Ambition didn’t disappear when I became a mother — it just got more complicated.
Essays on invisible labor, mental load, and building a career that fits a real life.
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Nobody Told Me I’d Think About Milk This Much
24 Hours Inside a Pumping Mom’s Brain People talk about the time it takes to breastfeed and pump. The feeding itself. The pumping sessions. The washing bottles. The washing pump parts. The storage bags. The milk transfers. The freezer inventory. And yes, those things take time, but I knew they would. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much brain space it would take. There’s a background process running in my mind all day long. Like a computer program quietly consuming memory. It never fully shuts off. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable. But it’s always there. Here’s a…
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How Being a Parent Changed How I Work and Lead
Before I had kids, I thought I was efficient. My days were full. My calendar was tight. I moved quickly between meetings, responded fast, stayed on top of things. I took pride in being reliable, responsive, and available. And then I became a parent, and things shifted. Not all at once, and not in a dramatic, life-altering way that made me a completely different person. But in small, steady adjustments that changed how I approached my work. The most obvious change was how I viewed time. There’s less of it, and it’s more constrained. The edges of the day matter…
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There’s Always More Work
There’s a moment at the end of most workdays where you come to a fork in the road. You could keep going, but should you? One more email. One more slide. One more pass at something that’s already good enough but could be just a little better. There’s always something left open. Something unfinished. Something that could move forward if you gave it another thirty minutes. Something where, if you just put that extra time in now, you’d be doing a huge favor to yourself for tomorrow. Or so you think. For a long time, I treated that as a…
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How Non-Parents Can Support Parents at Work
(And How Parents Can Support Non-Parents, Too) We talk a lot about supporting working parents. It shows up in policies. In benefits. In carefully worded statements about flexibility and inclusion. But support is not built in policies. It’s built in the day-to-day, in how we make decisions, how we communicate, and how we show up for each other. One of the moments that has stayed with me the most did not come from a lack of policy. It came from a well-intentioned assumption. My colleagues were planning an impromptu dinner with a customer the evening before a plant visit. The…
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Why Is It So Hard to Say No?
Even my favorite cartoon (dog) mom knows it’s hard to say no. Like many of us, I say yes to way too many things. I want to help, I want to contribute, I want to prove myself. But most of all, I don’t want to say no, even when I know I should. Whether it’s career related, volunteering in my community, or helping with my child’s activities, there is always something to say yes to. Before I became a mom, it was just as hard to say no, but things felt different. I had time, I had energy, and,…
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I Tracked How I Spent My Time for A Week – Here’s What I Learned
After yet another late Friday night at my computer, frantically trying to finish everything I put off all week, I asked myself (yet again), “Where did the time go this week?” Even after giving my calendar a once over, I still had no idea. But then I realized that perhaps I could determine the answer to my time management quandry. “What gets measured gets managed” is often my motto in my professional life as an engineer, so I committed to understanding how I was spending my time for the next seven days. I am an avid follower of Laura Vanderkam — her…