Professional Mothers

...Bob-bi Brown's assistant blocks out school holidays, half-days, field trips, and birthdays on her schedule before confirming any other appointments...

...She, like other women I met, wants to impart advice to her own daughters—advice she never heard...

...One Manhattan publicist organized a nursery in a spare office down the hall from her own and installed her infant and nanny in it...

...Speaking of which, did you know that a "byproduct of having career ambition is a happier marriage and a more satisfying family life...

...I feel that somehow that moment of me being there really seems to matter to her...

...The balance she thus achieves, of cause and effect, of painful tradeoffs and often-irreconcilable desires, makes for a strangely refreshing and apolitical read...

...Every afternoon, a crocodile of little children from a local daycare center ambles past our house—they toddle down the hill, and sometime later, they toddle back up the hill—and every day, without fail, one of the children is crying...

...One of them always holds the hand of the inconsolable boy, but as she is not his mother, she cannot really be expected to take an interest in his emotions—and visibly doesn't...

...It is always the same child: A redheaded boy of about three...

...No doubt she does, but as with the redheaded daycare kid in my neighborhood, you have to wonder, what does Lucas get...

...In fact, I snorted with derision...

...The Hispanic daycare workers leading the troupe seem amiable enough...

...Of course it does—and this points to the poignant omission at the heart of Sachs' book...

...I'm with adults all day," she says, "and when I come home, I have Lucas, so I do feel balance...

...The effect on the child was galvanic: He rejoiced through his tears and tried to break away from the pack...

...Although How She Really Does It deals with the stow-ing-away of offspring for the sake of female ambition, author Wendy Sachs does not flinch from acknowledging, for example, the corrosive guilt of peeling a toddler off one's bestockinged ankles before catching a train to the city...

...Well, I was wrong...

...away," one mother tells the author...

...How was he today...

...Should you quit for the sake of your children, as conservatives are wont to recommend...

...Oh," the woman scoffed gaily, "He fine...

...One entrepreneur—"mom-preneur" is the clunky It phrase now— bought the apartment next door to supervise her business and her nanny simultaneously...

...It simply was never a factor until they were married or on the cusp of having children...

...She quotes a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan magazine: "I think Gen X women really feel misled...

...Loretta, a marketing brand manager, confirms this felicitous finding in an interview with Sachs...

...Sachs makes this claim based on a survey by Working Women magazine, which presumably would never feature a survey concluding anything else...

...Sachs doesn't— perhaps can't—answer that one...

...Yet—surprise!—the "tug she felt toward motherhood altered her direction, surprising and scaring her at the same time...

...No, it isn't, and you don't have to be a choleric feminist to admit it...

...The overwhelming majority of moms I've interviewed," Sachs writes, "say they did not choose a career based on whether it would ultimately be compatible with having a family...

...One afternoon I happened to be looking out the window when the boy's mother arrived at the top of the hill earlier than expected...

...And I thought: She doesn't know...

...I heard her ask, over his head...

...She expected she would have her babies and would follow the course others promised her would be easy to navigate...

...they talk to the children in sing-song voices...

...Sachs relates various successful schemes...

...Wave after wave of these highly educated strivers have poured out of universities into demanding careers—only to find, five or ten years on, that they are totally unprepared for the compromises required by marriage and motherhood...

...And actress Cynthia Nixon makes a point of fetching her daughter from school "as often as I can even if I'm doing something later that afternoon, and I have to hand her over to somebody else after an hour...

...As it happens, Sachs belongs to the generation of young mothers who feel almost no connection to the hairy-armpitted amazons of the sixties...

...Nor do they necessarily gravitate toward today's pedicured neo-traditionalist housewife counterculture...

...Her son is weeping his way through day-care, day after day, but she will be able to tell herself, as do many of the mothers quoted in How She Really Does It, that her child is thriving in a "happy environment...

...Many of the women Sachs interviewed for her book would clearly have benefited from such advice...

...Of one such woman, Sachs writes: "Samantha says she felt completely blindsided by the impact motherhood had on her...

...It looks at What Working Woman Wants, and only occasionally hints that the children involved may have very different yearnings...

...Flipping through the book and seeing testimonials from wealthy execu-moms such as couturier Vera Wang, broadcaster Ann Curry, and makeup superstar Bobbi Brown, I couldn't help thinking scornfully: "Great, just what the world needs...

...A daycare worker restrained him until they reached his smiling mother, and he was released to rush into her arms...

...For Sachs, like many writers before her, is addressing the greatest dilemma of modern motherhood: What to do when you love your work, but also love, and want the best for, your children...

...Another book celebrating the guilt-free glories of dumping your children with strangers so you can go to the office and be somebody...

...It would be great if you had children and then the ambition went Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...Or should you keep working for the sake of your children (cash- and role-model-wise), as liberals tend to favor...

...They are the product of what scholar Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls the Girl Project: the great push from the sixties onwards to prepare girls for adult lives as independent, salaried careerists whose happiness was not dependent on traditional female roles...

...A doctor imposes order on her hectic life by keeping office, apartment (with nanny and daughters), and gym within a five-mile radius...

...Blindsided, as we have seen, and many rungs up the ladder of success, what do determined Stay-At-Work mothers do...

...And they're not going to tell her...

...The boy kept his face buried in his mother's midriff, but she bobbed her head gratefully, thanked the workers, and off everyone trundled...

...If that phrase sounds familiar to you, it should: Danielle Crittenden addressed this very phenomenon with elegance and force in her 1999 book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, in which she argued, in part, that ambitious women should have their children young and then have careers, which is how earlier generations managed to Have It All (think Madeleine Albright, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Margaret Thatcher...

...But it's not like that...

...We have lots of fun today, didn't we...