Home/Work : Working Mothers

Adult Garanimals: What's Your Working Mom Uniform?

kgranju — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:51:00 GMT

This is a photo of me, earlier tonight, talking to the very clever students who run the University of Tennessee's digital journalism showcase, TNJN.com. I had a great time, and appreciate having been asked to talk about what I do for a living.

As you can see in the photo below, I am wearing my defacto version of adult Garanimals - black, black and then some more black. These black on black ensembles are easy to throw together without being all matchy, matchy. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.

The adult Garanimals are a great solution for me to pull together quickly and painlessly as I rummage around each morning, attempting to get myself dressed, C dressed for the day, all the kids fed, and everyone out the door in time for school and work. The only down side I've found is that black does tend to show all the dog hair and stray curry that one might encounter in a given day....

So what's your own working mom uniform, or do you have one? Tell me in the comments below.

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I bring home the bacon; he fries it up in the pan

kgranju — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:49:00 GMT

There have been many moments since I hit age 21 when I realized that this was "it," and I was truly an adult. Marriage, birth, divorce, loss of my own parent - each of these life-changing events gave me a fresh sense of being a real grown-up, with real grown-up responsibilities. But nothing, nothing at all has made me feel the full weight of adulthood the way becoming my family's primary breadwinner has.

I come from a family of working women. My grandmother was a journalist for nearly 60 years, serving as editor of the iconic Hollywood tabloid, Photoplay magazine during my childhood (that's my grandmother toiling at her Photoplay desk in the photo below). My mother was a newspaper reporter and editor, a wire service bureau chief, and currently serves as the PR flack for a major government agency. So I always expected that I would work. But even with the feminist upbringing I received, I must have somehow always held the thought in the back of my mind that the ultimate responsibility for keeping the wolf from the door would belong to someone else, not me. This wasn't ever really a conscious assumption. In fact, had you asked, I would have denied it. I actually only realized I held this view after life finally put me in charge of keeping an entire family fed and clothed and housed

For the first decade of my life as a parent, I was the secondary wage earner. Don't misunderstand, I always, always worked, but most of the time it was on a freelance or contract basis, while my husband's "real" job assured us a 401K and health insurance and a steady paycheck. My monetary contribution to our family was not insignificant, but it was his job that was the anchor of our financial health.

Then, when I was 34, divorce changed everything, and I suddenly had to get my own real job... really fast. Thankfully, I was able to do that. While the first year or two as a working mother were very challenging, I managed to dig in to the workforce, and I have done better economically each year. I have also been lucky that I have been able to keep freelancing (writing, editing) outside of my full-time day job.

Now, I am remarried to a wonderful guy, and we've added a fourth child to our family. And in contrast to my previous marriage, the roles my husband and I play in our family life are flipped. He does more than 50% of the childcare for our one-year-old, taking her to work with him each day at the family business where he works. When one of the children is sick, he's more likely to take time away from his job than I am. And he does a great deal of the housework, grocery shopping and general household management.

Our arrangement is definitely unconventional, but he does more of the traditionally "female" stuff in our family because as it happens, I am the primary wage earner. I make more than twice what my husband does, and my job also provides us with our health insurance and retirement account. Don't get me wrong, he's great at his job, and his financial contribution to our family is very important. However, we both recognize that my career requires our full support - mine as the person doing the job, and his as the person taking the lead in manning (heh) the homefront. So far, this arrangement is working well for us. In fact, we both agree that we would ideally like to expand my wage-earning capacity so that he can spend even more time at home with the children. He's great at it, and is actually better suited to stay-at-home parenting than I am.

All of this sounds very progressive and wonderful, and mostly it is. But I would be lying if I didn't admit that I occasionally have nights when I lie awake, stressed by the role I now hold as the person primarily responsible for financially taking care of the people I love. Never before have I felt more adult than I do when I consider the fact that if I were to screw up and lose my job, or if I got laid off due to the bad economy, everything we have could come tumbling down around us. It's a responsibility I take very seriously, and it can feel extremely frightening at times. It's made me recognize the deep-seated and naive belief I somehow developed in childhood that I would ultimately always be able to depend on someone else to "take care of me."

