Leadership and Frozen Food

In my day job, I’m a lawyer.  That can mean a lot of different things, and indeed, I’ve worked in a lot of different kinds of jobs.  Early in my career, I did legislative and policy related work, as a lobbyist and then a legislative staffer.  During that time I also 1) had two kids and 2) got divorced.  Not long after I divorced I decided I needed, for my personal sanity, to move away from the state capital -- and I wound up unintentionally mommy-tracking myself for the next ten years.  I spent six years working part-time in a very small law firm.  I’ve moved back to full time work in the past few years, but I’m not, as I near fifty, doing anything terribly high powered or prestigious:  I work for a large government agency, providing advice on various interesting but not terribly earth-shattering legal issues.  

One kid left for college this fall, and the one who’s still home has given up soccer.  Which means I’m experiencing something I haven’t experienced in a long time:  Free time.  Hence this blog, but also a lot of navel-gazing consideration of what I’ve done with my life so far, what I wanted to do with my life and what I might still be able to do with my life.  

In my case, the answer to what I wanted to do with my life is pretty easy:  I wanted to Change The World -- get rid of all that pesky poverty and injustice that make things unpleasant for so many people.  I’m making light of the somewhat grandiose dreams of my younger self, but I feel now as I felt then that the best use of my time and talents is to work to create a more just world of shared prosperity -- locally, in the United States, and even globally.  

Straight out of law school, I had a pretty good idea of how to do that, and indeed wound up working on legislative issues and getting involved politically.  The path back to that kind of involvement at my current stage of life is a lot less clear to me -- I can’t afford to leave my job to start over again in a more policy-oriented job.  Even if I could I’m not sure anyone would hire me.

So I decided to attend something called the State Bar Council on Access and Fairness Leadership Summit, a two day program billed as a networking opportunity and a chance to learn practical leadership skills.  As it turned out I was more the age of the people making presentations than of the other attendees, who were mostly young (some still in law school) and mostly people of color, the idea being to encourage diversity in leadership positions in the bar and in communities and organizations around the state.  

I hung in there and braved it nonetheless, and the panel presentation on the first morning actually had me kind of inspired.  The stories of the panelists’ careers reminded me of the important work I’ve done in my life (and there has been some) and made me feel that returning to that was well within reach.

I was sitting there feeling pumped up when the next speaker turned to the theme of finding your passion -- and I slowly started to deflate.  

Let me say that I completely agree with the sentiment that wanting to be “a leader” has to be about wanting to accomplish some goal that’s not just about yourself.  If you just want to be important and powerful without having something you want to do with that, then you’re just a self-promoting jerk -- and self-promoting jerks are well represented in leadership positions everywhere.  On the other hand, I’ve always found the “find your passion” concept a bit dismaying.  I don’t think it’s true that everyone has a passion, or needs to have one.  We all have something to contribute.  Each person needs to work out from her own values how she wants to do that.  Not everyone will find that there’s some one issue that calls out to her, or some creative endeavor that is the core of her being.

So I sat there in the audience struggling with the idea that I needed to “find my passion” before I could get back into being involved.  I thought, I just have no idea what that is -- there’s no one particular issue that drives me to action.  I started trying to sort through what issues I’m drawn to, what I care most about.

My thoughts turned to this blog.  

I laughed at myself, thinking, okay, the Michael Pollan Can Bite Me blog has nothing to do with what I want to do to make the world a better place.  Until I realized:  yes, it does.

Because here’s what matters to me:  creating a society in which every single human adult gets to contribute something to the great wide world and be a loving, responsible member of some kind of family. I want men and women to be able both to achieve worldly success -- in business, in government, in science, in the arts, etc. -- and still have time and energy to devote to their families in their roles as partners, as parents, and as the children of aging parents.  

This may not look like everyone working no more than forty hours a week throughout their lives. For some people, it may mean putting in long hours when they’re young, and then having ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of easing up while they’re raising kids -- with, ideally, some clear paths for older workers (me! me!) to return to a faster track.  In another family it may mean that one person leaves work at five two days a week, her partner leaves work at five a different two days, and let’s just imagine a world where they both go home at a reasonable hour on Friday and no one suffers professionally for not attending the firm’s weekly Friday Happy Hour.  

So, yes, it’s about balance, and on one level each person needs to figure out for herself how to make it work.  

But here’s the thing.  Every time someone ramps up the expectations for home life -- when, for example, Michael Pollan writes about the importance of home cooking, uses as his examples the most time-consuming kinds of cooking imaginable, and spends several pages dissing frozen food -- it’s falling on the ears of some woman (and I do mean woman, because men are not socialized to feel the same sense of overwhelming duty to their families above all else) as a data point adding weight to one end of her personal scale.  It’s not just Michael Pollan, of course.  It’s Martha Stewart, too, and the endless stream of magazine articles on how to raise happy and successful children, and the instructions posted and re-posted on FaceBook for how to make cute snowman cupcakes with your kids, and just about all of the content of every women’s magazine, down to and including “Working Mother” magazine.  (Note that there is no “Working Father” magazine.)   

