Here’s How She Does It

In 2002, Allison Pearson wrote a book entitled “I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother.” In it, the hedge-fund managing heroine struggles mightily to balance work, a husband, and two children, only to be undone by how hard it is to find a Tellutubbie cake while attempting to run the world. The entire book is an ode to the high-drama of doing the working mother dance, with near-operatic complications and crises on par with being tied to the railroad tracks by a smirking villain. By the end of the book, one suspects that Kate Reddy, and, of course, Allison Pearson, believes that a working mother should be awarded a medal for doing a job that is done by … practically every other mother on the planet, and many of them not in an air-conditioned office, but in a stifling factory or a blazing field. So, in the interest of making every Kate Reddy/Allison Pearson feel better about her Herculean task, I, Alina Adams, also a working mother of two, will graciously provide you with the answer to How She Does It.

Okay, ready? You might want to take notes.

How Can a Woman Manage Two Children, Two Jobs, and Everything Else That Comes With It?

(Here it comes).

Marry the Right Man.

Yes. That’s all there is to it. If you marry the right man, then being a working mother is really not all that melodramatic.

Of course, my definition of Marrying the Right Man does not gel with Kate/Allison’s. When Kate asks her husband to help more around the house, and he does (!), she finds him strangely emasculated, and herself no longer attracted to him, leading to an e-mail flirtation with a virile, “traditional,” executive.

Personally, I find nothing sexier about my husband then when he says, “Honey, you look tired. Why don’t you go get some rest? I’ll cook dinner and put the kids to bed, tonight.” Is that hot, or what? (Might that also be the reason I hit a wall trying to sell my romance novels?).

My point is, this rash of novels about how unbelievably, inhumanely hard it is to be a working mother (and it’s subgroup, the drama and “miracle” of pregnancy and childbirth; honey, you know what you’re doing gestating there, it’s also being done by about a million women around the globe on a daily basis. You ain’t doing anything special. In fact, you’re doing the one thing you were born to do, biologically speaking.) inevitably makes me roll my eyes and shake my head. Why has the banal, in all media, not just literature, been elevated to the sacred, while the truly heroic achievements, astronauts, soldiers, inventors, great thinkers, been denigrated to irrelevance?