Bring Your Kids to Work Decade
How Resolute is your desk?
Plenty of previously professional women talk about the 10-year “mommy gap,” when they drop out of the workaworld (more or less) to raise rugrats—assuming someone in the household could help pick up the breadwinning slack. In these long years they might bond with their kids but unbind from whatever career track they were on, losing upwards of a decade of resume-building and salary in a blurry, babied smear. Typically they can never fully recover, never seamlessly pick up where they left off, never earn their worth and live up to their potential. A gap is a misnomer— it’s a gaping black hole.
I didn’t fall into that hole exactly but I likely lost my mind. Through my breeding years, I didn’t opt out of the workforce but rather increased my production if not exactly my paycheck. Our growing family (husband, one-year-old, me, reluctant black cat) had moved from an extremely affordable apartment in the city to a home with all the fixings (car, mortgage, property tax) in the ‘burbs in 2009, which meant I immediately started to up the ante on my freelancing of this-and-that since my former income (owning a bar in Brooklyn) had just shuttered. I worked from home, cramming during naptime. What does life look like when Bring Your Kids to Work Day is everyday? More accurately, there’s no end or boundary to work, in the same way there’s no end or boundary to kid. We were all crammed into this hellish, hairy bedlam boat. Then came baby two, and greater density of responsibilities as I went from a contributor on the local news site to full-time editor, and then the role expanded to cover four communities instead of two. I nursed babies as I pumped out eight articles a day. Sometimes in the gap within the gap (the years before school) one or the other child got to be dropped off at some minimal daycare, but mostly the awkward traveling assemblage was: one baby barnacled to me, and the toddler strapped in a stroller packed with snacks and gear, with me attached to a phone and a notepad trying to play Becky McReporter around town without making too much of a scene.
I never made it easier on myself; I made it harder with my unflappable convictions about how I would mother. My kids had glass bottles. They had cloth diapers. They didn’t get raised by screens. For weeks, as I walked up and down the hill of Main Street going door to door to interview owners for my “Shop Talk” series, my baby on my back had milk in a bottle to appease her and allow me to actually talk to people. But I remember, on multiple occasions, hearing this loud smash and turning around to discover my daughter had taken to tossing her bottle to the pavement, leaving a wake of milk and broken glass. Then there were the times I could feel the warmth of leaked pee seeping from the side of a full diaper and running from the carrier down my backside. Or the countless times when a mini-me was screaming and I couldn’t feign adult conversation with so-and-so Important Politician I was trying to quote. Then, worse than the public embarrassment, was the difficulty in returning home and transmuting all these gathered materials (fuzzy photos, illegible scrawl) into something resembling composed English via computer. The kids very soon knew they were competing with this mesmerizing machine for my attention and they began to resent it. My toddler would close the laptop over my typing fingers and wail when I tried to reopen and start the infernal clickety-clack. They had to play, and I had to entertain them. I do not know how we all survived this; I’m not sure we have. My kids seem to smart with ancient PTSD when I even glance down at my phone to this day. They learned some things then that are still true when you have a mom who is a writer: no matter what we do I may have to write about it; and this may also include your picture. There is no line between work and mothering; I measure my days in stress and mess. But at least everything is catalogued. In the old images and words, I feel my not-so-secret anxiety seething through the smiles, the nervousness packed between snarky phrases.
A fleeting good moment might look like this with everyone mimicking mom’s work with their dumb devices (those screens didn’t do anything; I couldn’t keep them fooled for long):
While the more typical bad moment might end like this in a sweaty tantrum that segues right into a collapsed nap (a good moment at last, which I think, by the way, happened to be my birthday):
Wait, where’s the desk for me in this? How does one work under such conditions? There’s no picture of an actual desk because it was a rare treat to be able to use one. My desk was the floor, a couch, a clipboard, a picnic table in the park, a bench, leaning a notebook against the back of a stroller or the edge of a trash can, the whole wide world which we littered with broken glass and kid slime.
Fast forward to a time nearing the end of this gap-decade (will it ever end?), when the big desk isn’t mine but the Town Supervisor’s I work for in a regular office outside of the home. The kids are in school now, mostly; I can go to “real” work, an essential worker no less with no choice. But wait again, there was for a while still the rough ends of the pandemic. Now the blur would expand to include both school and sickness, either could combust one day without notice and still pervade all the work. On a day where my young one couldn’t go to school, I had to pack her up with a mask and let her play office here. Sure, the Supervisor said, use my desk. What a treat:
On the other end of the spectrum, you have some Presidents (or their unelected sidekicks) and their little boys lurking under or about the Oval Office’s Resolute desk who may or may not be telling the President to shut up while picking their button noses. The desk is the centerpiece. The people are props around it. The great seat of power and all its precious carved wood.
When the richest man in the world, or the most powerful man (or surprise, both suddenly, unexpectedly merged into one), does this odd gesture of bringing their kid to work (by choice!), there’s nothing frivolous about it. They have all the help they need, and we all know no matter your status none of this public parenting in a professional setting is “fun,” so the kid could only be there on purpose for a photo op, for the look of things, to make the parent seem like the kind of dad who would bring their kid to their work for no practical reason and never out of necessity because they are just.such.a.good.person.
“Is this fun fathering or a cynical and exploitative PR strategy from the tech billionaire?” asks a writer in The Guardian, and obviously we know the answer.
