I was settling in for an interview over Zoom when I glanced at my baby monitor and saw it: the unmistakable wiggle of a toddler who’d pooped himself awake from a nap. I sighed and set the monitor aside. I had no choice but to wait till after the call to check on him.
When the Zoom ended, I dashed in to clean him up, then texted my friend a photo of the three of us (my baby, myself and my laptop). “Look at me,” I wrote wryly. “I have it all.”
I started thinking a lot about “having it all” after my son was born in late 2021. I went back to work after four months of parental leave, breast-pumping my way through phone calls and changing diapers on the sly. I loved being close to my son and was lucky to have a husband who thrived as a stay-at-home dad, but it was all so completely exhausting. For every stolen midday snuggle there was sobbing (on both sides of the door) when I had to close my eyes and tune out my son’s cries for Mommy as I buckled down to get a project done.
Surely, I often thought to myself, this isn’t what Helen Gurley Brown had in mind when she published “Having It All,” her famed book of advice on balancing sex, work, relationships and more, in 1982. I may have a career and a family, but I often “have it all” — or, rather, do it all — at the exact same time.
In the summer of 2012, just a couple of years into my journalism career, The Atlantic published Anne-Marie Slaughter’s culture-defining text, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” In it, she described stepping back from powerful government work to be closer to home and more available to her two teenage sons, and she outlined the workplace changes she saw as necessary to allow ambitious women to pursue big careers and remain present mothers.
I read it hungrily, feeling smug about my own ambivalence toward motherhood. At 25, I was climbing the career ladder fast and loving it. Why derail the train with a baby when the ride was so exciting? Plus, I couldn’t imagine a world where Slaughter’s proposed changes — more flexible schedules, remote work, less business travel, teleconferencing instead of in-person meetings — would materialize. Little did I know a global pandemic would abruptly shift that tide.
A decade later, in a post-COVID world, I had, in many ways, exactly what Slaughter had described: an exciting career with a flexible, remote job that allowed me to be close to the baby I’d decided I wanted. But I also…
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