Do Reporting and Motherhood Mix? Tales of maternal multi-tasking
Though I like being back in the game, I find myself wanting more hours like this and fewer hours on deadline. If you’ve been there and figured out how to balance work and baby, let me know.
Reporting is like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget how to do it. And once you do it again, as I’ve done for the past six weeks after being rather out of practice, it can feel as exhilarating as getting back on the bike. I have the wind in my hair, the sensation of whizzing past pedestrians, skirting between motorists. I’m back to getting perfect strangers to talk to me and tell me their problems – a psychologist for the masses. Sometimes I think there is no better job in the world, though in more cynical moments I think this is a myth we journalists tell ourselves to swallow our paltry salaries.
The only problem is that reporting is not entirely compatible with motherhood, in particular with mothering a six-month-old baby and a toddler who’s just turning two. (Happy Birthday, Eli!) In fact, the reason I have hardly blogged at all in the past two months is that I don’t know whether to celebrate or mourn my return to work.
Sometimes being a reporter with a baby means breastfeeding in the middle of writing a story, trying to type up notes with one hand while securing baby Z with the other. Sometimes this feels valiant, and at others, vulgar. Sometimes I put baby to sleep for the night by the light of my iPhone as I trawl for tweets that might give my almost-finished story that extra punch. When baby is this sleepy, I figure, she won’t realize that the soft glow is no night-light, but Twitter feeds from Benghazi and Beirut. (Yes, I worry about radiation, and realize that we don’t know how dangerous being around a cellphone may be, so I hold the phone as far from baby’s precious cranium as possible.)
Once upon a time, I thought nothing about taking off for a month to Iraq or Sudan, or driving the easy hour and-a-half from Jerusalem to Gaza, not being sure if I’d be coming home or staying over for a night or two. I used to keep a satellite phone a flack jacket in my car, just in case. Now I tote along my Medela Pump in Style, just in case.
Trying to make room for motherhood, in January 2011 I accepted a job as an editor at the Jerusalem Report magazine. I thought it would be the perfect way to keep a foothold in journalism without having to run around too much. My son was then four months old.
This July, as I prepared to come back to work after the birth of our second child, I found that the job had changed. It was unacceptable to the magazine’s upper management that I edit from home, as had been my previous arrangement, and I was ordered to be in the office for eight-hour days. A plan to bring my baby to work for half the day was nixed; I learned it was forbidden. So when the Jerusalem Post, which owns the Report, made me an offer to be a senior reporter with a beat focusing on Israeli-Arabs – a.k.a. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship – and other Arab world stories, I decided to take it. In addition to covering issues I care about, when not out reporting, I’m totally free to work from home. Ironically, the busy reporting job gave me more freedom to be around my baby than the “desk” job as an editor.
My friend Orly Halpern out reporting on West Bank settlements with her son in a baby carrier, along with journalist Elizabeth Rubin, who also does an amazing balancing act between journalism and motherhood.
I find myself wondering where I will draw the line. Will I take baby Z out reporting from time to time? I might, if it seems a tame and safe enough environment. Colleagues have done so, like my fabulous friend Orly Halpern, pictured here. Will I go away overnight and leave baby Z behind? Not yet. It would probably be more traumatic for me than for her. But as my husband, my favorite editor, noted when I asked him to read this, “You have more cognitive ability to reflect on her absence. She will ache in your absence with no ability to comprehend that you will be back.” (Great, I feel much better now.)
A few weeks ago, an editor asked me to cover a demonstration of settlers about to be evacuated from their illegal outpost in the West Bank. The location, it turned out, was in front of the Justice Ministry in East Jeruaslem. One solution was to bring baby Z to the demo. But settlers? East Jerusalem? The two don’t mix well. What if someone decided to toss a rock or a Molotov cocktail? I had just covered, for nearly a week running, an awful Molotov cocktail attack near a settlement that seriously injured six members of one Palestinian family. Images of a burned five-year-old boy, whom I’d seen in the hospital a day earlier, flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t worth the risk. Something in my gut said no. Instead, I found a babysitter who helps us from time to time, and took off.
Of course, nothing happened. It was perhaps the most boring, quietest protest I’ve ever covered. But the issue was before me. What would I or wouldn’t I do?
Recently, reluctantly, I put my daughter in a small day-care program in someone’s home, five minutes from my front door, four days a week. On days when baby is home, I still usually have to work. Sometimes I type with one hand while I hold her with the other. Or I set baby on the carpet, where she now loves to be as she does downward-dog poses and tests out her ability to sit up, while I write nearby. In late afternoons, I usually blow off work for a few hours, doing playtime-dinnertime-bathtime-bedtime, only to return to my computer, often on deadline, to continue working until 11 p.m. Sometimes, when the story is too big and I’m too far from getting it done on time, I simply rely on hubby to pick up all the slack. Which induces great guilt, but that’s the subject of another post.
Baby Z paging through my notes with vigor.
