From Here to Autonomy

Femalities: A breakdown of SXSW and a lot of other stuff from a woman's point of view

Don't know what it is--the fact that I've just emerged from a weekend at SXSW, it was International Women's Day on Friday, I got snubbed by a "prominent" male investor/entrepreneur that in the virtual world I respected, though in person not so much--but I am feeling my womanness of late. And no, guys, it's not because it's that time of the month. If anything, it's the world who's experiencing a hormonal shift.

A digital analyst that I bumped into at SX in the lobby of the Hilton asked me what struck me as the big story at SX. I gave him a safe answer that belied the unbelievable growth the BlogHer Network has experienced on mobile platforms </shill for my company> and realized there's a better, more encompassing answer: WOMEN.

You know, those people at SX who like to hug, code, and grab coffee. They've been at SX before (we partnered with SX in '06, developing programming for them around women and have been involved as attendees or board members </shill my business partner> since). They're not really that new in the space. Like content marketing they were around in the Web 1.0 days too, but there are new distinctions that folks seem to be making, in part because, like Facebook, some broke out and went public.

Yes, we don't need to say Sheryl SANDBERG or Marissa MAYER out here. Everyone knows who you are talking about when asked, "What'd you think about Marissa's decision?" or "Lean In, you agree with Sheryl?" It may have been International Women's Day on Friday, but it seems the celebrating here in Austin was delayed for the official launch of "Lean In" instead.

Even my ungeeky friends have reached out and asked me, "So do you think this Lean In stuff is valid?" For the record (and since I was supposed to represent BlogHer on a CNN panel to discuss this Friday, but the topic was bumped to today and we talked about DOMA and Justin Bieber instead) I want to put what I thought was a damn well-conceived opinion out there, to the two of you reading my blog:

I love what Sheryl has done with her platform as resident SV untouchable badass to highlight the issue of women and work. It seems that when women who haven't taken companies public try to do so, the media responds with a tad less enthusiasm. And while I understand the criticism of some of the fembloggers who feel that Sandberg's privileged background makes her an unreliable advocate for those of us who actually have to work, I think someone had to get this conversation started. My hope and intention is to invite others to the conversation who have lived in fear of being fired and feel they have to fake leaning in, or who don't have the resources to lean in without keeling over from the exhaustion of having a full-time career and being a caregiver.

I don't believe that women have an ambition problem. When it comes to having a family and high-powered career they have a power problem.

I attended Jessica Coen's Interview of Anne-Marie Slaughter and felt for the first time in a long time like a pig in shit at a SX session. My people! And I saw plenty of men in attendance at her panel. One even approached me after I asked Anne-Marie my question (Do you think men are equally at risk of having difficulty on-ramping back into the workforce after being at home raising the kids?) and told me how he managed the transition. Finally I can come back from SX with some takeaway for my amazing Stay-at-Home Husband.

And I attended a panel led by John Gerzema that walked us through the research done for his book The Athena Doctrine--which provides powerful examples of men and women who have manifested massive change in the world by adopting feminine qualities such as flexibility, intuition, generosity, and empathy. Gerzema argues that it is the embracing of feminine traits (defined as feminine via a global survey of thousands) that is required to be effective in today's political, economic, and societal realms (and to the "professor" who took issue with Gerzema's omission of his female research partner--who did not co-author the book--on the cover: Consider the maleness of your body language and accusatory tone and Gerzema's open, accepting, perhaps FEMININE response to your attack. Personally, I prefer that he have my back).

And I capped off a long day having dinner with some crazily inspirational women who got where they are (at the top echelons of their companies and running their own) via a killer cocktail of chutzpah, yes, but also of being tireless connectors and interpreters of what the rest of us are going to care about in the future. None of them had the asshole personal interface that I experienced on Saturday, as mentioned earlier that I experienced from an investor entrepreneur who speaks a whole lot about the need to empower women entrepreneurs, just so long as he doesn't actually have to SPEAK or LOOK at any of them at SX. I must say, I've attended countless investor meetings with all-male VCs, tech conventions with mostly male attendees, board meetings with mostly male members, and never have I felt disrespected like I did when I encountered this person and said hello. (To place in Evernote in a file I've reserved for notes on a book I one day intend to write that explores the correlation of assholeness with effectiveness as a visionary. Sadly there often is one, but I'd like to make a case that there doesn't have to be).

