Hi all,
This month’s newsletter is anchored in this mantra:
First - a happy update to share since last month’s newsletter - I’m on the other side of welcoming our baby boy. Crazy to say that out loud - I am a parent! We have a son! This newsletter will remain a career-focused newsletter at its core, and not become centered in parenting - but in this first month of parenthood, I have a lottttt of initial thoughts and reflections on identity and mindset (yes, initiated by parenthood, but I think also broadly applicable to career). AND, as you know if you’ve read this newsletter for a while - I believe our careers are best considered in the broader context of our lives, which obviously include our relationships and families. So, you can expect the worlds of career reflections and parenting reflections to occasionally collide in future editions of the newsletter.
Onto the first such post!
The first month with a newborn has been a complete whirlwind. I would say 80ish% of the experience has been one of overwhelming joy. We are so fortunate to have a healthy, funny, growing kid whose hilarious facial expressions, newborn snuggles and snorfeling noises are delightful.
The other 20ish% (of both new baby life and the postpartum experience) can only be described as bewildering, disorienting and completely humbling. So many things caught me off guard:
The recovery time (I was focused so much on pregnancy, then labor and delivery, that I never really thought about the “after” part and how recovering from a major physical process would take a lot of rest, time and patience)
The around-the-clock anxiety of caring for a completely helpless (oftentimes shrieking) creature. I knew this would be true, but it really is around-the-clock!
How quickly the initial days have flown by (at the point of publishing this, my husband’s parental leave will be almost over!).. and simultaneously how days went by without any of the traditional measures of time passing aka - ‘shit getting done’. Of course, the most important ‘shit' has gotten done - we kept the Demogorgon alive! Fed! One of us took a shower! But it has been a jarring adjustment from a typical pre-kid day of routine and productivity.
I’ve also been totally caught off guard in many positive ways, and am happily reminded of some of the core positive principles of humanity.
Even though I’m currently distracted mainly by diapers and pumping, I have a peripheral awareness of the news cycle.. and know that reminders of positive principles of humanity are deeply needed right now.
I’ve been floored by the generosity of friends, colleagues and family who are genuinely so overjoyed for us, and have spoiled the kid with the cutest and most extraneous stuff (advice: you should only stock up on the basics like diapers and cream and snot suckers, and let your friends spoil your kid with adorable, high thread count, plush things that they will very quickly outgrow and/or projectile spit-up all over).
Principle: there are still so many moments of pure joy and instances to celebrate. Despite circumstances of the world being not so bright right now, the entrant of a new baby, full of hope really elicits that feeling of joy in one’s community.
People have also been as generous with their advice as they have been with gifts - I feel fortunate to have many a mom-friend, who have proactively and wisely shared so much information on postpartum recovery, and newborn recommendations and advice. Many have led with “how are you feeling?”, acknowledging how challenging and destabilizing the initial days of parenthood can be for the parents, and have wasted no time in offering direct, unfiltered, non sugar-coated advice.
Principle: People want to share their experiences, and they want you to succeed. There is a unifying bond of shared challenges and experiences and we are NOT meant to go through hard things alone. It truly takes a village.
I’ve been amazed at the learning curve of parenthood, and how we as parents have learned so much in only a short amount of time. Of course, credit where credit is due - I’ve been even more amazed at the learning curve of babies! This kid now knows how to eat, adjust his feeding position and scream at the top of his lungs in a variety of registers to indicate even the slightest annoyance! Progress has been exponential (and also frequently regressive).
I think back to the first day with baby - two hapless first time parents who didn’t know how to hold him properly or change him properly.. on my part, I didn’t even know how to operate a nursing bra.. and within days (and with the GRACIOUS, GODSENT wisdom of our first-30-day nanny) - We have learned things! We have mastered things! We have unlearned things! We have kept the baby alive!
Of course, the baby changes in the blink of an eye, so we’re left to navigate new challenges every day, but I think it’s valuable to give ourselves this grace, and acknowledgement.
