Negotiating It All

One thing about apartment living is that there just aren’t that many flat surfaces to put stuff on.

Over the past two months of quarantine, my beloved wooden dining table has held milk spills, ketchup smudges, and wine glass rings. But also: cardboard Lenape teepees, and those little dots that fall out of the hole puncher, and one truly hideous 1000-piece puzzle. Our table has been an ad hoc desk for laptops and iPads and contracts and notes. It has propped up elbows holding exhausted faces, been scattered with eraser dust from math homework gone very, very wrong. It’s been assaulted by Lysol sprayed obsessively over groceries lined up in rows, and by puppy paws begging for pasta, and mountain ranges of folded laundry, and some big fat salty tears, too.

In our families and in our work it is, quite literally, ALL on the table right now, as we negotiate our needs, our space, and our values together. If “negotiating” previously conjured up an image of a desk with two professionally-dressed people squaring off, I hope that old notion is one thing we are happy to leave behind post pandemic. With so much of work visible to our families, and so much of our family life visible at work, we are arguing—productively, ultimately—for a sustainable existence like never before. Here are some specific questions you shared.

Q: “How do I get my husband to pitch in and help with my child's distance learning? We both have full-time jobs that keep us very busy all day at home."

A: First of all: primal screaming right there with you. As many smart parenting columnists have pointed out, this is not home-schooling, this is crisis- schooling. But as time stretches on without any clear finish line, it’s becoming clear that this crisis can’t just be our new normal. For those of us fortunate enough to have partners, we need equity, and for many of us, we need a reset on those panicked early days of quarantine -- fast.

I see a version of this problem come up very often in my Fifth Trimester coaching, even in totally progressive well-intended couples. (I’m going to be heteronormative about this here because same-sex couples have been shown to work this stuff out more equitably. So bear with me.) Typically Mom will have taken a longer parental leave than Dad, and then when Mom goes back to work, she is the one who knows how to do All of the Baby Things and also Wants Them Done Her Way. It’s only natural but it’s unsustainable and really isn’t fair to either partner (or their kids!). The fastest way to fix this is for Mom to go back to work and then for Dad to take a week or two home with baby totally on his own. It’s bootcamp, and it works, as Dad learns on the job and both parents see how utterly capable he is.

I wonder if you could try some sort of similar reset right now in your home. Can you have a day—even just one day—when, due to a massive work project of yours, say, Dad has to take a day off of work and do the kid stuff completely?

Barring that, I suggest a 90’s-sitcom-style family meeting. If your kids are old enough for school (even preschool), they are old enough to share their opinions in a way that I suspect your partner might find motivating. Ask everyone to come with a “thorn” and a “rose” about distance learning right now (feel free to make *your* thorn all of the research that shows that most moms are particularly over burdened right now which is keeping you from role-modeling fair partnership for your kids...ahem), and take turns offering empathy and solutions.

Q: “How can I negotiate for continued virtual work even when things 're-open'?”

A: As I sat down to write this column today, my eight-year-old son interrupted me: “I’m still doing my video PE, Mom, but I have a question.” Sigh. Sure, okay. “When is the pandemic going to be over?”

Perfect. Just the big, unanswerable question I was hoping to tackle. “I don’t know,” I told him honestly. He didn’t budge from the office doorway. Then I had a little inspiration. I reached over next to his head and turned the light switch off and back on again. Click. Click. “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s going to be like that,” I told him, “on, and then off, and then on again completely. It’s going to be more gradual. And there are almost definitely going to be some things, some good things, from the way we are living right now in quarantine, that we are going to want to hang onto. Let’s think of some.”

I’m calling that moment my parenting victory of the day (perhaps month, let’s be realistic), and its lesson is my advice to you, too: Some of the changes we’ve made are worth keeping...if we can agree on them mutually as wins. The most basic rule of negotiating is to lobby for something in a way that makes it feel like a smart choice for both you and your employer.

For most of us in non-essential-worker jobs, I do think that the return to work isn’t going to be that light switching back on. We’re going to have to ramp back up childcare that may have evaporated. Workplaces might need to enforce social distancing that would thin out the number of people who can be present at once, necessitating some shifts worked from home.

But right now, while we’re still in the messy middle, start taking some notes on what’s working, what’s good, what’s maybe even better than before. Are you able to log in earlier because you don’t have a commute? Are you meeting face-to-face (on screen) with clients more often instead of playing perpetual phone tag? Do you have more of an appreciation for your colleagues’ personal lives in a way that makes your team stronger? Now, can you assign a dollar value to those improvements? I know it feels grabby and weird, but just try. Because another question that came in was about how to negotiate being made whole again after taking a pandemic pay cut. And you can’t negotiate the value of your work or your time until you believe it yourself. Start there. And when it’s time to have the conversation, you’ll be ready.

Q: "Can you help me negotiate to not work for hours after the kids go to bed to get it done? I'm returning from maternity leave soon."

A: Could there be a weirder time to return to work after baby? (Universe, please don’t answer that question.) But seriously, welcome back to a much-changed workplace, where, suddenly, *all* of your colleagues feel as exposed, and as in-the-trenches, and as in need of drawing lines as new moms do when they come back to work after leave.

Use that to your advantage. Many, many people are asking for -- or just taking -- the accommodations they need right now. The best approach is to come with a plan, not a problem. Do some external research to see what’s worked for other new parents in your industry. Then, think about your job description and figure out how you can deliver the work that’s in it on new terms that work for you and assuage any obvious conflicts for your team/boss. Offer that plan. If you don’t get an immediate yes, offer a trial period to show that it’s doable. And focus on visibility, too. While you might normally make one-on-one meetings with your immediate team upon your return, don’t undersell the value of your old water-cooler relationships. Reach out to those people with a friendly “Hello, hi, I’m back, how are you?” too, in case you ultimately decide that you want to change teams.

Lauren Smith Brody is the author and founder of The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity and Big Success After Baby. You can follow her on instagram @thefifthtrimester.