Working Mothers and Career-Parent Conflicts : Babies and Briefcases Group Provides Support for Some Fortunate Women

Holly Weisbuch remembers the emotional jolt she felt the first time she saw her toddler, Aaron, pick up a crayon and draw. “The last time I gave him crayons,” she said, “he ate them.” Weisbuch was feeling the guilt and conflict common to mothers with full-time careers outside the home.

Weisbuch, 30, a systems analyst for a health care consulting company, is by her own description “the kind of person who wants to do the right thing,” an efficient, success-oriented professional.

Frustrated and Fragmented

But she’d found that, since the arrival of Aaron, now 20 months, her life no longer ran smoothly. She felt exhausted, frustrated and fragmented.

She is typical of the women with children under 5 who have found their way to Babies and Briefcases, a support group for the career woman/mother under the auspices of the Early Childhood Center of the Thalians Mental Health Center at Cedars-Sinai.

“The common theme is guilt,” said Phyllis Rothman, the program coordinator, who as a clinical social worker has been involved for a decade in early childhood education. “Our society hasn’t adjusted to the fact that so many women work.”

Indeed, 1985 statistics from the Census Bureau show that 25.7 million children under 18 live with married parents who are both in the labor force--either working or looking for jobs. Combined statistics from the bureau and the Department of Labor point to record numbers of mothers of preschoolers--more than 50%--working outside the home.

A Range of Problems

Nitty-gritty problems of professional women who are also parents--dilemmas ranging from finding good child care to scheduling a service call for a major appliance disaster--have for the major part not been addressed.

Babies and Briefcases doesn’t promise answers. What it does promise is that these women will find other women who are desperately trying to juggle babies and careers, husbands and homes and feel their acts are falling apart.

Isolation is a major factor for these working mothers, Rothman points out--we don’t live in a time or place where neighbors exchange chitchat about their kids over the backyard fence. Frequently, groups for mothers and children meet during work hours. And, in the workplace, childless colleagues don’t offer empathy.

Typically, Rothman said, women calling to inquire about Babies and Briefcases ask, “This isn’t a group that’s going to talk about toys, is it?” They are not interested in discussing the latest model backpack; rather, they’re looking for other women with whom to share what they feel.

The group starts with the basic premise that most professional women are able to manage the nuts and bolts of their dual roles. This is not, the literature points out, about “how to cook 30-minute gourmet meals while simultaneously doing the laundry, reading Business Week and bouncing baby.”

On a recent evening, five “alumnae” of Babies and Briefcases, women who had started the 10-week, 20-hour program together in October, 1985 met at the Sherman Oaks home of Mary Talley-Garcia to share a pizza. These once-a-month gatherings are a ritual that have kept the group close.

Those present included Holly Weisbuch, Talley-Garcia, 36, mother of Alex, 22 months; Kathleen Burke, 40, mother of Rebecca, 5, and Nora, 22 months; Arlene Singer-Gross, 40, mother of Taylor, 23 months; Shirah Vollmer, 24, mother of Deenah, 14 months. Their stories, together, are a composite of the tugs and pulls experienced by career women/mothers.

“It was like a shock to my whole way of life,” said Singer-Gross, a studio teacher for Embassy TV, of the arrival of Taylor. “I had no idea what was involved.”

For her, there was a second adjustment; Taylor is an adopted child and “I didn’t have nine months to think about this baby.” Her husband, Bradley Gross, an assistant director, was not working at the time, and was for a while the principal child care provider; later, they hired a housekeeper.

But Singer-Gross hadn’t counted on the emotional tug and pull of this baby. “I was going crazy,” she said. “I had such guilt I wasn’t functioning. Sometimes I would sneak out of the house in the morning” to avoid saying goodby to the baby.

‘Wasn’t Just the Guilt’

“Babies and Briefcases really saved me,” she said. “I found other women feeling exactly the way I felt. It wasn’t just the guilt. But to know I could sit next to someone having a conflict with her husband over who was going to feed the baby, who was more tired . . . .”

Shirah Vollmer, who took time off during the fourth year of medical school at UCLA to have Deenah, now 14 months old, spoke of how carefully she and her husband, who works with computers, had planned this event, just as she had planned her career--”I thought it was the ideal time” because to postpone it would have meant waiting five years, until she had finished her residency in psychiatry.

Very quickly, she learned that a child can’t be programmed.

She laughed--”I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a trend-setter,” then “all of a sudden I looked at myself as a terrible role model.” The rigors of her internship at UCLA, which can mean 36-hour shifts and on-call weekends and holidays, in conflict with her wish to spend more time with her daughter, were tearing her apart.

