Having kids changed my career, but not how you might think

Before I explain the unexpected way having kids changed my career, I want to give a huge thanks to many wonderful Substack writers for interviewing me about my book, and my big ideas about care. I spoke to

Courtney Martin

here;

Nancy Reddy

here;

Emily F. Popek

here;

Melinda Wenner Moyer

here;

Rebecca Gale

here;

Anya Kamenetz

here;

Jim Dalrymple II

here; and

Allison Daminger

wrote a review of my and

Jess Calarco

’s books here which I really appreciated. Also, you can read

Anna Sale

here talking about my episode of Death, Sex & Money. (Yes, Anna came over to my house and sat at my dining room table with me and spent two hours asking me about my care story. Yes, she really is wonderful.) More Substack convos are on the way!

If you have read and enjoyed WHEN YOU CARE please let me know. I love hearing what it stirs up in readers—the best part of publishing a book. Also, please share a few kind words on Amazon and Goodreads, which really helps. If you haven’t read the book yet, or haven’t told all your family and friends about it yet, well there is no day like today.

He is 11 now!

It wasn’t an ambition thing. It wasn’t a work/life balance thing. It was something entirely different.

How parenthood changed my career:

I went into parenthood determined not to lose myself to it. I would become a mom, I would love my child, and then work hard to keep that part of my identity carefully boxed off from my otherwise interesting life.

But motherhood, I came to learn, doesn’t easily stay contained. Children, by definition, provoke and surprise, which made it very difficult to partition off my “mom self” from all my other selves. Worse, my efforts to do so were stopping me from being able to deeply engage with, let alone find meaning and pleasure, in the experience.

My big concern about motherhood was rooted in the fear that it would stop me from having the kind of psychologically and philosophically mind-bending new experiences that could change my understanding of myself or the world. Alas, being a mom has turned out to be one of the most mind-bending experiences I’ve had yet. My sons Augie and Levi, now ages 11 and 7, have pushed me to leave the cocoon of my own subjective experience and observe the world with a newfound intensity and sensitivity. I’ve learned how to pay better attention to others and, ultimately, myself. People go on meditation retreats, long hikes in the forest, travel continents, or read great books to discover such things. I’ve tried and benefited from all of those, but none of them have led me to as much insight and expansion as being a parent.

It began with my first son Augie, born in 2012, who has always been a pragmatist. In many ways, this made things easy when he was young — a broken cookie was still a cookie. He’s also a slow and deliberative decision maker, intent on thoroughly understanding the world before committing himself to any given opinion or action. Getting him to pick a cookie at the bakery could be a tediously long task and even after he chose one he remained unsure about whether or not he made the right decision. My big challenge with deeply uncertain Augie was to get him to listen to himself. I was not, I soon realized, well-suited for this task.

Back then, I made my living from hastily-executed opinion pieces, or “hot takes,” which had hardened me into an overly certain person. It took hanging out with toddler-age Augie and seeing myself mirrored back to me in how we interacted, for me to notice how alarmingly easy it was for me to offer him, or anyone else who asked, simple explanations of a complicated world. Augie didn’t need someone who had figured it all out. Instead, he needed someone who could question her beliefs and, in doing so, encourage him to find his own way — to determine his own favorite cookie and not just buy mine. Because of Augie, I began to not just question my thoughts and ideas, but actively take pleasure in being in a state of not knowing.

In her book “The Sovereignty of Good,” philosopher Iris Murdoch writes about how the self, the ego, is a “place of illusion.” To be good, she explains, is to try to “see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.” Ms. Murdoch might well have been describing my experience with motherhood. (She was not).

Caring for my sons not only helped me see my own long held blind spots and delusions, but also helped me comprehend what should be an obvious fact: People are different. Our kids are different, from each other and us parents. We must, day after day, move beyond our own perspective and figure out what they need, regularly adapting to them in the process. This is not a task that can ever be completed, but a way of experiencing the world. It’s how we open ourselves up to the ongoing nature of self-creation and self-understanding and learn to see and respond to how things and people are rather than how one thinks they should be.

Today, I write from a place of deepened uncertainty which means I am a little less fast and a little less spicy than I used to be. This doesn’t mean I never arrive anywhere, just that I get where I am going more carefully — with room to keep learning and expanding my understanding of whatever it is I’m paying attention to after the last paragraph. In other words, I write like I care.