I hung out in pubs with men and women who talked about their kids as much as their work projects and who had thoughtful commentary on Marissa Mayer's decision to reverse Yahoo's remote work policy (for the record I'm in the "she's a CEO first" camp. In the future I hope she will address the MANAGEMENT problem that led to the degradation of morale among the remote workers and re-institute flexible work policy.)

Last night, I didn't sleep, and for the first time in a long time, something other than an infant kept me up all night. I had a realization, borne of this combination of aforementioned events, that women are on the cusp of big reckonings. I can feel it pulling me out of my 5-year blogging slump.

I remain true to my belief that being a woman doesn't keep you from getting VC funding--a shitty business plan and weak management team do--and entrepreneurism is accessible to all (Steve Blank, whom I finally got to meet in person at SX, I continue to bow to you). But there continues to be a lack of respect for things female. Note again, I didn't say WOMEN, I said for things/traits female. I think that is going to change. And pretty soon.

On working and having babies

Bless you Marissa Mayer for taking the helm of Yahoo while being six months pregnant. I'm not joking!

While you are hardly the first CEO/Mama to exist, you took the job at the height of your career, which just happened to coincide with those years when mothers/gynecologists/childbearing friends start to needle with good intentions about the approach of the "cliff"--you know the one; when good ovarian eggs suddenly become less easy to come by. You were in a position of power, and already pregnant, when a board concluded that they needed your talents. You didn't need to be apologetic or cryptic about your intentions to have a baby when things were less hectic, or when the time was "right." You know the cosmic joke: The time is never right.

Like you, I had my first baby in my later 30s and will be expecting my second daughter in just a few weeks, at age 40. I must confess, while I was in the "thinking about" stages of building a family (something I hadn't even contemplated until age 36, as I was quite busy starting a company and not thinking about making babies), I wondered if others might think I wasn't serious about my career, now that I was having kids. I was also uncomfortable--having done many things professionally at a relatively young age--being in the position of the newbie and asking 25-year-old moms how to get a kid to latch properly.

Even now, when I go to executive functions while very pregnant, I am aware that some people have judgements. Recently one male exec said to me, "Aren't you a bit old to have kids now?" I wasn't sure if he meant biologically old, or too far in my career to have to now manage babies at the height of their neediness. Women who were sitting near me insisted that the question was nonsense--women are having babies later now, after they've established their careers. But when I asked them when they had their children they said that their kids were older or even grown up. They got the baby-making phase of their lives "out of the way" early in their careers.

When I learned I was pregnant with my first child I agonized about whom to tell and when. I reasoned that bearing children was my right, a right that plenty of male executives exercised. At the same time I made plans to work at full speed--including travel--up to the very last possible moment. I pushed myself harder than usual in order to prove I wasn't less committed to my career now that I was going to be a parent. I took mental note of all the powerful women execs who were parents and wondered when they managed to fit the kids in. You see, there isn't a lot of how-to out there about having babies and high-powered careers. You can read a lot about preparing for little sleep and negotiating a maternity leave, but so many of the women I talked to confided that they winged it, often kept their Mommy status on the down-low, or even traveled for business abroad with baby and nanny in tow to make the transition unnoticeable to colleagues and bosses.

But even with an air-tight system of nannies, assistants and various professionals there to help, there remains the inevitable identity shift that occurs when you become someone's Mama. I recall being on a flight back from New York to San Francisco (one of many I took the first year of my daughter's life) and realizing that, you know what? I'd rather be home tucking her in. You'll be able to rationalize these bouts of momminess and get back to the email at hand, but you can't turn it off indefinitely.

I just read a piece about the various camps of judgement over your move to Yahoo. Some praise your decision of taking a high-profile position while pregnant, and some condemn it. Some argue that with your considerable compensation package you can hire all the help you need to nurture your baby while you handle business. I suppose that's true. But even in these scenarios that many working moms could only dream about, there's the biological tug that you will feel being a mom that makes a demanding job even more demanding. It will sometimes feel like a sacrifice, even when you are lucky enough to afford help. Even knowing that you don't want to be a part- or full-time stay-at-home Mom, you will still wonder what it's like to spend more time with your child.

I don't mean to say you should feel guilty about your choice. Frankly, I would have made the same choice to step up up the career if I'd been offered. I'm only saying that as a Mom and CEO, life won't be pangless. You'll get pangs in the weirdest places--in boardrooms, in TV interviews. You will feel a little lessened when you perceive that your kid laughs a bit more with his caregiver than he does with you. You might sense that you are not as bonded to him as you were when he was just born. And you won't take yourself so seriously when you remember that earlier that day, you were wiping someone's butt.