Musk’s four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii (often called “X”), is something of a seasoned statesman now. Just a few days before the Modi meeting, X joined Musk and Trump for a press conference in the Oval Office. While Musk rambled about democracy and walked back a despicable lie about $50 million’s worth of condoms going to Gaza, X looked as if he would rather watch Paw Patrol. At one point he appeared to say—perhaps to Trump—“I want you to shush your mouth.” (Where did he hear that, one wonders?) And, at another point, X (who Musk once described as his “emotional support human”) seemed to pick his nose and then wipe the results on Trump’s desk. The nose-picking is very normal for a little kid. The standing by the president of the US, while your dad, who seems to think he is king of the world, makes outlandish claims? Not so much.
Grimes, the mom of a trio of Elon’s many children including this boy X (formerly Twitter), apparently objects to this public showing, but there are so many moms to wrangle, so many kids, who cares what they may mumble through their lawyers or tweets.
Then we have the iconic moment this odd trio of Trump et al can’t help but allude to. The memory we all have through that classic magazine picture of JFK, Jr. peering out from under his dad’s desk, and discovering that magic eagle seal door that opens unto the lens of a spying photographer.
There are other photos of the kids at play in this young dad’s office, so maybe this really was the fun father, or at least he was a less stiff actor and seemed far more believable in that role.
Differences in depictions of this same desk: Kennedy’s is gnarly and packed with odd clutter with the appearance of looking busy though it’s hard to imagine what sort of work these objects might entail. Sending morse code to a submarine through a device that bleeps? Trump Marie Kondoed all the crap out and focuses on what brings him joy: a Sharpie-signing situation. Just slick surface here. Nothing to see, or read. Let’s defer to Elon and his X-tra smart child instead.
If only I had a space so Resolute to work beyond the hours when the kids were distracted or sleeping. What’s the history? From The White House Historical Association:
The Resolute Desk is a double pedestal partners’ desk made from the oak timbers of the British ship HMS Resolute. In 1880, Queen Victoria gifted the desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes. It has been used by nearly every president since, with the notable exceptions being Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford. The desk was primarily used on the Second Floor of the White House, where the presidential offices were located prior to the construction of the West Wing in 1902. In 1945, the desk’s rear kneehole was fitted with a panel carved with the Presidential Coat-of-Arms, and President Harry S. Truman was the first to use this updated version.
The desk was first used in the Oval Office during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. When President Lyndon B. Johnson selected another desk for the Oval Office, the Resolute Desk became part of a traveling exhibition and then went on to the Smithsonian, where it was displayed from 1966 to 1977.
In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter requested that the historic desk return to the Oval Office. Since then, the Resolute Desk has been used by every president in the Oval Office, although President George H.W. Bush only used it for five months before switching to a different desk. It was returned during the Bill Clinton administration and has remained there ever since.
About the boat, the wood, and design:
The Resolute Desk, made by William Evenden, Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, England, was constructed from white oak and mahogany timbers taken from the HMS Resolute and was presented to President Rutherford Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880. In 1852, the Resolute was part of a British arctic expedition to search for Sir John Franklin, who disappeared while trying to discover the Northwest Passage. The Resolute had been abandoned after being trapped in ice. The American whaler George Henry recovered the ship in 1855 and Congress appropriated the funds to refit it and send it to England as a gift in friendship to Queen Victoria. The Queen reaffirmed that friendship with the construction of this desk after the Resolute was decommissioned. Original designs for the desk featured portraits of Victoria and Hayes along with side panels featuring arctic scenes and British and American flags. The center panel with the Presidential Coat-of-Arms was added in August 1945. Although similar to the Great Seal of the United States, the Presidential Coat-of-Arms has slight differences in design. This version depicts the eagle facing to the left and the talon holding the arrows.
Beyond that rare queen, it’s all steeped in masculinity and mahogany here. Could a woman even sit in such a commanding position? Well, we’ve thought a few times it might be possible but now are perhaps more resigned to the sad truth that we may never know. Perhaps in the lifetime of my daughters? Is it misleading to even bequeath that hope? JFK launched us to moon, after his death. Now maybe we’ll go to Mars before we see a woman at the controls.
Other countries know better; they know a woman who can juggle her babies so adroitly is the best equipped to organize the heck out of the desk of a nation.
There was a woman who did this bring-your-baby-to-work thing but the look was quite different. Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who, in the same Guardian article, “became the first world leader to attend the UN general assembly meeting with her baby in tow.” The meaning of this mom with her newborn was profoundly deeper than these men with a “fun” photo shoot around the desk. “Ardern was broadly praised for showing people that a woman can be a mother and a leader.”
Ardern agreed. “I want to normalize it,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “If we want to make workplaces more open, we need to acknowledge logistical challenges… by being more open it might create a path for other women.”
Resolute, as defined by Oxford: admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering. The word derives from the Latin resolutus (“released”), past participle of resolvō (“I release, I unbind”).
How much more resolved, unbound from history and our cultural norms, we need to be to better show our weakness—and our ultimate strength.
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I’m still tired from reading about your early mothering and hustling years my friend. The whole desk thing is both funny and terrible, writing on a floor strewn with toys and dishes while kids beg for attention, it’s no comparison to pretend fun dad time at the freaking White House no less. Blech.
Beautifully written and thought-provoking as usual. My blood is boiling at the universal abuse of women both literal and figurative.