Principle: We can continually do hard things. We have instincts and intuition (and Google, and books and nannies!) that help guide us.
This month’s newsletter focuses on our hyperfixation on scheduling and control… elements that seem paradoxical with a newborn, but concepts that somehow still find their way into every conversation about parenthood. I know, in last month’s newsletter, I vowed to stay present in the parenting experience no matter what.. and yet, in the first hazy month of parenting, in the wee hours of the morning feeding the kid for the umpteenth time, I have found myself obsessively Googling… future timelines.
“When does baby sleep through the night?”
“How can I tell if my baby is eating enough?”
“When should we introduce a bottle to baby?”
“How long is typical postpartum recovery?”
“Postpartum weight loss timeline?”
I’m almost embarrassed to type these things out, because as all parents know: there is no linear path or timeline for any of this stuff. It depends on the health, development, growth, temperament of your kid.. and your own body. Googling and comparing future timelines can often create more anxiety because some moms bounce back more quickly than others, and some babies settle into sleeping and eating more quickly than others. What has given me some peace of mind, however, is that no matter what question I ask - Reddit has an existing thread on literally everything. In the absence of finding a definitive answer, Reddit has at least gave me comfort that many first time moms go through this same kind of mental spiral, sourcing answers from the interweb, as proxies for the question “Will I ever have control of my life again?”
It won’t surprise you to know that this tendency for “late night asking the Google abyss for life answers” isn’t novel and bespoke to parenthood. Before the kiddo, it was scrolling on LinkedIn looking at people’s titles and career trajectories, reading tech news on startup exits, reading articles on financial independence - essentially a mining of the internet for the answer to the deep existential question of “Am I doing the right things? Am I doing enough? Am I on the right path? When will it all be ok?”
So. Does having a kid transform you? For sure, but also.. new baby, same me.
And on the topic of future tripping, it just so happens that in between feedings, I’ve been reading snippets of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. (When I say snippets I mean sometimes only a sentence at a time - as the break between baby feedings can be sporadic and short).
Burkeman writes about the broad concept of time - with a stark reminder that our lives are actually much shorter than we think (the “Four Thousand Weeks” in the title refers to our lifespan if we live until age 80). He points out how as humans in this modern age, we have a uniquely weird relationship with time. We chase efficiency, thinking it will create more capacity for leisure, but we inevitably fill the freed-up time with more things to do, plan and operate. We never ever really feel like we have enough time no matter how efficient we are or how much we pay for convenience. ‘Tis depressing stuff, kids.
Burkeman further discusses this “future chasing” mindset in the context of parenthood (of course, this resonated with me). In advance of the arrival of his first child, he became increasingly focused on “using time well”. As anyone with a child (or anyone in proximity to someone with a child - sometimes you learn this stuff through osmosis and chatter from friends and colleagues) can tell you, there has been obsessive focus in recent years on “sleep training” and setting very strict structure for babies as young as a few days old.
The rationale is that structure gives babies security… but really, and as Burkeman points out - creating structure is actually how parents try to ensure baby integrates into the routines of the parents. By ensuring babies sleep on a certain schedule, parents can structure their sleep and can seamlessly get back to the swing of work after their brief parental leaves.
I’ve noticed doing this myself (with a kid who is less than a month old!) Already anxiously timing feeds, rousing the kid from his slumber in order to feed at a certain time… flipping ahead a few pages in the baby book to see when the kid will sleep for 5+ hours in a row.
And yes, of course I want to set stabilizing routines for this little human, but I also want some uninterrupted sleep.. why? To feel rested. Why? To feel energized the next day. Why? So I can… be productive? What does productivity even mean right now? Get him to sleep so that I have time to do more laundry so that I can free up time to… do even more laundry?