But I congratulate you on your choice to step it up. And I hope that, while you don't owe anyone details on how you are managing this choice, that you will be open to talking about it and sharing your experiences with other working moms.

A Woman in Tech/Media's Take on Yahoo's Hiring of Marissa Mayer as CEO

I've had 24 hours to marinate on the news of Marissa Mayer's appointment as CEO of Yahoo. Initially I was shocked by the immediacy of it all--Mayer resigned from Google Monday and started her new post at Yahoo! today, just days after reports of Jason Kilar taking himself out of consideration and Ross Levinsohn seeming the logical next choice. It seemed a Hail Mary move to save a company that was stroking out in the press; a shot of adrenaline thrust into the heart of an Internet giant that could either save it, or leave it a near-corpse, damaged from all of the half-and poorly executed experiments of well-meaning CEOs past.

Perhaps "near-corpse" is too dramatic. Yahoo is still a content and advertising powerhouse. Mayer's selection is generally being described as a good thing. Some industry experts are even making cautious comparisons of Mayer's hire to Steve Jobs's appointment as CEO of Apple--finally a product visionary to help bring Yahoo back to its cool, techie roots.

Ah, were it as simple as following the Jobs playbook. Being a female co-founder of a digital media start-up, I know I should be dancing the Hora with my fellow entrepreneuses; another woman from our Silicon Valley hometown has tipped the "Women in Real Power" scales slightly more in our favor. But I hesitate, not because I do not have faith in Mayer's ability, but because I am a businesswoman. And I have a few reservations.

1. I do not immediately subscribe to the "product trumps all" argument. I thought Marc Andreesen was quite convincing in his enthusiasm for Mayer's appointment. But even he admitted surprise over the Yahoo! Board's selection, he diplomatically reasoned, because he was surprised they landed such a talented fish in the public spectacle that had become the search for Yahoo!'s next CEO. Still, he was surprised.

I agree that for media/tech companies product is important. Rely too much on content alone, or someone else's technology, and you become irrelevant. But (and let me just disclose my media bias right here--a professional hazard) let's not discount where Yahoo is still making money--in content. Mayer has huge chops developing cool-ass products, but there are certain mundanities that she'll also have to address, like the myriad content businesses and programming that Yahoo! serves up every day to pay the bills. 

Clearly, the Yahoo board's decision to hire an engineer to helm the company indicates a larger emphasis on product. And I applaud the longer-term thinking, and the pure ambitiousness of yanking out the wiring, even the wires that work, to restore Yahoo as a tech innovator. But I had my money on Levinsohn to lead. How inside the box of me. Must be all those years having to earn revenue by quarter.

I hope that the learnings gained from Yahoo's prominence as a content company don't go to waste. Yahoo still needs partners, and content sources, and an impression base, to get it through its identity crisis. The jury was out on Scott Thompson's plan to drive consumer commerce into the mix before he had to resign as Yahoo's CEO in May, but it was a move that could have made sense, given social technology is highlighting how easy it is to corral purchase recommendations, and mobile tech is making it stupid simple to purchase on the spot. There was money being left on the table that Yahoo could easily swipe.

I think that Mayer will have to address the collective whiplash remaining employees inevitably feel from having survived multiple rounds of business strategy, and unlike in Google's early days, where there was nowhere to go but where others hadn't, Mayer will have to respect some legacy businesses, even while renovating them.

2. Being a CEO is hard. Not like I know from experience or anything. But I do have a business partner who is our CEO, who came from the product side.  She is a testimony to how product geeks CAN run companies, but it ain't a day in the lab, where you get to wax philosophical about product. It's a series of painful decisions based on hard truths and counterforces, and some things you'd rather not deal with.

Before Mayer was hired, Ross Levinsohn had put some nasty lawsuit business with Facebook behind him. What fun. While I'm sure Mayer can handle icky things like investor relations, will she want to? Or will she have the presence of mind to hire the corporate talent of a few suity types to do this while she focuses on her strengths? 

Also, there's a new level of mudslinging that occurs when you are the CEO that you don't necessarily experience when you are the anointed badass of product, or even when you are the 20th employee of one of the most successful companies in history. I don't dare suggest Mayer does not have thick skin; I suggest that this is another facet to leading a major corporation that requires skillz. And it remains to be seen how she will handle it.