Of course, I was wrong. And whatever cultural biases that planted that subconscious belief in my psyche are likely still at play in the way girls - and boys - grow up today. But I'm now trying to give my own children of both genders a different and more explicit message: I tell each of them that they need to assume that no one else will earn the money that will support them and any family they choose to have. Maybe if they hear this enough from me now, it won't be so terrifying the first time they realize they are actually doing it.

ADDENDUM: I want to respond to some of the comments below. First of all, my husband is not threatened or offended or otherwise bothered by the idea that I make more money than he does -- or that I just blogged about the fact that I make more than he does. And of course there are reasons why I currently make more money than he does, and the fact that I've been in the workforce longer than he has is certainly among them. But the point of my post wasn't why I make more money at the moment. The point was that as the primary wage earner, I feel a lot of responsibility. Last, I am well aware that the work my husband does at home and with the children is just as valuable as the work I do at my job for which someone pays me. He's definitely taking care of me, and our family, in an incredibly important way. But the simple fact is that if one of us forget to do the grocery shopping or laundry, we aren't at risk of losing our house. If I screw up on the job, we are. And that was the whole point of my post: that finding myself for the first time as the person most responsible for the financial well-being of our family is quite daunting. Oh yeah, and one last thing, my husband adds that he does his share (more, in my opinion) of the housework not because I earn more, but just because he wants to :-)

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When work and kids meet

kgranju — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:09:00 GMT

I've been writing to pay the bills since my children were very young. As long as they have been aware, they have had the experience of having people comment to them - and to me in their presence - about books or articles or essays or blog posts that I've written.

(Me, at work, blogging from Bonnaroo, 2006)

Mostly, that's a pleasant experience for them because 99.9% of the time, the people who take the time to talk to them or around them about their mother's published writing are doing so because they have something positive to say - stuff like "I enjoyed that article your mom wrote for the newspaper last week," or "I like your mother's blog," or "It must be fun having a mother who is a writer."

But occasionally, very occasionally, someone will say something disagreeable to one of them about something I've written. It happened recently when a teacher told one of my kids that he hated a recent blog post of mine on a controversial subject. The child in question mentioned the teacher's comment to me, and wanted me to explain what I had written (the kids don't keep up with every single thing I publish, although they do read my personal blog pretty regularly). So, I did. And that was that.

Then, yesterday, I had a lengthy interview published in the newspaper with a very controversial and not-well-liked figure in a rather infamous local murder case. Because this character is so unpopular in our city, and because some folks seemed to believe that the fact that I interviewed her meant that I was somehow absolving her of any culpability, the online comments following the story have been unusually vitriolic toward me, with one person suggesting that I "rot in hell."

I had in passing mentioned to my children that I was working on this story, but I hadn't really wanted to get into it too deeply with them due to the adult nature of the topic (adultery, murder, etc). But fearing that they might see the story on the front page of the newspaper, or somehow stumble across the comments following the online version of the story, or even hear from adults who had read the story, I felt like I should discuss the matter with them.

So, I explained to them that the interview had been published, and that because a lot of people believe that this woman, the one I interviewed, was a very bad person, some folks around town felt that I shouldn't have interviewed her. I told them that there were some unpleasant things being said about me in the comments attached to the story. And once again, as I do periodically, I asked them what it's like for them to have a mother who writes under a byline that also happens to be their last name. We had a good discussion, and they shared the pros and cons of how my work affects them.

As I explained to them, I totally get what that experience is like for them because when I was a child, my mother was a newspaper reporter and editor, and my father was a TV reporter. Sometimes that was a fun thing for my brother and sister and me, but sometimes it was a real pain in the ass to listen to angry local citizens who decided they would explain their objections to my mother's journalistic judgment directly to 13-year-old Katie instead of just writing a letter to the editor.

My sister reminded me yesterday of one time when we were in middle school, and a teacher used our mother as an example of "yellow journalism" when he was lecturing our social studies class on the importance of a free press. And I well remember the time a friend's father angrily informed me that he would no longer be watching the television channel on which my Dad appeared each night because of my father's "obvious bias" toward one candidate over another in an upcoming election. This happened at a sleepover, and I was mortified beyond belief.