Vollmer, who alone among her peers at the hospital had decided on motherhood while she was still in training, said, “I turned from pioneer to lonely very quickly.”

Often, she thought of giving up her work but would decide, “I can’t quit because I’ll feel like a failure. I’ll quit when I’m up--but when I’m up I don’t feel like quitting.” And the reality, she understood, was “If I don’t get my license, I have no way to make a living.”

She sought out Babies and Briefcases, she said, “to see how other women were dealing with this.”

Conflict of Desires

Talley-Garcia, the hostess this evening, was persuading a tearful Alex, 22 months, that it was bedtime and, at the same time making meal preparations. She was recalling how she had come to the group, when Alex was nine months old and she was “close to tears” from dealing with pressures on the job--she is a librarian who runs a librarian consultant and personnel service--and her desire to stay home with her baby.

At work, she had no support. She recalls her then-partner coming to see her and the baby in the hospital and bringing “a stack of work.” Still, Talley-Garcia said, she was “very ambivalent” about the baby for about the first four weeks and looking forward to returning to the office. “After four weeks,” she said, “something kicked in and I didn’t want to leave him.”

At six weeks, she returned to work. The guilt period ensued. She felt guilty about going back to work and guilty about not wanting to. And, she said, “I felt there was no one who could possibly take care of him as well as I could.” On the job, she felt, “I couldn’t give 100% anymore.”

“I was totally unprepared for the conflicts,” Talley-Garcia said. “My emotions were in an upheaval.” She tried taking Alex to the office but found “he was fussy, and I was nervous. I don’t think you can mix the two.”

She smiled and said, “I was always very successful, and all of a sudden I wasn’t successful at all at anything.”

Kathleen Burke, a staff research associate in microbiology at UCLA, came to Babies and Briefcases through a workshop for working women conducted by Phyllis Rothman. Her daughter, Nora, was 3 months old and she was planning to return to work, but somehow things didn’t seem to be going as smoothly as they had after her daughter, Rebecca, 5, was born.

“I felt a lot less adequate with the two kids, somehow,” she said. Nora, unlike Rebecca, wasn’t cooperating by sleeping through the night. “And I was dealing with the sibling thing,” Burke said. Also, she and her husband, who runs adventure travel tours, had both been working four-day weeks when their first child was born; her present job is both more demanding and more fulfilling.

And, Rebecca is now in kindergarten, where there is after-school day care. Still, “I couldn’t do it without my husband,” she said. “He’s in charge of a lot of the picking up.” (Several of the women pointed out the need for after-school care that is available longer hours, ideally from before 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.)

These women are typical, said Rothman, women who have carefully planned their lives, only to see all the planning blow up when baby arrives. In looking for a support group, she said, they are seeking women with whom they can talk about “what happens to the you that you thought was you. I think aloneness is still a big problem for women who are working and having babies.”

Rothman has been facilitator for Babies and Briefcases groups since 1982 and she understands the problems these women face in juggling both motherhood and careers, even with husbands and, for the most part, with live-out housekeepers to care for their children.

In a society that in recent years has tended to devalue motherhood, they may feel guilty acknowledging that their jobs bring them greater self-esteem than being mothers. Because they themselves may have been reared to fulfill “women’s roles,” they may have nagging anxieties about whether they can work outside the home and still be “good” mothers.

Unprepared for Reality

And no amount of planning appears to prepare dual-career couples for the reality of sleep-disrupting midnight feedings and temper tantrums.

The Professional Women’s Parenting Project, a part of the Cedars-Sinai Early Childhood Center, has found that career women-mothers are faced also with society’s “given” that they still are the primary child care provider in the family. And, having bought what the parenting project’s staff has referred to as the “myth” of quality time vs. quantity time, they may make mothering more difficult by giving in to the child’s every whim to keep the time they have for the child “happy time.”

These women may interpret the normal problems of bringing up baby as proof of the folly of trying to do it all. And, on top of this, they may have a need to appear professionally cool and nonvulnerable--tough and competent, just like the men they work alongside.

‘At My Wit’s End’

Holly Weisbuch, who returned to work when Aaron was 6 weeks old, said, “None of the people I knew who’d had children seemed to be having the problems I had.” Aaron was a restless sleeper who would keep her awake nights and, she said, “I was totally exhausted.” She commutes an hour each way to her job and after a 10-hour day, she found, “Between the demanding job and the demanding infant, I was at my wit’s end.”

Dealing with statistics and computers on the job, she said, “Either you do it right, or you do it wrong. With children, it’s not like that.”

She “had fantasies about being the perfect mother. The child had never had a jar of baby food. It was kind of a neurotic thing I did. I’d get home and make baby food and freeze it in ice cube trays.”