Like I said, no Horas just yet. Just a pat on the back and a sincere "Good Luck!"

Reservations aside, I think that Mayer's decision to take the job is a no-brainer. Marc Andreesen thought it was such a coup that Mayer would be willing to helm a damaged company, but isn't that the point of taking the job? What determined powerhouse executive wants to take on a perfectly run company, where others will only compare your performance to that of the person who led before you? Here, the board, the employees, the public, is begging for change. She doesn't have legacy founders to contend with like she had at Google. Founders who provided Mayer with the opportunity of a lifetime but couldn't possibly provide the continued growth that she was ready for. Yahoo! offers Mayer the chance to implement her vision--the most meaningful thing someone who has already been successful at a successful company could want. 

The best opportunity at this point is one at which she might fail, but fail her own way. 

A final note, from someone about to have her second child in a month: Kudos to the Yahoo! board and the press who didn't harp on Mayer's pregnancy, or suggest that it would negatively affect her ability to lead a company. It's not easy having babies and raising small children while running any company, let alone Yahoo!, but if we women keep anticipating others' discomfort with our choice to have families, we will take ourselves out of the running for such high-profile roles completely. 

I know I've taken to task the media's oversimplified interpretation of Sheryl Sandberg's "Don't Leave Before You Leave" philosophy, and applauded Anne-Marie Slaughter's assertion that maybe powerful women don't NEED to jump on every prestigious opportunity that comes our way, but for those of us who do want these opportunities AND have babies I am encouraged by how this acceptance of Mayer's choices is playing out.

 

Life of a Secondary Caregiver

"KYE!" My daughter was yelling at me yesterday, pointing upwards. I looked at my husband, not understanding.

"Yes, My Love, SKY!" he said. It was another word in her repertoire, one that I hadn't inspired.

Last weekend, when I put on her shoes I thought she was babbling. And then I realized what she was saying,

"BUT … BUT …"

She wanted me to put on her boots.

"Don't let her wear those socks," Jesse said, as I was putting a lavender pair on her little feet. "She can't walk around in those."

"It's not a biggie," I said, putting them on and then watching Liv slip and slide on the wooden floors.

Months into coming back to work I started to notice the difference, the disconnect. I could no longer correctly guess my daughter's every need as she needed it. I could not figure out why she patted her stomach, or screeched in delight. Daddy knew how to make her laugh, while with my attempts she looked at me, not unamused but perhaps a bit confused. I watched her like a student, waiting for a teacher to explain to me what I was witnessing.

I catch myself saying things to my husband:

"Can I give her this?" I ask, holding a cup of juice. I know he has a system and doesn't want her to drink too much juice at bedtime. And then I ask myself, "Why am I asking for permission?"

"Think we can take off her sweater when she eats?"

"I think YOU can," Jesse says.

I know that when I come in the door it's my turn to be the parent. But sometimes I'm rusty, especially when I'm coming from a business trip. I put my stuff down (forgetting to zip up my purse--big mistake as its contents will inevitably be strewn across the floor once she gets to it). I want to talk about my day. Jesse wants to finish the game he'd started on his iPhone two hours before, when he last had a minute to kill.

I didn't finish an email before getting off the plane, so I open up the laptop. I just need 90 seconds to get it done.

"Are you going to be with her, or are you going to do email?" Jesse asks. He's making dinner.

"This is going to take just a minute." She comes for me with her arms out. The email is going to have to wait.

With a few moments of exception, I've learned to stop trying to fit in emails before dinner. My goal has become to put everything down and have my hands washed before she comes around the corner with her arms up. I love that she's made it difficult for me; before her no one had succeeded.

Today I'm squeezing in a blog post, a few emails, and some online shopping into her nap time. Jesse's just come back from his Saturday bike ride--one of two or three times he gets to himself during the week. He comes in the front door, avoiding the garage door, which can sometimes wake her when opened.

"What time did she go down?"

I tell him what time. And I know it's 30 minutes later than he suggested to avoid her becoming overtired.

"Bummer," he says, walking his bike through the kitchen.

I don't worry about it. She'll get used to these days with Mom. When naptimes are off, when a bottle is forgotten. She knows that I live for this time with her, however imperfect it may be.

Making it Work: Traveling while lactating

I have no expectations of earning any bloggys for this series of posts, in which I share the practicalities of being a working mom of a baby girl. I realize that this solidifies my status as "one of those people" who think that every mundane aspect of parenting deserves to be chronicled.

