, I have a lot to juggle, and I’m a work in progress as I try to manage it with grace and perspective. I continue to move toward equity with my partner at home. I do my absolute best at work. I’m committed to making sure my kids feel loved and cared for while I’m figuring out ways to stay sane and whole myself. It’s all a dance, and, sometimes, it’s a clumsy, off-rhythm one at best.

Moms who read my first book, The New Baby Blueprint: Caring for You and Your Little One, said they were most inspired by the advice I gave on coping with the transition to motherhood. When I sat down to figure out what wisdom I wanted to impart in this book, I knew the advice I gave about coping well would also be the most critical here. I realized writing about life beyond the initial postpartum period would be more challenging because it’s so much more complicated. I also realized that I often still felt pretty unwise myself, even though I give parenting advice all day in clinic and have built a career and community via Modern Mommy Doc, as I muddle through motherhood. How do you expertly share tips and tricks for balancing life and work when you don’t do it perfectly yourself?

That’s when I came to my truth: I’ve become an expert on helping moms in the early years because I myself learned to give up on mothering perfection a long time ago. I’ve seen way too many modern moms who are, in large part, struggling and failing because they’re trying to do it all, all the time. I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I’ve honed in on the true, freeing message we actually need: our constant yearning for perfect balance is exactly what’s leading us astray—stealing our joy and ruining modern motherhood. And that’s why I wrote this book—because we don’t need another 5 steps to instant success kind of working mommy manual—the kind that focuses only on tactical strategies for doing more. We do need a philosophically based take a step back so we can get some perspective kind of guide—the kind that allows us to do less and reach a deeper level of joy and contentment at our jobs and at home with our family.

Everyone knows that being a mom itself is tough and that working moms shoulder a unique kind of stress. In homes with 2 working parents, moms almost always take on the majority of the household workload, even if both parents work full time. In single-parent homes, mothers or fathers are struggling to handle everything alone. In 2-home families, the coordination and collaboration create an extra layer of chaos. Working moms have full-time expectations at work plus full-time expectations at home plus societal pressures to be perfect. Oh, yeah, and how can you forget the mommy guilt, all while juggling these things and making everyone happy? We’re pulled too thin, stretched too far. We’re overloaded, but it feels like, even though something has got to give, everything will fall apart if anything does.

Sociologist Caitlyn Collins, author of Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, studied parenting paradigms in 4 wealthy Western countries.

Across the countries where I conducted interviews, one desire remained constant among mothers. Women wanted to feel that they were able to combine paid employment and child-rearing in a way that seemed equitable and didn’t disadvantage them at home or at work. The United States is an outlier among Western industrialized countries for its lack of support for working mothers.

Collins found that American moms seem to have it the worst when it comes to trying to balance conflicts between work and family and that they see it all as their fault—as a personal problem—when really structural problems and cultural norms are to blame.

I want American moms to stop blaming themselves. I want American mothers to stop thinking that somehow their conflict is their own fault, and that if they tried a little harder, got a new schedule, woke up a little earlier every morning, using the right planner or the right app, that they could somehow figure out the key to managing their stress. That’s just not the case.

Turns out, working harder at mothering, doing it all, is overrated and exhausting. It burns us out, making us anxious, frazzled, and resentful.

That’s why this book is not going to tell you how to do it all. It won’t offer 3-step solutions to every working motherhood problem, not because the problems don’t exist or because they’re not worth solving, but because some of them won’t ever be settled until society adapts and evolves. This book is not going to teach you how to balance your life perfectly. You’ll find practical help for simplifying and for laying a foundation of efficiency, but it won’t make you a superhero, able to do anything and everything in your 24-hour day. In fact, here’s the most important message I want you to take away after you get to the very last page: You can’t do everything if you want to do anything well. You’ll have to accept that there are trade-offs and benefits to every decision that you make and you’ll have to make some tough decisions as a working mom about your priorities if you want to actually enjoy anything. If you do, the sky is the limit on the joy-o-meter.

