An Overwhelmed Mother's Departure Memo The "departure memo" is a fixture at many large employers, and nowhere more so than at big law firms. Departures, particularly of young associates, are built into the business model. Not everyone is supposed to stay, and many never planned to stay, so leaving is often celebrated. Many of the "Departure Memos of the Day" published on Above the Law fall into that category. Excitement at the next opportunity, and a little bit of glee at leaving, is completely acceptable, as is a little thumbing of the nose at the firm. Creativity isn't unusual. But this departure memo, written by a young female associate from the law firm Clifford Chance, while creative and even funny in a "been there, done that" kind of way, is anything but gleeful. "Departure Memos" are generally published anonymously by Above the Law, and this one is no exception - thus "Ms. X. " in the first line. Here's how it begins. A day in the life of Ms. X (and many others here, I presume): 4:00 am: Hear baby screaming, hope I am dreaming, realize I'm not, sleep walk to nursery, give her a pacifier and put her back to sleep 4:45 am: Finally get back to bed 5:30 am: Alarm goes off, hit snooze 6:00 am: See the shadow of a small person standing at my bedroom door, realize it is my son who has wet the bed (time to change the sheets) 6:15 am: Hear baby screaming, make a bottle, turn on another excruciating episode of Backyardigans, feed baby 7:00 am: Find some clean clothes for the kids, get them dressed 7:30 am: Realize that I am still in my pajamas and haven't showered, so pull hair back in a ponytail and throw on a suit 8:00 am: Pile into the car, drive the kids to daycare 8:15 am: TRAFFIC 9:00 am: finally arrive at daycare, baby spits up on suit, get kids to their classrooms, realize I have a conference call in 15 minutes Ms. X goes on, through skipping lunch, into the frantic call from the client that leads to the memo drafting that leads to the waiting for partner review that leads to the being late for day-care pickup at $5 a minute. She loses the negotiation with her husband on who will do the bedtime and bath routine. Logs back into her office network, falls asleep over her work and gets up the next day to do it all over again - or not, since this is the moment when she, as they say in the law, "takes down her shingle": Needless to say, I have not been able to simultaneously meet the demands of career and family, so have chosen to leave private practice, and the practice of law (at least for now). I truly admire all of you that have been able to juggle your career and family and do not envy what a challenge it is trying to do each well. I appreciate those of you who have been incredibly understanding of my family obligations over the past few years, and especially the last several months. That's one of the bleakest reports from the front lines of juggling parenting and work on the upper-middle-class side that I've seen in a long time. I wish the this former associate not only the best of luck, but some joy in her choice. Maybe she'll feel a little more gleeful once she's caught up on her sleep. Elie Mystal, the Above the Law writer who posted this departure memo (and the father of a 6-week-old baby), notes that it depressed him as well. "It shouldn't be so damn hard - in the richest country on Earth - to have a big-time job and be a loving parent," he writes. Having very young children will always be "hard" in the sense that they are no respecters of persons, sleep or property, and in the sense that they bring most of us a fresh awareness of the fragility of life. But the grueling kind of "hard" that results from the sheer mechanics of working outside the home with children who essentially demand that there be someone "working" (or providing child care) at home as well is another question. I'm not sure how we make that easier, but the first step is to talk more about how those mechanics affect every parent. If you're a mother or a father at work with a baby at home, someone, somewhere, somehow is working to make that possible. After the election in my home state, New Hampshire, of a full congressional delegation of mothers (and a governor), I wrote that I'd like to hear successful parents in politics and elsewhere talk more about the mechanics that enabled them to get there, because juggling those mechanics has become the new normal for all of us. On Slate's XX Factor blog, Amanda Hess responded: a professional woman, she wrote, "can't really speak honestly about how she manages her home life without getting attacked." When a successful woman does speak out about how she manages work and family, she has to take care that her work-life balance doesn't tip too far in either direction. Admit that she's hired a fleet of nannies to care for the children? She's an out-of-touch elite. Talk about how she stayed home to raise them herself? She's never worked a day in her life. Popped out a baby and returned directly to work? She's neglecting her kids. Kept working even while in labor? She was never pregnant at all! Never had kids? What is she, gay? Her husband cares for them instead? What, is he gay? All those things have been said of working women in the past, and probably will be again. And it's certainly been true that, in the past (as Ms. Hess points out) fathers haven't been asked to explain how they are balancing kids and career - because the assumption has been that their wives have been taking care of that for them. But we now live in a world where that assumption has, in theory, disappeared, as has the assumption that a mother with children won't work outside the home. The assumptions may be gone. The structure of our society hasn't changed. Schools still let out at 3:00. Quality day care is difficult to find in most areas, and often expensive. Maternity- and paternity-leave policies vary wildly, not just in letter but in the way they're regarded or implemented. A whole host of things still function based on an unspoken assumption that there's an adult at home during the workday. Every single working parent, mother or father, is solving the problem of being needed in two places at once in one way or another. When we do it silently, one of two things happens: for men, the assumption that there's a little woman at home smoothing it all over can continue unchanged. For women, the same litany of attacks described by Ms. Hess can remain hanging out there, unspoken or not, because if we won't talk about how we manage it, there must be something wrong with having to manage it at all. Now it's time for a neat wrap-up, tying together one frustrated law firm associate and now at-home parent with the need for both policies and social compacts that make quitting a choice, rather than a perceived necessity, and that make her eventual re-entry into the workforce a generally accepted part of the arc of a career. It's all part of the same thing: the evolution of the working parent as both sexes reach for a more balanced life. And given another half-hour at my desk, I'd wind that into a closing paragraph that made it all flow, and made it clear that the goal should always be to enable all parents to make the choices that work best for their families - because children raised in happy, secure environments are important to our future. But I don't have another half-hour, because I'm a working parent, and I have children to pick up at school, and an afternoon's coordinated activities to set in motion, with the help of my husband and any number of other parents, all of whom are about to embark on a usual weekday of Lego League practice (four working-parent coaches, including me), playdates (with a parent who has an afternoon off), birthday parties (starting after work!) and taking children to watch the college hockey team in action (another afterwork activity). Who's doing what with your school-age or younger kids this afternoon, and how hard was it to make it happen?