But I feel strongly about writing about my experience, even if that experience is not that exciting, or doesn't lend itself to engaging prose. I find that as a relatively new mom I slurp up others' anecdotes, as I'm hungry for hearing about how other women manage in what seems to be at times two self-canceling realities: working and parenting. Indulge me, or tune in another time when I am back in working mode...

I had worried about how difficult it might be to return to work. Not the work part, the being away from the babe part. And the pumping part. Actually the transition has been--dare I say--good. Better than expected.

I enjoyed every second I had spent with my daughter on mat leave, but I was jonesing for a schedule. I like having to adhere to a schedule and having dedicated thinking time. Having this space in the day only makes seeing my daughter at the end of it that much more enjoyable.

The pumping is a pain, but everyone at the office is supportive. We've made our supply room the "Pump Room" for the time-being. I duck in and put a sign on the door, requesting 30 minutes of privacy, three times a day. I crank out email and even take calls in there if they are internal. If it's a client call, I take it in my office. 

Travel has been interesting. I started off slow--a day trip down to LA--fly in, fly out. How hard could it be? Still, it was my first, and a new milestone in my time away from child.

"It will be like I'm at the office," I told H-band, only it really wouldn't be. I had a place to pump at the office, and I hardly knew where I would pump in LA. Surprisingly I'd yet to have the dignity-dissolving experience of pumping while perched on the john, the slurping sound of my hands-free Medela echoing off the tiled walls of a public bathroom.

I was grateful that my first business trip since returning from mat leave was a relatively simple one. I carried a purse and my pumping equipment in a second canvas bag. It's been beautiful on the West Coast; I didn't even need to fuss with a coat. I figured, what could befall me other than a flight delay?

The first obstacle was in security. I hadn't even pumped yet, but my equipment bag had to go through a second inspection. Still I got through to my flight. Easy peasy.

I didn't fly into LAX but rather Orange County, a smaller airport, but fortunately it had a Red Carpet Club. All of the enclosed offices had glass walls overlooking the airport--a nice touch, but not for someone looking for a private place to pump. I headed to the women's restroom.

It was a onesie. With no stall. Shit.

I did the math: Meeting in little over an hour; four hours since I'd pumped. I needed to do this--now. I held the restroom hostage, grateful that only one poor soul knocked.

I flew out of LAX, which was much more amenable, meaning I used a stall in the club on the far end of the rest room that had a changing table--just enough space to lay out my gear, strap up, and read email on my Blackberry while pumping.

Amazing how grateful you become for the little things.

But security was a bear.

"What's in your bag, ma'am?"

"A pump. And some milk."

"Security check! We have some milk here."

I walk past the conveyor belt toward another station with different equipment.

"Ma'am, do I have your permission to take the contents out of this bag, or would you like me to do this in private?"

It wasn't like he was asking me to nurse in public."

"Here is fine."

I felt a bit sheepish, as he held up half of one bottle--all that I had managed to squeeze out in Orange County. All this freaking work for three ounces.

"I'm going to put this through a radiation test," the TSA official said.

It failed.

"What does this mean?" I asked, that my milk is radioactive?

"No ma'am. We just need to do another test." He opened the bottle of milk and put what looked like a litmus strip over the top to "test the fumes."  I was free to go.

This week I traveled cross-country for several days. I'd mapped out my meetings and marked in my calendar good times to pump, but I didn't know for certain where--or if--there would be places to take my get up. Even if I could duck into a bathroom at any one of the places I was headed, I wasn't sure I wanted to pump at a client engagement. I looked at my schedule and noted that I was cutting it close between my last meeting and my flight home. I wondered if it would be gauche to pump in the cab on my way to the airport. Are there rules about that?

UPDATE: I opted not to pump in the cab--too messy, and the trip went fine, though I'm quite positive my boobs are confused. I pumped at our NY offices whenever I had a chance, then went for long stretches of nada. Watching what I consider liquid gold go down the drain (I had resolved myself to pumping and dumping, rather than try and figure out how I'd keep my milk fresh for three days) was more painful than I thought. In the early days I fought hard to establish a supply, and for three days my goal was to just get rid of it.

On the way back to CA I managed to pump before my flight, in the club restroom. I appreciated all the free tampons, pads, feminine aids that were available in the rest room, but I would have traded this bounty for a stall large enough to place all of my luggage and pumping equipment, and a surface in the stall to place my stuff.

