A younger working mom I met at a recent conference told me she and her husband were contemplating having a third child. She looked like I remember looking when I had only two children – hair well coiffed, pink lipstick carefully applied on her actual lips, minimal bags under her eyes, a flat stomach. She looked so happy, dreaming of another baby. Then she asked me if it’s harder juggling work and family with three kids versus two. Like I always do when a woman asks me this question, I lied. “Three kids is great,” I said. “Your life is already total chaos, so how can a third make much difference?”
The truth is that, for me, having a third child wrenched my fingernails from the cliff I had been clinging to for five years, juggling two young children with full-time, demanding managerial work running the Washington Post Magazine. You know, the kind of deadline-driven, high-adrenaline, wake-up-at-night-with-a-great-idea kind of work. I was so thrilled by my job that I told everyone, for the full nine months of my third pregnancy, that I wasn’t planning on taking any maternity leave.
Then Tallie was born. The first thing my husband said, after “It’s a girl” was “We got a good one!” From the start, Tallie was an “om” baby, a peaceful lump radiating joy and tranquility into our lives. There was no way I wanted someone else hold her, much less take care of her for hours while I went back to work. What had I been thinking?
And caring for three kids turned out to be, um, a little more demanding than I’d anticipated. Throughout maternity leave, between breastfeeding, getting the big kids ready for school, and caring for Tallie, I had zero down time. The 16 weeks I took off from my job flew by. When I went back to the Post, my life collapsed. I showed up a half-hour late for work most days, hair unbrushed, lipstick smeared across the bottom of my face, looking (and feeling) like I’d already worked a full shift by 9:30 a.m.
I got to every meeting late and regularly wrote important presentations the morning I gave them. My results were still good –- sales and profitability and my employees’ evaluations were zooming. But by the time 5:30 came around, my breasts ached, my brain throbbed, and I had little patience or energy for anything, much less picking up, driving home, feeding and getting three small tyrants into bed. I don’t recall having a single conversation with my husband during this time. If I had had the energy to make any self-assessments, it would have been obvious that for my family, a third child was the tipping point into insanity. After six months, I negotiated (read: begged) to work part time. This saved me. Ditto for my marriage, my kids’ mental health, and our dog’s life. Read More.Leslie Morgan Steiner is the author of the best selling anthology: Mommy Wars: Stay at Home and Career Moms Face off on their Choices, their Lives, their Families. She writes the new Mommy Track'd column, Leslie Morgan Steiner's Two Cents on Working Motherhood and is a regular contributor on the subject of working motherhood to media outlets including The Today Show, MSNBC, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Parents, Parenting, and many others.
