The day before the day
Yesterday Emma and I hosted a Make/Shift at the d.school that brought together prominent women from the Bay Area digital / women’s health tech scene who’re at different stages of their parenting journeys, and around 30 students from every possible walk of life (undergrads, GSB, med school, stats, alums, other d.school teachers).
Tomorrow is the day that every women’s health / “fem-tech” (though I don’t prefer that word) organization will milk for all possible press value: International Women’s Day. Gird your loins, Linkedin! etc. Neither the d.school nor us had this in mind when we decided on a workshop date, but as it happens, today is in fact the day before the day!
Coincidentally that is also word for word the phrase one of our speakers used to talk about the eternal cycle of minutia and mental overhead that she now deals with as a working mom (on top of all her other personal and professional duties). I will borrow this phrase often as an on-steroids working parent version of the sunday scaries that’s an eternal and constant performance of preparation, logistics, execution, backup plans, rinse and repeat until you finally have a few hours to yourself (never enough).
It is worth noting that both Emma and Hilary were wearing Rothys, undoubtedly the Bay Area woman’s shoe of choice.
Emma and I were delighted by the turnout, grateful to all our friends who helped share the event around (Maria, Moh, Sherman, and others, thank you thank you) and jazzed that folks rolled out in spite of the rain. My one regret is that in the rush of planning and implementing this I forgot to bring a to-go container! There were a lot of leftovers.
The panelists had great advice on co-parenting, not sweating the small stuff, and some really personal challenges around the role of grandparents.
Our participants had really great questions around what to delegate, what not to delegate, and how to have these conversations with ease in the workplace.
Based on the nature of this event, some of the most insightful things for me were the most vulnerable things shared by others and I am not at liberty to re-share here. But, some general highlights below.
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Panelists
Hilary talked about how all events now have a chain of preparation and recovery - “the day before the day”. And the day after the day after the day. She talked about how there were some things that the non-birthing parent simply cannot do (breastfeed, carry the baby to term) - and that in itself helped inform the delegation of labor in her household.
Joanna talked about how teachers at school could tell when she was traveling because her kids would show up with mismatched clothes. And that it was entirely OK - part of the small stuff that needed to not be sweated. Things that didn’t matter: what food they ate, what preschool they went to. “All the kids turned out completely fine”.
Rebecca talked about how parenting sharpens prioritization at a whole other level — and the critical importance of finding the right co-parent to partner with (if that’s something people want to do). She also emphasized that an objectively great relationship - even a great marriage - may still not stand up to the tall requirements of co-parenting.
Thanks Julia for proactively assembling this photo. No thanks, me, for attaching the pins wrong so everyone’s flowers were upside down.
Participants
Q asked the panel how critical they thought proximity to grandparents is - and reflected that she wasn’t sure if her family had overlooked this, and whether they were OK in the long run with the real costs of being apart. This resonated a lot with everyone because it is hard to talk about parenthood only in the context of nuclear family.
Julia asked how to ask about people’s kids or families in a work setting (and made the room very very happy with her recounting of an accidental pandoras box she opened with someone who had 5 kids… and was only too happy to talk about every… single… consecutive… one).
Matthew asked about how to navigate the tough boundaries of nanny VS parent - what a working parent delegates to a nanny, at the risk of the bond being stronger between child <> nanny than child <> parent. There wasn’t an easy answer to this but I know it was on many of our minds.
:)
I think a lot about the hidden toll of emotional labor and caregiving which tends to be such a gendered thing in both Asia and the US and so I was surprised/happy to see so many men in attendance.
:(
Something that I guess I should have expected - even before the class began, undergrads mentioned in a pre-intake form that they thought this was “kind of cool but not very relevant to their lives in the future”. Keep in mind - these are already the ones who RSVP-ed for an event literally called Designing for Working Parents.
I’m actually not that sad about it. I’m convinced that this is a sign that we are on the right track even if people don’t feel a need for this content.
From everything I know as a person with working parent friends up close + having worked at a literal return to work company for years - the transition to parenthood is literally one of the most disruptive life events a person can face. So it is in fact, a problem that so many people don’t feel prepared for it until literally mid-transition.