In the group, Weisbuch said, “I found a lot of other mothers who just couldn’t seem to do it right.” As the women talked, she added, they made a marvelous discovery: Their babies are real people and respond to being treated as such, “which is not really the way we handle things in the corporate world.”

Katherine Leiner, 37, another graduate of this Babies and Briefcases group, has published six books for children, including this year’s “Both My Parents Work.” She and her husband, film composer Miles Goodman, work out of their Pacific Palisades home, which, Leiner said, “is good and bad.”

Leiner has a 15-year-old son, Dylan, by a former marriage and she and Goodman are parents of a daughter, Makenna, a busy 18-month-old.

At nine most mornings the housekeeper arrives and, Leiner says, “We say goodby, go out and close the door” and retreat to their downstairs offices. There, she works uninterrupted until 1:30 when the whole family reconvenes for lunch. Before she puts Makenna down for a nap, mother and daughter usually fit in some playtime.

“But when I’m on deadline,” Leiner said, “I don’t see her for three or four days at a time.”

Still Has Drawbacks

Even on routine days, she said, working at home has its drawbacks. Makenna “knows we’re there, yet for six to eight hours, she can’t get to us.” She knows, as Makenna gets older, “The more capable she is of intruding upon us, the more she will.”

Still, she said, “My problems have been slightly different” from those of the other women in the group. “I haven’t had the separation anxieties” of being in an office miles from home. On the other hand, she said, the basic anxiety is the same “whether you go downstairs every morning or to Thousand Oaks.”

Leiner found the group because “I was having problems dealing with a number of my older friends, women over 35 having their first child and giving up careers. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t just put my career aside.”

She couldn’t, she said, and she wouldn’t, still she admits to “terrible guilt,” some of it related to the fact that she is not as available now to her son.

Still, Leiner recognizes that she and the other women is this group “really do have a choice, and many career women do not.” When Dylan was a baby, she said, she had to work--”Now, I work because I personally have to work.”

This is, she decided, “a very confusing time. I think the kids are all getting mixed messages, too.” When both parents work, she said, “You treat them more like little people more quickly. The child’s sense of childhood is probably not so great.”

‘Not Always Me’

Some things don’t change. Babies still get sick. But the question today may be, which parent is on call? “Should he give up his screening or should I give up my interview?” Leiner asked. He makes more money, she said, yet one has to make that sacrifice “and it’s not always me.”

Leiner thinks “a sense of their mortality” is one factor contributing to women’s willingness to take on the double role. “Older women want to leave some mark of ourselves. Maybe, with the women’s liberation movement, we don’t feel children are enough. The movement is the source of a great deal of confusion.”

She looked at Makenna, bouncing a ball at her feet, and told of having fixed the child eggs for breakfast that morning, even though Makenna, having been asked, had stated her preference for cereal. Leiner smiled and said, “My mother was not so preoccupied.”

Admitting that there are times when “I’m so happy to be away from her at 9 o’clock,” to the order of her home office, Leiner said, “Sometimes all I want is a normal household,” a Sundays-in-the-Park kind of household.

She said, “I always feel terrible when the holidays come around . . . we sort of throw it together every year.”

Kathleen Burke remembers once being so preoccupied that she took her two daughters with her to the supermarket--and drove off without the groceries. Once, she said, 5-year-old Rebecca asked her, “Mommy, do you like Nora and me as much as you do your work?”

When she told this story, Phyllis Rothman noted, “Children don’t ask their daddies that. I think women themselves give off conflict about what they’re doing and the children pick this up.”

This is still a culture, Rothman noted, in which “mommies bake cookies.” Burke nodded, mentioning that she was starting to get calls from Rebecca’s school about doing her mother-volunteer stint.

Singer-Gross, whose own mother was a nurse who didn’t work until the children were older and was “a Brownie leader, a Cub Scout leader,” all of it, said with her Taylor “I always feel so preoccupied I don’t feel like I’m giving what I should give or I’m capable of giving.”

The conversation drifted to solutions--it was agreed that the solutions are political, things like paid parental leave, good day care close to the workplace. The women said they knew they should be working for these things but they simply “don’t have the energy left over.”

sh Not Just Personal Problems The reality, Vollmer suggested, is that “The people who run society are older men whose wives stay home”--and these wives view the problems of young working mothers as personal problems “as opposed to a systems problem.”

Talley-Garcia observed that the country is run “by a paternalistic man with a wife who’s there to hang on his arm.”

Rothman said few of the women in her “Babies and Briefcases” groups had had mothers who worked when their children were young. Was this a contributing factor to the women’s guilt?

