The first time Neha Ruch explained her work to me, I didn’t get it. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
A few years ago, I got on a call with Neha Ruch. Her best-selling book, The Power Pause wasn’t out yet. Her community was still called Mother Untitled and I was still at my last job, one that demanded my attention all the time.
So when Neha explained the idea of pausing your career while your kids are little, my brain went straight to the binary we’ve all inherited. Oh, so you’re a stay-at-home mom, I thought. As far as I understood you were a =working mom or stay-at-home mom. Pick your poison.
Now, 18 months after quitting my last full-time job to go out on my own as a consultant in search of a more balanced life, her work hits a little different.
Episode 5 guest, Neha Ruch, author of “The Power Pause”
Her point was never that one is better. It’s that the phrase “stay-at-home mom” does women a disservice. It’s so loaded. It comes with assumptions about who you are, how you spend your day, what you’re into, and how ambitious you are. It can’t hold the multitudes women actually contain.
Neha felt it herself, sitting poolside at her son’s swim class while another mom asked what she did. She word-vomited her entire resume. Afterward she wondered why she couldn’t just say “stay-at-home mom.” Her answer: “Because I’m not. That doesn’t describe who I am.”
So she wrote the language. Literally, a whole book of it.
We have to rewrite every single trope and pillar this whole system was built on.
Is staying home a feminist act?
In college, I took a women’s studies class with a professor who started her career as a police officer. When she had kids, she chose to stay home with them, then built a second career once they were older. One day she asked us whether staying home could be a feminist act.
The room was full of 18- and 19-year-olds who pictured stay-at-home motherhood as a 1950s prison: no ambition, no choice, nothing of your own. And then she flipped it for us. Feminism is about women having a voice and a choice, and making that choice without judgment. Pausing your career for the years your kids are small and coming back when you’re ready isn’t a betrayal of feminism, it’s the entire point.
Neha puts it this way: the last generation of feminists proved we could do the work. “But we proved our capacity in the workforce by pretending we were the same as men.” This generation gets to be honest about the rest of it.
The war on moms
That honesty is overdue, because right now moms are at war, and a lot of it is mom versus mom. While Reshma Saujani of Moms First was filming her documentary No Country for Mothers, which came out this summer, moms told her over and over how judged they feel. In her words, “Moms are tired of being blamed for choices they didn’t even make” like staying home because child care costs more than a paycheck, or working because there’s no other option.
Neha sees the same thing in the two questions she says have haunted women for too long: “Am I not mothering enough? Am I not ambitious enough?”
They sound like opposites, but they come from the same false binary. We’ve been fighting over labels that were never big enough for any of us.
My confession
Here’s the truth: I didn’t leave my last job to spend more time with my kids. We’re a great daycare family. I love an empty house. I love working. For a short time I felt a little ashamed of that, but tbh, I got over it pretty fast. And Neha would approve.
What I took from this conversation is that motherhood doesn’t need a perfect script. Millennial moms (hiiiiii) want to label it, out-work it, and perfect how we explain it. Because there’s no role I care about more than motherhood, I overthink it and get in my own way. What if being a mom just came out of me naturally, the way every other part of me does?
Or, as Neha says: “Right now I get to be with my kids. We’ll see what comes next.”
I couldn’t pick just one: five Neha lines I’m taking with me (without context)
“This kid only wants me to be me. And that is something that no workplace has afforded me.”
“Owning the choice and being very deliberate about why you’re choosing is the first empowering statement.”
“You’re developing a sense of identity that is stronger than any work title.”
“You cannot be doing this to get validation or money. It is going to take a long period of time.”
“It’s a long freaking game. This career is getting longer, not shorter.”
Episode is live!
Cat