I had just enough time afterward to grab a snack in the club and make it to my boarding gate. By the time I landed in SF I looked like Dolly Parton from the neck down. 

Concerns of a Mom returning to work

This is the last weekend of my maternity leave, which I've anticipated for a long time. I've been planning the timing of things in my head and practicing on the breast pump--which for all its necessary function also is a bit dehumanizing. Even as I rely on them, I'm a bit repulsed by the pump, the plastic milk storage bags, these poor facsimiles of maternal role replacement. I know, I know, many women have done this before me; broken the seal of the little bubble of constancy created around them and their child. It has to be done sometime, but I still find myself recoiling from the inevitable pop.

I remember asking a woman in my office who had recently returned from maternity leave how she felt to be back. She was glad to be working again but confessed that she cried dropping her son off at daycare. A friend of mine who returned to work three months ago said she cried every day for two weeks very morning, after dropping off her daughter with a shared nanny. I'm lucky: My husband will be staying at home with my daughter--no emotional drop-offs; no wondering if she's clean or scared. I don't imagine myself crying, but rather digging in to work like I've done for the past 17 years. Work has a way of helping me temporarily forget things. But I worry: what if I don't temporarily forget? What if I find it too easy to forget?

I must confess, I miss being focused on things for longer than three minutes, with no distractions.

My child has not been away from me for 3.5 months. There was one day when Daddy took her out thinking he would come home sooner, but, amazed that she took a bottle in her sleep, he stayed out a whopping six hours. Aside from that anomalous day we've been apart no longer than three hours. Never has a relatively short eight hour work day seemed like such a hurdle.

We've tried to get her to take a bottle (asleep or awake) for two months, and we have had no luck aside from the aforementioned "dream feed". Sometimes she screams during our attempts; most times she plays with the nipple of the bottle, thinking we're offering her a new toy, happy to chew on it for a few seconds but ultimately rejecting it. We've offered the bottle with Mommy out of sight, with Mommy in the room, with Mommy subbing it in for the breast during a nursing, with experienced Grandmas and Aunts helming the effort, with Daddy begging her to consider, with bottles that look like boobs, with bottles that look like pacifiers, and with bottles that look like bottles, but nada.

We're now resorting to what friends tell us is the final, most effective method: Mommy goes back to work and makes the baby take a bottle or starve. This option is more than unsettling.

The babe also doesn't like to sleep in her crib. The past three months has elapsed over a long series of hand-offs between me and my husband; and if you are the one she falls asleep on, you must transition her to the nearest bed-like surface. Sometimes this can be a crib, or co-sleeper, or reclined baby swing or couch. The transition is done with the grace and precision of an experienced tai chi practitioner, as the babe cannot feel any slackening, dropping, or fidgeting or she will wake up.

This on-demand service will be impossible to continue when I go back to work, including the days when I'm working from home. In other words, unless we get this kid trained to fall asleep on her own, in her own bed, my husband will be the sole set of arms for eight-hour stretches of time. I've been praying for him and reminding him that, in retrospect, these times pass by all too quickly.

There were short stretches during my leave when I took a work call, sat in on an important meeting, responded to email, jotted down some thoughts I had about something business-related. All of these moments were all-encompassing. I know myself, and while I often multitask, I cannot integrate mothering with working. Both must be done exclusively during the times I've designated for them.

This, in itself, is a mixed blessing because it forces me to keep these realms separate, but it also forces them to compete. The work side can no longer sneak in minutes, that turn into hours, pursuing unscheduled ideas and entering spontaneous discussions. All of my spontaneity will be paradoxically planned; hemmed into my work day. The Mom side has to acknowledge the future I'm building at its short-term expense. I'll miss some milestones of my daughter's development and catch her at the crankier end of the day.

And I'll abandon someone I once left before, years ago, with whom I'd become reacquainted over the past three months. She knows how to sit in a room without looking at the clock. She forgets appointments. She sometimes forgets to bring her cell phone with her when she's out. She calls her friends in the middle of the day and apologizes if she catches them working. She finds joy in crazy things like changing diapers. She's not hankering to go places. She gets weepy from looking at babies, particularly ones she has to leave.   

Breastfeeding in the office: My view

I recall a conversation I had with a woman who was my neighbor at the time, telling me how she handled feeding her newborn as a working mom: It really wasn't an issue, she said, she simply brought her baby to work with her and nursed her in the office. I was far enough away from having to plan my own parenting options that I simply took mental note of it and finished drinking my glass of wine.

