Laura Vanderkam is a married mother of five, time management expert, and concise and insightful writer. Though it’s been several years since I read it, her book “I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make The Most of Their Time” came to mind when I was reading Valerie Shore’s “The Compleat Woman.” Both books, both written by ambitious mothers of many in the thick of it, seek to answer the same question but go about it in different ways: How do some mothers manage to meet the demands of their lifestyle while also continuing their career?
Shore’s “The Compleat Woman” is a compilation of retrospective interviews. As such, the perspective is limited by personal blind spots and bias and sparse on the details of logistics. Some mothers explain that they blatantly lied about the bliss and ease of motherhood in earlier interviews. Their input to Shore’s project was, for obvious reasons, suspect.
Among the more reliable interviews, there is a lack of specificity. Phrases along the lines of “I don’t know how we managed…” are frequent when reflecting on the early years of motherhood. There is also more than once the confident assertion from a mother that she did not sleep one single solitary night without being woken up by a child for precisely 8 years, and we have only her word for it.
In contrast, Vanderkam compiles data rather than narratives. Using time logs, kept hour-for-hour for 1001 days, Vanderkam has statistics of time spent working, time spent on household chores, time spent with children, time spent on hobbies, etc. In a certain sense, this removes the guesswork. It gives you raw numbers to think about.
The selection criteria for Vanderkam’s study were women with at least one child earning more than $100,000 per year as a means of differentiating women who have a demanding career. It’s been too long since I read “I Know How She Does It” to comment in detail. Additionally, I did not find the narrative compelling. I am confident years after reading “The Compleat Woman,” I will remember specific observations and still be inspired to pursue a certain kind of life based on what I read. This could be chalked up largely to personal preference—I’m more intrigued by narrative and find it more memorable. I think, however, that is not exclusive to me, and many people prefer a personal narrative to a list of timetables (not that Vanderkam leaves the data so undeveloped; it’s a hyperbolic statement).
In her TedTalk about the book, I believe, Vanderkam relates the story of a busy professional woman whose water heater flooded the basement. Despite having a full week as a working mother, this woman found 12 hours, or whatever the total was, to deal with the household issue. While from the outside we might assume that a busy professional, let alone a mother, could not possibly find 12 hours in her week, and, yet, when the need arises she, and almost anyone in her situation, would.
Vanderkam, who has been personally time-tracking for many years, began her time management work with “168 Hours,” which is, in case like me you didn’t know, the number of hours in a week. A pragmatist, Vanderkam has built a platform of sane time management approaches, utilizing working hours well and making time for leisure, seeing time constraints with realism while not advocating for unbounded fixation on efficiency, which does not make for a happy life.
Interestingly, both Shore’s selection of women with some form of career and Vanderkam’s selection of women making six figures can include authors and professors with a high degree of flexibility in their daily schedule and surgeons and law firm partners who are constrained by complex work environments and billable hours. Vanderkam tends to emphasize the women in more rigorously scheduled careers, arguing that mothers can do even these, though, notably, she has opted not to.
Personally, I would amend the title to “I Know How She Does: And I Don’t Want To.” Along the lines of Sheryl Sandburg’s grim description of an action-packed day, I do not question the possibility of fitting a lot of professional and personal responsibility into a single life; rather, barring dire necessity, I am not interested in personally doing so. To quote a mother with demanding work hours, “We wanted it all, and, boy, did we get it!”
That does not mean, however, that work is off the table. As Vanderkam’s own chosen profession and style of working attests, forging a career that can be done with variation and flexibility in much of day-to-day life can allow mothers to be present in their children’s lives on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon if that is of value to them. We could even allow that final “them” in the sentence refer to the children rather than the mothers. Is it of value to children to know that their mother will be available to them on most days? From adults whose mothers were not available to them as children, it seems likely the case. It makes a difference to children to know that someone will be there; yes, a nanny, a dad, a grandma, but most often that someone will be mom.
Outside of “I Know How She Does It,” Vanderkam is also quite good at questioning the narrative that some mothers “stay home,” with the implication that there is a strict delineation that no paid work is performed or career development is undergone. That does not match reality. “Staying home” is now an umbrella term that includes many mothers earning income and running businesses, but they refer to themselves as “staying home” to imply that their children are the first priority.
Where Vanderkam’s questioning of “the stories we tell ourselves” (a worthwhile and rewarding exercise) goes off the rails is in her assertion that the hours a mother and committed professional is getting her toddler ready for daycare is some kind of “quality time.” Nope! Maybe in some special families, rising at the crack of dawn and squeezing in a morning meal may feel like a good time, but for most mere mortals, waking a sleeping toddler (or worse, getting woken by a toddler) and schlepping him to daycare would be described as purely functional, not meaningful personal interaction.
Motherhood is sometimes simply being consistently and predictably available. However, tallying up the sheer number of hours that you happened to interact with a child does not capture the qualitative aspect. I’m not quite getting to the point I’m trying to make, but that’s the best I can manage at the moment.
On the subject of the “stories we tell ourselves,” meaning the way we interpret our experiences, limitations, and possibilities, the women Shore interviewed have wonderfully positive stories, many of them. Surely, some of them were unhappy at times, perhaps a lot of the time, but this seems unlikely. It’s not as though one remains married for a quarter of a century or more, raises a brood a children, and continues a career by accident. There seemed to be a lot of enjoyment in the lives of many of her subjects.
An editor told Shore, “But on the whole I think I am a mother who worked, rather than a career woman who happened to have children.” That was the sentiment of many of the mothers interviewed. The children were an immovable fact, and career fit in around them. Some careers, especially medical and legal, offered limited practical flexibility, but the sentiment was there for many of them.
In some ways unfortunately, the feeling seems to be the other way around now: career is the immovable fact and babies fit in around it, if they fit in at all.
This ordering was referred to by a woman with whom I email as a primary and secondary vocation. The implication being that marriage and motherhood form a primary vocation, defining interpersonally who you are. A secondary vocation to some profession or art exists but cannot supersede the primary. It’s a good way to order a life. Switching the two may not have the results we want.
Shore’s book also has the benefit, as retrospective, of hinting at the results of the mothering: the children of those career women were mostly adults themselves at the time of the interview, which was encouraging in a way that a working mom with a two-year-old is not.
While it may seem I’ve had a rather negative commentary on Vanderkam’s book, that is not my general impression of her work. I really enjoy her writing and her podcast. Few contemporary women have given me so much to think about as much as Vanderkam with her ability to reframe cultural narratives we may not realized we have absorbed.
Vanderkam’s work has been presented as a kind of roadmap for professional women who want to try the family experiment without messing up their carefully charted career track. That is good, I suppose, but what is telling in both Vanderkam’s and Shore’s work is that each individual woman had to chart a course for herself. If Vanderkam’s work inspires someone to buck the trend and find ways of mothering and working that lead to a flourishing life, I’m all for it. The burden remains on the individual to figure out how to do it.
Not because it’s terribly unfair, but because the individual is the one with the responsibility and the one who will have to live with the results. This is not to get into the weeds of “childcare” and “equity” but merely a statement about decision-making. Many times our circumstances will determine decisions for us, which makes it all the more important that when we have the opportunity to make a real choice, we make it with a clear conscience.
Having read both books, which combined include working mothers spanning the better part of century, I’m struck by the realization that it is not “the man” holding us back; it is not some silent, insidious oppression preventing women from “having it all.” Simply put, it is difficult being a mother while also working in a complex or demanding career. Difficult does not mean impossible. But whether you are a writing mother in 1950s rural England or a mother with a legal career in the 2000s in the US of A, figuring out how to spend your time and talent is not easily done.
