Corp Mom ISO "Mac N Cheese" Role Model
When I was younger, my dad had a saying: “If you can make a box of mac n’ cheese, you can do anything”. Now today, my dad would claim he never said that and doesn’t even know what that means.
But he did.
And I do.
He meant it as a way of saying that if you can read and follow directions, you can do anything and get exactly what you want. You just need to find the directions.
See, my dad is an engineer and I am an accountant, by trade. His middle name is “follow directions” and mine is “follow rules”. We are also two head-butting peas-in-a-pod, because we both always have the best way of doing something.
Fast forward a couple decades, and I’m a 20-something middle-manager sitting in my boss’s office in our high-stress corporate-America ivory tower. This particular boss was male, a few years older than me, and seemed like he genuinely cared about my best interests. Truthfully, I always thought of him as an older brother-type.
For some reason or another on that day, I was pouring my heart out to him on how there were no role models for me at our massive company. At that time in my career I was married, had 1 or 2 kids (it gets a little fuzzy in there), and was considered a high-potential finance manager for one of the largest retailers in America.
The apparent lack of role models felt wrong, because there were plenty of women in upper management, even at the VP-level. And most were married and had children.
The problem was, they didn’t act like they were married (unless it was to their job) or had children (unless they were reprimanding their employees). All the women above me who I’d consider as my natural options for role models exhibited the same characteristics as most of the men above me. And those men seemed like they were likely on the verge of divorce (or would have been if they were married to me) and the only inclination of whether they had children was the canned pictures on their desk (or were those stock photos that came in the frames?).
These women didn’t appear to have any daycare pick-ups to run out for at 5 on the dot, no worries of a crock pot meal that they woke up early to prep, emails from them dinged well after 9pm, and the weekend seemed to be (excuse my language) a corporate pissing match for who could stay more connected to work on their “off-days”.
These were my options for corporate admiration.
So there we sat. Me and my boss.
Me complaining of no one to look up to, and my boss, like a good big brother, listening to me drone on.
And then he said something. Something that made me want to strangle him.
He said (sincerely, mind you) “If you don’t see a role model for you here, then maybe you’re supposed to be that role model.”
Are you kidding me?
Didn’t he get it??
Didn’t he know I was only in my late 20s, exhausted, carrying a laptop bag on one shoulder, a breast pump bag on the other, and had NO IDEA what I was doing? I didn’t want to invent my own role model. I didn’t have time for that!
What I needed was a box of mac n’ cheese! I needed to be able to follow someone’s directions, do exactly what they do, and get the perfectly creamy, cheesy outcome of work-life balance.
I’d like to say that I took a breath and took his advice. That I took my corporate life by the horns and blazed a grand new trail for all nipple-sore exhausted working moms.
But I didn’t.
At least not that day.
At least not all at once.
But I did start to shut my work phone off after 7pm. The emails would be there in the morning.
And I did hide my phone in the china cabinet for the weekend. Or at least Sunday and most of Saturday.
And I held my head up high when I left at 4:30pm for day care pick up.
I, begrudgingly, paved my own path. I was going to choose to act how I wish my senior counterparts acted.
Because this was the only way I was going to make it through.
Then 2 years later, I announced my departure from corporate life. Departing not because paving my own path had caused problems, but because it was the next step on my newly blazed trail.
As I was packing up my office, a 24-year-old married (no children yet) woman on my team walked up to me and told me she was sad I was leaving because…
…she looked up to me as a working mom.
And she wasn’t the only one who said something like that. I heard similar words from other women too. Apparently, other women were watching me blaze my own trail.
Dang.
My boss was right.
Sometimes when we can’t find the role model we’re looking for, we need to pick our head up and look in the mirror.
I can only hope that someone else picked up my trail.
