Five years ago, when I was pregnant with my son and a manager of multiple departments, people, and programs (too many), I called my boss and not-calmly, told-not-asked “I don’t want any of them. None! Dump ‘em all! And don’t ask me what to do with them either!”
I hear people say to me all the time, “Well she is pregnant,” or some such disclaiming, disempowering response that indicates Don’t take her too seriously. Take whatever comes out of her mouth with a grain of salt.
And how many times in a movie have we watched a pregnant woman discount herself with “‘It must be the pregnancy making me—?” The end of that sentence is anything judged as crazy, too emotional, or too confrontational.
What if being pregnant injects the truth into a situation? What would happen if we value women’s opinions and insights when they are pregnant because they have a superpower and can see clearly?
I’ve had multiple discussions with people as an adult working female and parent about the women’s movement. We have questioned the outcomes, feeling like we now do everything. Work, create, take care of the home, raise children, plan for the future, try to be fit and enlightened… And once in a while the fantasies of our “only” responsibilities being to keep the house and raise the kids taunt us with their shimmer of apparent simplicity.
But NO.
First of all, ask any woman who “only” takes care of the house and kids what her life is like. Then ask your mothers and grandmothers and aunts what their lives were like. I hope they laugh aloud in your face. It’s not about going back to the past. We just haven’t gone far enough to alter the structures themselves. We should honor pregnant women as beacons of truth. Powerful and wise beings with wolf-like smell and sight who tell us what’s wrong. We should listen.
There’s not enough space in the world for sacred, deeply moving, transformational spiritual truths, and certainly not in the workplace. When was the last time you chose to take an unsolvable problem to a wise person–perhaps a woman on her period, or carrying a life inside her, or letting go of her child-bearing years and suffering into the wisdom years, or on the verge of leaving us–for her insight?
I know we are pulling apart gender to see into its complexity and better understand what is true for us as individuals, and so sometimes it feels like I should stop talking about being a woman for the sake of giving that conversation its due. But I’m a woman. I feel like one. I’ve been pregnant twice. And I have fought hard to break limits and make it better and easier for women to thrive at my workplace. Just like women before me fought hard to break limits on who they could be in the world so I could complain about working constantly while parenting, cleaning, and organizing everyone’s lives. Those women set it up so I could have options beyond school teacher, secretary, nurse or wife. Now I believe we are setting it up for balance. We are ‘doing it all’ so we can figure out how to do that sustainably and truly share responsibility. We aren’t there yet.
Being in the middle of anything is very challenging to our need to know. Will it work? I don’t know. You don’t know. But we can’t quit moving forward. We can’t stay here forever, and we can’t go back to the past. So hold on and keep doing the baby steps.
What are the baby steps towards something different?
STOP disclaiming our most sacred, honest selves. The selves that are in the mire. The selves that are doing the hardest shit of being human: cycles, birth, transformation, death. Women who are exhausted stop pleasing people and just fix things. I did have too much on my plate when I called my boss and told him to take it all. It was one of the most victorious conversations I’ve ever had and I thank my pregnant, tired of meeting other people’s needs and neglecting my own, pissed-off self. I thank her often for getting me off the hook for what my slightly more rested, sane, powerful self takes on. She’s the crazy one. She does WAY too much, for way too little.
Trust the pregnant women. We should be letting them tear apart and rebuild businesses in saner ways. Ways that align with a balance of power, a balance of responsibility, a balance of work and family, a balance of self-care and push. We should let them surgically remove narcissism and replace it with decency and kindness. We should assume that they see things that we don’t see. We should shut up and let them do their work of rearranging things to be better. And then when the babies are born, we should bring them into the boardrooms. Make decisions with all the factors in play.
This is me with my son. . . who I took to the boardroom.
This post is dedicated to the incredibly wise, insightful, truth-seeing pregnant women in my life. I see you. I trust you. We all should.