This book is also not going to teach you how to care for yourself perfectly as you mother. Self-care is important, but we miss the point when we approach self-care like it exists in a vacuum for mothers or like it is the be-all and end-all. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. Self-care is important but requires prioritizing and compromising when you have kids. It requires overcoming guilt and, often, getting a reluctant partner on board. Successful self-care has to work for you and your budget, which may change, depending on the season of your life. Self-care is not about checking off a box or about using a certain formula. It’s about returning to yourself, about finding joy.

Finally, this book is not going to teach you solely how to win at work. We won’t talk about how to fight for the corner office, about how to climb the corporate ladder, or about how to really make it, because I strongly believe that making it doesn’t necessarily mean being single-minded or being top dog in a corporation. It can include professional achievement, but it doesn’t have to. Truly successful modern working moms know that winning at work matters but that winning at parenting matters too (and that, if they lose themselves in the process, it was all for nothing). Their mission is complicated; their struggle is complex. Working moms want to find balance; they want to find long-term contentment; and, above all, they want to promote the social-emotional health of their kids and of themselves.

That’s what you’ll learn in The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself: how to approach motherhood with perspective and intention, how to make room for the most important things in your life—the things that make you you, for the things that give you joy, and how to balance it all. You’ll find real stories from real moms—moms who are flawed but not failing, whose tips and tricks for keeping it all together will work 99% of the time but who also recognize that some days are total lost causes.

This book is deeply personal to me and to the other working moms who contributed to it. There are stories no one else has heard, Confessions From Working Moms; moms I interviewed sobbed through as they recalled them to me. They shared their journeys so you could either follow suit or learn from their mistakes. You’ll find brutal honesty and real hope—hope in the reality that being a working mom is hard but worth it, that you are an amazing parent—not in spite of the fact you work but because you do. We’ll find hope that, as a working mom, you can win at parenting without losing yourself.

Chapter 1

Doing Away With Single-minded Grit

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.

—Sheryl Sandberg

CONFESSIONS FROM WORKING MOMS: Katie is a human resources executive. She rose quickly in the ranks through hard work and a heavy focus on her career. She is celebrated by her peers and has upward mobility. She is so capable and smart that she can do anything she sets her mind to. Now that she has had her second child, though, she is seriously questioning if the dream of the corner office is really that lofty a goal.

Yesterday, she decided to take her 3-year-old son and 4-month-old baby girl on an outing. She had 1 week until her maternity leave came to an end, the skies were blue in Portland (a rarity), and she itched for the chance to bond with both kids before she officially returned to her stressful position. Her son had been requesting a trip to the gondola that connects Oregon Health and Science University’s water-front and mountain campuses for weeks so he could see the special engine room. Today, she decided, is the day, preparing herself with all the gear necessary for potential diaper blowouts, toddler snack requests, and weather changes.

On her arrival to the gondola engine room, baby June immediately started fussing. No problem, she thought, reaching for a pacifier from her bag. But June was not interested in the pacifier or in multiple attempts at nursing in a crowded room. Katie fumbled with the nursing cover and her wriggly baby, who grew more and more unsatisfied in her arms by the minute. She shushed, she swayed, she swaddled, but June was having none of it. After 10 minutes of full-tilt screaming, Katie decided it was time to call it quits.

Sorry, buddy, she explained to her son Carter. Sister doesn’t feel good. We have to come back another day to see the gondola. Can you be a patient big brother and be nice to June on the way home? She will probably still cry a little as we drive.

He looked up at his mama with sad eyes but nodded and started walking toward the car.

June cried at the top of her lungs the entire 26-minute ride back across town. Carter sat silent in the back. Katie was never so happy to see her driveway, but the day’s challenges were not over. As she tried to handle all of her gear and a still-screaming baby while getting out of the car, she asked Carter to bring his sippy cup into the house.

No, mommy, you bring it, he responded.

She took a deep breath and tried to be logical. "OK, Carter. If you don’t want to bring your cup in, you have to leave it in the car. Mommy can’t carry it right now. Her hands are full, and June is really