My daughter Evie and I had a rough morning.
It was a Wednesday and I had to be in Southern California for a work meeting ASAP, but I’d delayed my flight (and kept people waiting) in order to take the kids to school. I wasn’t going to see them for a few days and I desperately wanted that extra bit of momming.
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Evie is always hard to motivate in the mornings but this morning, in particular, she took 20 minutes longer than Eli to get ready for school. Twenty minutes. I don’t even think I could move that slow if I tried. It was like this.
After the usual polite, and then nagging reminders, after the “Let’s go over again how disrespectful this is to me, to Eli, to your teachers…” I was just done. I absolutely lost my temper.
As I explained to Evie in the car, part of the reason I got so angry was that I have spent every morning for at least the last year explaining to her that she’s disrespecting other people’s time and efforts when she can’t get out of the house in a timely manner. I tell her that multiple times per morning. At this point, I told her, it’s hard for me to face that she simply doesn’t care about my feelings when it comes to this. And that’s sad.
But more to the point: I told her that I will always keep doing things for her no matter what she does as her mom. But many other adults in the world will not.
“You see this house we have in San Francisco? You see the fact that I’m able to run a company? Everything I have is a combination of hard work, and people seeing that hard work and giving me a shot. Going out of their way to do things for me. If you telegraph to people that you don’t appreciate their efforts, they simply won’t.”
I got to school and the kids bounded up to sing with their classmates for assembly. I confided in another founder-mom whose kids also go to our school that I’d utterly lost my sh*t with Evie that morning and how I felt justified in doing it, but it still sucked since I wasn’t going to see them for a few days. Of course I felt guilt and shame.
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Then she said something amazing: “I’ve been talking about this a lot lately, why do women have to be pushed to the point where they are screaming or crying or have totally lost it to have their words taken seriously?”
WHOA.
This insight hit me like a lightening bolt. And it immediately shifted the guilt I was feeling to, “Yes… Why did I have to get pushed to that point to be taken seriously?”
I was used to the difference between how a screaming man (passionate!) and a screaming woman (emotional!) were perceived in the workplace. And how much more controlled you have to be in your emotions as a woman.
When I worked at TechCrunch every time I’d argue something passionately the founder Michael Arrington would tell me to “Take it down a few notches.” Meantime, he was someone who’d have such large emotional outbursts, he’d disappear from the business for weeks at a time, or walk off stage at his own event, leaving the steady, reliable and largely female management team to pick up the pieces.
But what I hadn’t thought of was why I yell. I’d been used to seeing it as my weakness, my failing. But maybe it was the world’s.
As the other mom at school commented about why women always have to take things to the extreme to be heard, I thought of not just Evie. I suddenly cycled back through so many instances of my life as a younger manager, and how frequently I had to yell to be heard. How much I had to yell at a company that screwed me over on an embargo. How much I had to yell at everyone to be taken seriously as a female reporter. To make sure they were crystal clear that they couldn’t screw me over. This is, after all, not only a male dominated business but one that encourages “asking forgiveness, not permission.” Screwing people over is part of the code of conduct. And those who look like they won’t fight back get it the worst.
I have long looked back at those moments with shame that I resorted to the easy out of yelling to be heard. But now, suddenly, I saw it for what it was: An unequal playing field where people just were going to keep pushing it until I yelled. That was—for many years and in many relationships—the only way for me to be heard.
Yelling at kids and yelling in a professional setting are two different things. And, yet, the reason my kids don’t take me seriously unless I yell is that they are so used to me sucking it up when they don’t mind, smiling, and still doing everything for them. Read these stories of emotional labor at work, and you’ll see that women frequently face the same expectation in the office.
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The world forces us to yell to be taken seriously; then we pay a steep price when we do. A double whammy.
I’m reading Michael Moss’s “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” and I’m struck but how the giant food conglomerates weaponized working mom guilt via “convenience” food marketing that also sold “fortified” cereals that should have been in the candy aisle. It sold us food with undisclosed amounts of sugar wrecking kids teeth and health and had the nerve to do so by claiming this was the answer: The way women could work and still feed our kids!
We know you feel horrible for providing for your family! You should! But let us help you!
And when an obesity epidemic ensued? Well, that’s mom’s fault again, of course. You and your job! You shouldn’t have been so selfish that your kids had to eat at all that pre-packaged food! Why weren’t you making home-cooked meals?
It’s a similar double whammy. In both cases what feels like a no-win situation for working women actually has an incredibly easy solution. In the case of food: BOTH PARENTS COULD SHARE THE LOAD. (Yep, I’m yelling again.) In the case of yelling: If you don’t want me to yell, take me seriously before it gets to that point.
Because when we’re forced to yell, it not only labels us as “emotional” at work, it also labels us as social media’s favorite weapon against ambitious women: “a bad mom.” Yelling has been called “The new spanking” and there are pages and pages online of mothers exercising their guilt of yelling. New York Magazine wrote a piece on this where the author talked about the poignant universality of the line in a Lauren Groff short story: “I have somehow become a woman who yells.”
From that piece:
That or she runs a company in a male dominated industry.
(This article originally ran in Chairman Mom’s daily newsletter The Mama Bear. Go here to subscribe for free! Everyday thousands of women on Chairman Mom discuss work, life and everything in between in a troll-free, privacy-first safe space. Check out a free trial here. You aren’t alone, and we’ll never make you yell to be heard 😉 )
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
