more-money / uncategorized Interview with Carol Evans (cont) | Better Way Moms
Today is May 18, 2012

Think Outside the Cubicle

If that job is for you then great! If you’re ready to shake it up, here’s where to look!

Interview with Carol Evans (cont)

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This Is How We Do It

…want to be able to be in two places at once.

Sarah: I knew you were going to say that. As a mom, I was thinking, “she wants to be in both places all the time.”

Carol: Right! [laughs] If I could go back 15 years and do that, I would in a heartbeat! I could be at home while pursuing my career. Perhaps in this new world of telecommuting, moms can experience a little bit of being in two places at once, but I was never ever able to work out of my house. It just wasn’t something we ever figured out. I always commuted and worked, and as a result had this split role of mother and career woman.

But there isn’t much I would do over. Perhaps I would take another month of unpaid maternity leave instead of only taking six weeks. That would have been really nice. But I never felt like I could do that. The business was always in the midst of something major when my babies were born. I think I took eight weeks with Julia and six with Robert. If I could do it again, I think I would have taken more maternity leave because physically and mentally, you need more time. Or if I could move to Sweden — where they give you six months! — I might do that. Though I have to say, I have no idea how the they structure their businesses to provide that.

I would also try harder to create more of a balance in my home/work relationship by working from home or taking one day per week to work at home. When I tried to balance my work with my life, the scales tilted more towards the job, and less towards home.I don’t regret that, because in the world I was living in, that was what was required. It was very hard to have any kind of flex time in those days – it just wasn’t happening, but I would have liked to have had my children at a time when flex time was more acceptable.

Sarah: Speaking of balance, I know I’ve done this before, but I want to thank you again for writing “This Is How We Do It” because it really helped me as I was crying four weeks after my son was born thinking, “how in the world do we do this?”

Carol: You’re so welcome.

Sarah: I thought I would just pop right back into work without a problem. And that is not what happened. Anyway, you acknowledged in the beginning of the book that you had a lot of people helping you along the way, but you have a pretty great work ethic and you have a passion for what you do. Is that what had you sit down every weekend and write this while you were running a company? Was it a sense of duty? What was it that had you finish that book when you had so much else going on?

Carol: I felt I had a story to tell because I had gone through most of the stages of motherhood, except for getting them off to college – though now I can now write another book because I’ve done that too – and I felt that having raised my kids, I had something important to say to other women. My perspective was unique. It was not just being a mother, but having a successful professional life as well: 15 years in a profession where the working mother was the target audience I could draw on not only my personal perspective, but also my unique perspective as a champion of moms, and as an advocate for working moms. Personally and professionally, I had a desire to tell my story.

I had been accustomed to seeing these issues brought up within the confines of a magazine. A magazine’s architecture is very different from a book. You can’t write 15 pages about husbands in a single issue of a magazine. You have to keep things very crisp and fluid,but in a book you can really take time to explore a subject. I felt that the magazine was satisfying working mothers in one way, and that the book would satisfy working mothers in a completely different way. The difference would be that the author, or authors, of a book would be able to spend more time on a given topic within the context of a book. The magazine, at that point, had been saved, and I kept telling the people around me that I needed to write a book. Over and over again, “I really need to write a book.” It was the same passion I had felt before for the magazine, and I knew, almost intuitively, that this book would be important for moms. It turned out, much to my delight, that it was important for the magazine as well; it gave the magazine a different platform and a new audience.

Sarah: In the book you spend a lot of time talking about how we can shape our bosses, especially today when we have more options. Were you nervous in sharing those experiences? Were you concerned that the old bosses would read that and be upset about it? Did you talk to them about it beforehand?

Carol: No, I didn’t talk to them about it beforehand, I didn’t talk to any of them. And the reason why is that I didn’t care what they thought — to be perfectly honest. They were no longer my bosses. I had given up bosses for the world of entrepreneurship, and I felt that if these men had been born in a different time and place, they wouldn’t have been as ignorant about the needs of working mothers as they were. They didn’t have the professional knowledge that I had, and they hadn’t been trained well in the issues that working mothers face, so I felt very happy to share my experiences and my experiments handling my bosses with my readers without worrying one bit about what those bosses thought. Truthfully, if I was younger or less far along in my career, I would have had to be more circumspect so as not to jeopardize my future opportunities. But by the time I wrote the book, I had successfully acquired the company of my dreams and I wasn’t really worrying about whether or not my former employers were going to give me a good reference.

Sarah:I have the same question about your marriage. You talk a lot about how your focus switched from Bob, your husband, to your kids when they were born, and then as they got older, the focus went back to him. Was he OK with you writing that?

(continued…)

 

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