What I think I actually want to make time for, and what will likely bring both the kid and I joy, is bonding… regardless of when and how he sleeps. So, I want the kid to sleep more, so I can sleep more, so I can be awake and alert during the day in order to spend time with the kid, who… I’ve been cajoling into sleeping most of the day to abide by a schedule and therefore won’t get a chance to bond with at all?
The analogous example Burkeman gives in his book about chasing efficiency and missing the forest through the trees - is perhaps one you’ve heard about, but still packs a punch in its simplicity and impact:
… the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.
Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early.
“And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
The POINT isn’t to be more efficient… fulfillment is about being able to participate more in the pleasures of the present and to do what matters in the here and now.
As I’ve been obsessively denominating our days into hour-long-windows, I also ended up stumbling upon this realization. Two weeks into it all, the kid started fussing whenever we held him horizontally. Our nanny told us matter-of-factly, that the reason for this was that the kid no longer wanted to be held horizontally and snug to my chest like a tiny little baby. He wanted to be held upright so he could crane his quickly developing neck and look up at the ceiling and the big-kid world. I have no idea if this is true for all babies or rooted in any facts, but our baby nanny has a way of speaking definitively and a wealth of newborn experience that makes me believe anything she says.
What a gut punch. In my two week maniacal focus on feeding/changing/pumping/sleeping in order to get the kid to the “next-stage”, I accidentally took the kid and those first fleeting days for granted. He had changed and grown up a tiny bit already.
As one of my coaching clients shared with me the weekend before I delivered, and perhaps another principle of humanity to acknowledge:
“Everything, for better or for worse, is a phase.” Both the hard stuff, and the accompanying magical stuff - it’s fleeting. Treasure it for what it is in the moment.
I see a lot of parallels between this future-fixation between parenting and work, and really all aspects of modern life, to be honest. We’re soooo focused on the next thing, once we get to the thing, we immediately focus on the next next thing and spend hardly anytime relishing in getting to the first next thing at all.
In addition to digging deep within ourselves to try to be present, another suggestion to counteract this tendency relies on the collective wisdom of others.
I wrote about this a few years back in the context of creating a community of mentors. “Teach Me How to Dougie (And by Dougie, I mean, lead a balanced and successful life)” Pt 1 and Pt. 2.
It’s critical that we create and surround ourselves with a group of perspectives and advisors that is well diversified - especially across age and life stage.
If your immediate and only community are all identical to you, you’ll amplify certain perspectives. If the top 5 people you go to for advice are all new moms - you might end up hyperfixating on sleep training and breastfeeding. If the top 5 people you go to for advice are all your business school classmates, you might end up hyperfixating on titles and traditional accolades/milestones of success.
If you add the perspective of someone younger than you, or older than you (ranging from a few years to a few decades) - they might just give you an incredible breath of fresh perspective.
“They” (10 years younger) might simply marvel at your ability to both have a child while having a career (no matter how much the kid sleeps or what the kid is eating).
“They” (10 years older) might recall only from their infant-rearing days, how special and fleeting those baby snuggles are, and how resilient and great their kids grew up to be (again, no matter how the kid slept, or what the kid ate).
There’s value in having people that are in your exact shoes at a moment in time (as mentioned in the newsletter intro, they’re the ones that tell you the brand of onesies to get - magnet closures, ofc, and the postpartum underwear and aftercare that will salvage your days). But maintaining broader perspective is just as valuable and critical to not get into too myopic of a mindset at any given time.
So where does that leave me? I’d love to tell you I’m tossing out the baby books/guides and schedules and letting my intuition and sense of presence drive me.
But, the reality of work and life are still very present… and of course, some semblance of scheduling and structure are valuable, if not outright necessary to keep baby and parents healthy and sane. So, hopefully this newsletter merely serves as a reminder to you, to future me of course, to find the right balance between rigidity and structure, and presence and planning.
Please feel free to share this with someone in your network that might be a new parent or a working parent, and is navigating some of these questions themselves! I’d welcome all perspectives and guidance - we’re not meant to do hard things alone ❤️