And if an upstream / early intervention yields “we don’t need this” - maybe that’s part of the problem. This is more a community health intervention than an apple / steve jobs “if you make it they will come”. I bet they won’t. But the stakes are still too high for this to continue to go overlooked.
Not to mention the other hidden curveballs (e.g. elder care, relocation, growing work mandate) that early midlife often brings.
Maybe there isn’t much a person can do to prepare. Maybe it’s not actually a problem that parenthood has to come smack you in the face - or all over your body if you are a birthing parent. But I’d like to believe there’s potential for a more gradual learning curve that’s less sudden, violent, extreme, better for everyone.
Family intersects with so much - working identity, personal identity, income, energy, health, relationships. There’s growing attention and support for getting pregnant, returning to work, parenting support etc - but what if the amorphous, long, pre-kids stage is where a lot of foundational work can be done? What if that’s where the hidden levers live, to an easier family building journey afterwards?
I’m still thinking about how to get this right. It may not be a business (in fact, it probably isn’t). It may not even be a class. But this whole pre-kids / 20s “defining decade” period feels like a really overlooked pre-transition in and of itself that feels too high stakes to ignore - and it will touch literally every one of us, because even for the people who decide not to have kids - that is a decision worth being convinced about.
And for what it’s worth - I don’t actually think “optionality” is the thing to optimize for. The goal is not to delay family building as indefinitely as you can until you can’t anymore. It is to be as deliberate as you can about the realities and the trade-offs so you can literally design the path that works best for you (vs having life happen to you).
OK, getting off soapbox.
Hosting and hospitality
We’re lucky to pull off an event in a place as tactile as the d.school with its many maker spaces.
I have had a couple of opportunities in the last few months to appreciate exactly how challenging it is to pull off a great in-person event.
Even for this intimate class - the intensity of the planning and implementation took me by surprise (nothing we couldn’t handle, but still).
Think in a “Studio 1 is only available at 5:20, dinner that has to be picked up in downtown Palo Alto is only ready at 5, you have told people dinner will be ready at 5:45 so they would come at 6, but now some are actually going to come at 5:45, and the d.school is not accessible by car so you will have to park illegally in some fire lane and run trays and trays of aluminum-wrapped piping hot food, 1 by 1 or they will split open on you, at the same time that your co-host receives panelists at a completely different visitor parking lot, also it’s raining, also the d.school is 2 floors and lots of people don’t know Studio 1 is upstairs” kind of way.
It’s nothing we can’t do (we pulled this off, to be clear), but it just reminded me that speaking of overlooked things, event planning IS very overlooked in the general landscape of “valuable and appreciated and monetizable skills”.
It takes real skill to bring people together in a way that helps them feel informed (but not overwhelmed), warmly welcomed (but clear on expectations), and properly taken care of — without flying off the handle, spending too much money, or forgetting little things aka doing it all inefficiently.
And it is hard to both “plan” and “host” - especially if you are trying to make it seem effortless or seamless. To all the planners out there, I see you. And not to make a point but I know most of you are female.
That said, I know my own hosting standards are high and so I really have myself to blame… Thank you, d.school, for having us!
Friendship
Emma and I got to bring some of the flowers home. Post-event we lingered in the parking lot and laughed a lot. We were both exhausted (remember, Emma is an actual working parent) but this felt like a necessary emotional debrief after the awesome chaos of the day.
It also repeatedly occurred to me how much our respective partners did behind the scenes to create room for us to implement this class - and for their many contributions I am very grateful to Rog and Pan.
Thank you to everyone who helped us pull this off - Seamus and Megan and Renee from the d.school Home Team, our panelists Joanna and Rebecca and Hilary for being willing to share their time with us (the combined $$ value of those 2hours of their time….!) , and the metermaids who did not stop me as I mainlined consecutive trays of jerk chicken and tofu from the beeping hazard light trunk of my DO NOT PARK FIRE LANE prius to the d.school.
Hello lamppost, whatcha knowing? I wanna watch your flowers growing!
