Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 6

Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.

—Will Rogers

I am the oldest of four, with three younger sisters: Charlotte (one and a half years younger), Rachelle (five and a half years younger), and Katie-Beth (ten years younger). Growing up, the joke was that my mum was our dad—she worked long days making money at a bank and came home late, all out of gas. This left me to be my sisters’ mother: I packed lunches for them every morning, I ironed their uniforms, and I took them to and from school. Sometimes I went to school, too, and sometimes I went back home and watched Oprah on TV. As a result, my sisters still treat me like I’m their mum to a large degree. When they need something like a deposit for a flat or a bit of advice, when it’s time to celebrate a happy occasion, everyone calls me or shows up at my house. My mum is a passive observer, a bit like a divorced dad who gets invited to drop by on major holidays—she’s a fantastic grandmother though. My kids adore her.

It’s obviously not natural or normal to be a parentified child—and there was a big sacrifice in this, as I skipped my own childhood—but I would argue that I was pretty good at it. It certainly gave me a time advantage on wrestling with mum guilt, as I learned early on that I could never do enough for my sisters to reassure myself that I had done a good job. At a certain point, I felt like I had to abandon them—they moved to Spain with my mum on a seriously misguided romantic adventure—while I moved in with Marcus and put myself through London College of Fashion.

Anyone reading this might think, Well, Emma, don’t beat yourself up. You were just a kid—of course you needed to look out for yourself, and yet I don’t think the guilt I felt then is all that different from the guilt some mums feel today. We live in a culture that subtly insists mothering should be our primary remit and ambition, that anything beyond those bounds that you might do in the “outside world” comes at a cost to a child’s health and happiness. Having experienced money scarcity in my childhood, and not having anyone who was focused on my education or future prospects, I realize I can provide both to my own children now—and that gives me some relief, as well as some authority to tell you that being the only safe and reliable adult your kids have access to is not emotionally realistic. For anyone.

We don’t have time for a romp through our prehistory, but we evolved with affiliative care—alloparenting—which is a concept mainstreamed by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. We raised our children collectively and communally, with help from multiple generations. While that feels incredibly far away from our modern reality that insists on nuclear and patriarchal families, we’re going to have to figure out how to approximate it through chosen family, teaming up with resources, and if one is lucky enough to afford it, hired help—there’s simply no other way. Even if a mum or dad doesn’t want to work, the reality of a single-income family maintaining a middle-income reality disappeared in the seventies—it’s very rare to find a family that can pull that off. In almost all scenarios outside of the 1 percent, both parents need to work outside of the home. 1 We need to accept this as a cultural norm and get over it, i.e., stop making women feel like they are being derelict in their duty by having—and maybe really wanting—a career.

We’re going to talk more about this in the section on family and trade-offs, but I believe that in order to be an effective leader in business, you must contend with your ambivalence and cut yourself some slack. And as a culture, we need to make this the norm and not the rule. I have four kids at three different schools, and it’s a great week when I manage a couple of school drop-offs. I have been known to snap back at security guards and teachers who comment—with surprise—that it’s good to see me. Just the other week, I was ready to pick a fight at the school gate, as I said to one, “It’s not good for working mums for you to be exclaiming that they showed up.” She responded that she “could receive that.” Good: Receive it! For what it’s worth, I cannot imagine an administrator saying anything like that to my husband, who is about as present as I am—and for what it’s worth, I also can’t imagine him noticing if they did, as men do not feel constantly on their back foot about their competency and visibility as fathers. We don’t think of them as bad fathers when they’re not present all the time.

Clearly, this is touchy for me as it is for so many other mothers. I’m in a constant conversation with myself about what I’m prioritizing and why, and whether I’m making the right decisions. What I’ve learned over time is not to leave myself out of that calculus. I don’t just think about my family’s well-being; I also think about myself and what I both want and need. I make choices from that perspective, as honestly as possible— and then I own them and I don’t equivocate. This is critical, because too often I hear my friends blame their children and their families for keeping them from a job because they refuse to own their ambition—or they shift their own guilt about working out of the home back on their kids by explaining that they have to be employed even though it’s not what they want. We don’t think about it this way, but that’s what we’re doing: We’re making our children responsible for our choices, and that is a heavy burden. As Carl Jung wrote, “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” 2

I had Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson on my podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede , and naturally, I hit Michelle up for parenting advice. “If you are choosing to drive in your career, don’t parent from guilt,” she offered. “I always say that kids have nothing to do but watch us. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have responsibility. They’re figuring it out based on us.” 3 Whenever it’s appropriate, I make my decision-making apparent to my kids—especially to my oldest daughter, Lola. She knows I love my work. She understands I find a lot of identity and fulfillment at the office. I do hope by modeling this for her, she’ll carry less anxiety about the choices she’ll have to make someday, too. We’re going to talk a lot about trade-offs in the coming pages, because I want to leave you with a concrete plan for tending to them when they invariably come up.

Expect guilt—it can be a helpful and healthy check when you’re out of balance in your life, have fallen out of integrity, or need to put something wrong right—but it’s not helpful at all in excess. And before you give guilt any attention in your life, make sure that it’s coming from inside of you as a signal about your values, and not from failing to meet the expectations of others.