Singer-Gross wanted to know, “How many of our husbands’ mothers worked?”

Choose to Work

They talked about themselves as women who choose to work, rather than women for whom work is a financial necessity. Vollmer said, “It’s a lot easier if you know if you don’t go to work, your family can’t eat. If I don’t go to work, my family still eats and my child gets to have a mother who’s home.”

Singer-Gross said, “I’ve resolved in my mind that I have to work. I need that outlet.” She and her husband are in the process of adopting a second child--is she confident she can handle two? “No, not at all,” she said, laughing. “That’s another support group.”

Weisbuch said she had begun being able to cherish the little moments, such as when her son looks lovingly at her and says, “Mommy.”

The problem of finding time for themselves was mentioned again and again. Burke does her running on her lunch hour. Singer-Gross said, “If I can read a book before I go to sleep at night, that’s time for me. I fantasize about what it would be like to cook and bake.” Talley-Garcia gets up at 5:15 each morning to have quiet time before the household wakes.

Still, none of them is thinking seriously of being a full-time mother. Weisbuch, whose family is in the East, said, “I certainly would not want to be home, Aaron and me alone. Having extended families was the key” for women of earlier generations.

Animosity Towards Kids

She thinks public places today are “just not set up for kids. In the ‘50s, I remember going with my mother to the butcher and having him give me a piece of bologna. There’s a lot of animosity toward kids now.”

Singer-Gross added, “In the ‘50s you had your neighbor to watch your kid while you had your hair done.”

Said Talley-Garcia, “I still can’t conceive of not wanting to work, of not having a part of me that’s not tied to Alex. And being so dependent on a man is repugnant to me.”

Vollmer said, “I feel I give 95% of my energy to my work. The balance is off. Work’s going to be there always, but your kid’s never going to be that age again. That kills me.”

Talley-Garcia said she has made compromises: “I’m going to be satisfied with my business at a certain level, and be comfortable with my child . . . you’re competing with men who don’t have these conflicts.”

Are the conflicts avoidable? Only if “you have someone you think is just as good as you are” caring for your child, Vollmer said. Responded Rothman, “That creates other conflicts.”

Talley-Garcia agreed. “When I see Alex learning things that I never taught him, I feel less than adequate. He learned to say ‘please’ and it wasn’t from me. It’s as if I didn’t have the time to do it.”

The women talked about women in the workplace who are not mothers who are bent on “being a better man”--and not responsive to the needs of women with children. They acknowledged that many working women “have it a lot harder than we do” and do not have the supportive husbands these women acknowledged as essential.

For the most part, they agreed, their husbands want them to work. They enjoy the life style that goes with two salaries. Singer-Gross spoke of the unspoken expectation that, when she married, she would continue to be a working woman with a measure of independence. “When Taylor came along,” she said, “we did not reevaluate our roles . . . we always had separate checking accounts. (Then) all of a sudden, we were asking, ‘who’s going to pay for Taylor’s clothes?’ ”

Talley-Garcia spoke of other changes in the marriage, the difficulty of balancing baby and job and “keeping up a good level of intimacy. There’s no time to just sit and cuddle on the couch. When I have time, I want it to myself.”

Weisbuch said she and her husband now make it a point to go out alone, where the conversation is not centered around the baby. “Of course,” she added, “I had to make the arrangements for the baby-sitter.”

This group had shared what they look back on as “some really rough times.” The friendships are intact. Leiner said she wouldn’t hesitate to ask any one of the other five for help in an emergency.

All agreed they had a better handle on their lives because of “Babies and Briefcases.” Burke smiled and said, “I still need a dial-a-Phyllis every once in a while.” Vollmer said she still feels very alone as a mother and an intern--”I talk to the nurses. The nurses have kids.” She added, “I always say some people save for college tuition, I’m saving for analysis.”

In the ‘50s, there were dire warnings about working mothers rearing juvenile delinquents. By the ‘70s, the “experts” had reversed themselves--children of working mothers were thought to be better adjusted. “We’re ill-prepared to know how it’s all going to turn out,” Rothman said.

In any event, Talley-Garcia said, “I think we’re all more forgiving of ourselves than we were” before joining the group.

“Babies and Briefcases” groups form on demand, when there are eight or 10 women interested. Rothman is also hoping to start in-the-workplace groups for men and women.

In the last four years, she said, she has learned “to appreciate the choices younger women are having to make these days, their commitment to parenting as well as to excelling in their careers. They’re working very, very hard.”

She spoke of the need for flexible time, job sharing, parental leave for men and women and--looking at her group of mothers and youngsters who had met this Sunday morning for an outing at Roxbury Park--said, “When these kids are grown up, that might happen.”