The odd thing is that my daughter has already reached a stage where she is no longer oblivious to almost everything but the task of getting herself fed. Now, as she lies breastfeeding while I type, she constantly lets go and turns her head around to see what I’m doing. And then, shockingly, she reaches over to the mouse pad on my MacBook, making all the open pages jump and dance around the desktop. My daughter is six months old and she’s already switching screens. And trying to crumple up my notes.
Admitting this, I am half-amused and half-ashamed. Shouldn’t I be rocking her off to a milky oblivion in a nursery with the sounds of a Bach lullaby wafting through the air? Well, I did do that for a while, in the first three months. And there are still moments when baby gets my full, undivided attention. But it seems there are moments when deadline is looming, time is short, and I have no choice but to multi-task. She too is learning to multi-task, gathering from her mother that it’s okay to do more than one thing at a time. I’m not sure what to do about it. Except maybe to ask her if she thinks I got the story right.
Baby Z is beginning to discover the joys of crawling around my office, and dragged this out of a carton under my desk. Book launch is set for November 15th in London, and baby says she’s coming along for the ride.
so well expressed Ilene and I can so sympathize with you–I went through that in the not-so-distant past…Even though tmy sons are a bit older now, there is always that struggle between being there for them and getting the story…
I can so relate to this, Ilene! I am a WAHM and structure my day to work, primarily, US hours. But, come 4:00 p.m. Israel time, I have to be available. I often times feel like my little ones are missing out on some one-on-one Mommy time because I have to check my emails, Facebook or Twitter feed. I completely empathize with that struggle, to balance your work duties with your Mommy responsibilities. And, sometimes I wonder that both work and family suffers because of it. It’s not easy doing what you do, but from what you write it sounds like you are really doing a great job. LMK if you ever want to meet up in our backyards
Agree/relate to every word. And yes, we should meet!
Maybe Sylvia Plath isn’t the best person to quote in this context (since she ended up sticking her head in a gas oven) but she was grappling with the work/family balance back in the 1950′s. To quote “The Bell Jar,”
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
My daughter just turned 1 and I have the good fortune of working part of my hours from home. The downside is, like you, I often end up making up those hours after she goes to bed (and before she invariably wakes up in the middle of the night on the days when I have deadlines). I have found that the balance is not just work and baby, but work, baby and sleep, and you can have two out of three but never all three at once.
Wonderful post once again! Your posts are always so timely for me and excellent food for thought… as I am contemplating getting more of my own life back and starting work.
After sleeping on it, I have several thoughts for you
1) I totally sympathize and can add that no matter how many hours in a day a mother has to spend with her kids, I think there is always a struggle to find balance (kids, husband, work, exercise, friends and family, cooking and household chores, and heaven forbid some her time!!). It is impossible to do all of it in a regular 24 hour day. IMPOSSIBLE.
2) As I read recently somewhere… it seems increasingly like Western parenting today is some kind of competitive sport where we must invest every ounce of ourselves into our offspring and their needs… and the judging and comments that happen when you try to multi-task, find time for other parts of life or aren’t up to speed on the latest organic baby food craze or must have BPA free sippy cup are just mind blowing (in a bad way of course)!! I think this attitude increases parental stress and guilt and adds additional unnecessary hardship to a job that is already very challenging on its own.
3) I was thinking about how people parent in other parts of the world, or perhaps in our own past… mother always worked, whether on the farm/fields, in a household, carrying home water, at a formal job etc. More often than not, babies came with in a sling… and even breastfed as mama continues to work. Mothers didn’t/don’t have the time, nor do they necessarily think it’s necessary to stop everything they are doing to sit and feed their infants and concentrate only on baby. Also, children in general but babies too grow up/grew up in the context of an extended family, larger household, tribe or group of mothers… such that many people contributed to their upbringing and the attention they needed. Never was the mother expected exclusively to provide all of the care, as is increasingly the case today for Western mothers.
I guess to sum up, I agree with you that balancing all of our responsibilities and roles as mothers is very challenging and ultimately a no win situation, especially given the modern day expectations that society and we are selves are setting ourselves. I read some words of wisdom in a mother/daughter story years ago that have stuck with me and that I cling to when I feel overwhelmed by it all: our goal as mothers should be to be GOOD ENOUGH mothers, not perfect mothers…. good enough means cutting corners when necessary, means setting up realistic expectations, means modeling for your beautiful daughter the kind of woman you hope she will be some day (one that takes care of herself and does things beyond motherhood too).
my boys are now 5 and 7 and i still struggle with this tug-of-war just about every day. it is good to hear other women admit the same experiences and feelings. now that my kids are older they are cognizant of me often checking my emails and working at any time–after school, dinner time, bed time, in the middle of the night, and they don’t know anything else, but like you it is me that is always wondering both about how it influences them and the hub. i only guess that your kids also will grow up with this and accept it as “normative”
i also guess as the kids grow up, the separation between life and writing will also change as we are able to talk to them about what we are doing and why, as they can tell us more and more about their needs and feelings, and as they start to understand and ask questions about the subject matter we cover.