On that particular occasion, I remember wishing that my parents did something more low profile for a living, but most of the time, I found it wonderful to have two parents who were constantly communicating with and about the world in which I lived. Having two parents who actively and publicly engaged in civic discourse and social debates helped my siblings and me develop our own views and learn how to express them with confidence.

I like to think that this will be the case for my own children - that they will be more confident and opinionated and willing to speak up for things that matter to them because they see their mother doing it on the job. They are already pretty opinionated kids, and I encourage that. I want them to be engaged and active members of the community, whether that's as journalists or public servants or bloggers, or even just as citizens with a point of view.

In the meantime, though, I'll bet sometimes they wish they had a mom who did something "normal" like sell real estate or teach school.

Please allow me to introduce myself

necroemoticon — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:41:00 GMT

Thanks for visiting my new Babble blog. I'm really excited to be here. I'm a daily Babble reader, and I've contributed several essays to the site, including one on "overparenting," and another on why I like having a large family.

And I do indeed have a pretty big brood, especially by today's standards. Allow me to introduce you to the many people who inhabit my domestic planet.

I'm mama to 14-month-old Charlotte, who is blonde, blue-eyed and a real Chatty Cathy these days.

And then there there is 10-year-old Elliot, my sweetheart of a boy's boy, who loves dirt, sticks, rocks, fire, and knives.

After Elliot comes my 13-going-on-17-year-old daughter Jane, who is destined to run Vogue one of these days.

And then there is my first baby, 17-year-old Henry, who is a hippie dreamer child with a dry wit that can make me laugh until I cry.

Yes, I do indeed have four children. And we may not be done yet. We'll see.

My three eldest children live half the time with me and half the time with their wonderful father, who lives nearby and to whom I was married for more than a decade. Getting divorced with children was very difficult. But our family is well past it now, and I am happily remarried to Jon, super dad, stepdad, blogger extraordinaire and all around great guy.

Jon and I were married in September, 2006, soon after buying the giant, old Victorian house that we all inhabit together. The house needs a lot of work, and we're slowly restoring it, but honestly, that's a project that will take years.

We also have three dogs. Fiat is a Jack Russell mix with doggy ADHD. Mabel is a surly black pug. And Leo is our nearly perfect 8 month old Great Pyrenees puppy. Our cats are Mingus and Moses.

As you likely guessed from the title of this blog, I'm a working mother. I work 40-plus hours each week in new media business development for a big media company. I also do quite a bit of freelancing for magazines and websites, and I'm the author of the book "Attachment Parenting." I've also contributed to several literary nonfiction anthologies, including this one, this one and this one.

My husband does more than 50% of the parenting in our household. He takes the baby to work with him each day at the small family accounting firm where he works, and my incredible, recently retired mother-in-law meets him there each day to help with our daughter and our three year old niece, who also comes to the office with my sister-in-law, who works with the family firm as well. It's a pretty wonderful childcare solution, and I'm grateful.

I'm also very close to my extended family, who help me juggle it all. Just today, my 17-year-old son was home sick and needed to get to the pediatrician, and I had meetings all day, so my sister took him to the doctor for me (and it turns out he has a staph infection. AAAGGGH). My children spend a lot of time with their cousins, my 14 nieces and nephews, whom I adore.

I hail from Bell Buckle, TN, and attended The Webb School and the University of Tennessee, where I studied politics, in which I remain intensely interested. In fact, I plan to run for office one of these days.In the interim, I also have a political blog. I'm a law school dropout.

My life is unbelievably full, which is why my house is often really messy, and I don't get enough exercise. I mean, there really is only so much I can get done in a week. Sometimes I think about trying to cut back in one area or another, but then I can't figure out where to do it. Plus, we don't have one of those "parental abandonment laws" in my state, like they do in Nebraska (I kid! I kid!)

I love power pop, horses, Gerber daisies, Tudor history and good beer. I used to never watch TV, but in the last year or two, I've become a little addicted. Paul Rudd and Ben Kweller are my biggest celebrity crushes. Guilty pleasures: true crime and the National Enquirer (for which my father used to freelance). I have a bit of "a Crackberry problem," as my family delicately puts it.

So there you have The Life of Katie in a nutshell. I look forward to joining you here at the old Babble blog each day to talk about life as a working mama, and I hope you will share your own thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for stopping by.

-Katie

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