Two years later I'm sitting in a lactation class, seemingly the only one with questions. "But if I'm coming into and out of the office, or even traveling, how do I get on a SCHEDULE?" I ask the woman at the top of the circle. "You just breast feed like you normally would, and then you pump some additional for when you are in the office," she said.

This answer didn't satisfy me. What if I didn't have more milk to pump? She seemed to assume I was going to have a steady presence in the office, but seeing as my job involves a lot of travel, that wasn't going to be the case. How would I manage pumping in, say, airport bathrooms, or after a day of back to back meetings? And what about others' around me? Would everyone understand my need to nurse? I spent my first few months of pregnancy in silence, taking perhaps more meetings and going on more business trips, as if to shore up enough pre-mommyhood chips for when I'd need to cash them in later.

I didn't want to make this group class all about me, so I let the questions linger in my head. Later, asking other women how they managed to breastfeed while working I was told much the same thing by all of them, "You just figure it out." I envisioned  "figuring it out" meaning something akin to developing a milk inventory spreadsheet, wearing a breast pump under my clothes and people associating me with this constant, electric sucking sound.

I was glad to see women like Margaret Heffernan--whose book about the dynamics of women in the workplace The Naked Truth I practically ate it was so relevant and consuming--address this issue of being a lactating executive. On the face of it, feeding one's child is such an unquestioned necessity; why is the management of this task so fraught with anxiety? Why should the fact that I am working while handling this activity make others--and hence myself--so uncomfortable?

"I don't know why you can't sometimes take the baby with you to work and nurse her when you need to," H-band said. I looked at him like he'd just suggested we join the circus.

"No no no no no. Nope. Not doing that. No. I mean, no. Not appropriate." And yet, didn't my former neighbor say that she did that at her job with the city? What makes me so different? Shouldn't I feel more empowered to develop a strategy that works for me as my company's co-founder?

Heffernan's post describes how another executive mom, Sabrina Parsons, struggles but manages the day to day feeding of her baby while heading up a Silicon Valley software company. Fact is, as one of Heffernan's readers points out, the law requires that women be allowed time and a place to express milk while at work, whether she's the CEO of the company or entry level. I know from personal stories how companies such as Walmart even provide spaces for employees to handle the care--and feeding--of their newborns.

But, notes Heffernan, "...the true barrier to women breastfeeding at work isn't legal; it is cultural. I could get away with it because I was the CEO. There are many, many companies that find this very difficult to take, not least because it reminds them that their employees do have other priorities in their lives beyond work!"

I recall several years ago a sponsor at BlogHer who called me after the conference to complain about how inappropriate it was that women were allowed to breastfeed in the vicinity of their sponsored area. I reminded this person that we not only allowed breastfeeding, we provided a lounge for it. Then why, the female sponsor asked, didn't we kindly ask women who opted to breastfeed in more public places to go to the lounge? Because, I told her, we didn't think of nursing anywhere at the conference as inappropriate. The lactation lounge was for women who wanted quiet and privacy. For those who didn't require either, the rest of our space was also fair game.

I have to laugh that this sponsor, who was targeting moms, felt that breastfeeding was so off-brand, even an embarassment. This incident reminds me that while I do not feel in the least bit uncomfortable with the notion of women breastfeeding in my workspace, the possibility of others' discomfort and disenchantment with women who integrate their mothering and their jobs affects me. Indeed, there remains a tension, for me, anyway, around bringing my mom duties to the office. Though we offer lounges for breastfeeding moms at our conferences, we don't have too many precedents in  our office itself. While there are so many mothers at our company, their children are past breastfeeding age, or they work out of their homes, for the most part. I do feel that my choice to have a child and to breastfeed are just that, choices, not sweeping policy decisions that require everyone to have to witness.

I will not push back meetings to go pump. Nor will I feed my kid behind Levolor blinds. I know some people do, and I think it's great they are able to. I will prefer to surreptitiously surrender to someplace that's private and that has an electrical outlet,  pack away the proceeds in a heavily sealed bag in the company refrigerator, and jump on the next con call.

I appreciate that the law and my colleagues will allow me to acknowledge that I am a Mom because the realities of life raising children while working make both unignorable. Though, for now, I need a line drawn, even a self-imposed one, to make both work.