I never thought much about what I was walking away from when I moved to part time work that wasn’t a particularly good fit with what I really wanted to be doing with my life -- or at least, with my career.  But I can look back and see that in addition to the gigantic stresses I faced as a single mother (parking my feverish child in front of a TV in my office was a particular low point for me as both mother and lawyer) -- I was also reacting to a steady stream of pre-Cooked admonitions about what to feed my kids, what activities to do with them, how to keep my home clean, and, always, how to be/stay “attractive.”   And here I am ten years later attending Leadership Summits to try to find my way back to a meaningful career.   

The Leadership Summit  was, by and large, all about getting involved -- joining boards and committees (particularly bar-related ones, as this was aimed at attorneys), doing the work that those boards and committees need to have done, and moving up into leadership positions through that.  And I thought of all the times I’ve held back from that kind of involvement because I just wanted to be able to get home at the end of the day and, indeed, cook dinner.  That choice, on my part, is not entirely due to messages like those in Cooked -- but the messages play a part.  

Michael Pollan does not, in Cooked, spend a lot of time writing about what people are doing with the time that they’re not using for cooking.  But not all of it is spent watching TV or checking Facebook -- or even driving carpool home from soccer practice. Some of it is spent working, or showing up for a bar committee meeting, or going off to phone bank for a political campaign.  And of the readers who will cut those hours and spend more time in the kitchen, the overwhelming majority will be women.   

You know there’s some young woman out there -- maybe one of the ones I met at the conference -- who’s been reading Cooked.  It makes her that much more unhappy to be sitting in her office at 7 or 8 p.m., and that much more likely to move out of that kind of career -- while her male colleague down the hall remains.  Play it out across millions of offices all across the U.S., and in ten years you’ve got however many million woman-hours of paid work and community work and political work that will be spent, instead, at home in the kitchen.  And as a result in fifteen years women will still be underrepresented among corporate executives, law firm partners, candidates for political office, and other positions of power.  

There are two things that have to happen for this to change, one far more important than the other:

The first and more important one is structural change.  This part is actually many different changes that need to be made in the law, in social policy and in the way businesses operate.  It means living wages for everyone, to begin with.  It means putting resources towards the creation of high quality childcare that is both readily available and affordable so that all working parents have good options for the care of their young children.  It means changing the expectations of the workplace generally so that excellence at work -- whether for a waitress or for an executive -- is not seen as requiring the sacrifice of all else to put in long hours at the job.  (I get it that there are occasional crunch times in most jobs, when you have to put in the hours; I get it that some very high-level jobs require a huge commitment of time and energy not compatible with other significant responsibilities like raising children.  But I think it is a peculiarly American competitive obsession that drives many people’s crazy schedules: you put in long hours because that’s what you have to do to get ahead, not because that’s what you have to do to do a good job.  With appropriate staffing most jobs, most of the time, can and should be done within a reasonable schedule.) It means changing fixed ideas of what a career has to look like, so that someone can work a reduced schedule or even leave the workforce for some years without sacrificing all hope of getting back in the game.  These are changes that will take political action and social action -- and that will take many woman-hours (and, yes, man-hours) of work to make those changes happen.  So sometimes this blog will tell you to get out of the kitchen and into the streets (or the committee meetings,  or the campaign offices).  

The second type of change that needs to happen is cultural change, and that’s mostly where this blog fits in.  Changing expectations at work is something that requires political action and, well, leadership within the business community.  But changing expectations about what happens in the home will take a different kind of communal effort, pushing back together against the relentless tide of messages about what should be happening in our homes -- messages largely directed at and heard by women.  I want women (and again, yes, men also)  to stand together to make things easier for each other, to remove guilt from the equation when we’re making our choices.  I completely agree with Michael Pollan about the evils of letting the corporate world take over our dinner tables. Cooking is a great choice to make -- but it should be a choice, and not an hugely time-consuming obligation.  And within the choice to cook there are many further choices -- including many ways to make quick, healthy meals from scratch, or mostly from scratch.  Cultural change means sharing how get dinner cooked when we choose to do it, and also sharing why we sometimes choose not to cook and what we do those nights.  By telling each other how we’re doing it, we can take some of the pressure off and remind ourselves that there are a lot of ways to keep a family fed.  

So, if you were at the office late but you still find time to heat up a can of soup and toast some toast -- more power to you.  And if tonight you’re putting in the time to put a homecooked meal on the table and help the kids with homework, but tomorrow is takeout night because you’ll be at a meeting late, good for you.  Or if you pretty much don’t ever really cook because you’ve got bigger fish to fry (so to speak), go you.  Each of us needs to do it our own way, but we also need to tell each other what’s working and what’s not, so that we’ll know what the possibilities are -- and aren’t sucked into believing that we’re failing because we haven’t mastered the mirepoix.  We need to reach the point where for every message telling women to get back in the kitchen there’s another message telling them to get out and show the world what they can do.  And we need to build a community of support to help all of us, women and men alike, to find ways to care for our families and play our parts in the wider world.