Dont have to buy my book. [laughter] i have three short excerpts i would like to read it for you tonight that i thought we could have a discussion. Has anyone actually read the book yet . Some people have started some people have finished. So just to give context the format is a bit unusual. Is a category stretcher written primarily as save them more a very personal story about my experience trying coming trying, trying everything i could think of to balance a demanding career and motherhood and allied completely and utterly failed but then i try to make sense of that failure to put it a bigger context with the idea to turn this into a book where started to hear from other web and the word eerily similar to mine and i realized how max out we all are and i wanted to understand it is a bigger way. It is a memoir butted each chapter i tried to include an essay where i take on a seed from the chapter. I will start to in the middle in the beginning of the books i had a baby girl and a stepdaughter was a toddler and i started a big management job at a Consulting Firm and Web Design Firm in San Francisco ive loved everything but i was completely wracked with guilt and was struggling almost from the beginning but over the years i figured it out i thought how to put my guilts and naboth size to a class is on anxiety management and sees things did help me but then i had another baby. So this takes place after i return from Maternity Leave with the new baby and two older kids. Although i was working only four days a week we had one child more. We were both moving as fast as we could but yet a certain task was not getting done. One was behind on immunizations i needed do classism your overdue for a trip to the dentist and america had a school play the same day as the Parent Teacher conference. When were we supposed to make time for this part of living a normal life but did not seem to fit into our normal life. Somebody has to pick up the dry cleaning or get the oil changed to organize family photos, plan birthday parties, rsvp to other parties, wrap them a gift and shop around for insurance, stock the earthquake kits and baked brownies for the pot luck luck, go to swim lessons lessons, please send the ince, by a coach and return Overdue Library books, chaperone the field trip and pay the bills. The work obligations that fell outside of work hours to do dinner, schmoose outoftown clients clients, Networking Events and launch party some of which we hosted that our office. There was bad form to miss them. But for brian there was invoicing and accounting negotiating contracts, learning new software, and other business related tasks for which he did not get paid. Luckily beaver consultants it was our job to plan and execute difficult projects. What we need is said good project plan confident this would fix our problem. Each sunday night after the kids went to bet we would hunker down to create our plan for the week. We listed everything that needed to get done and decided which was top priority then made in a weber it spreadsheet to divide each day into his and her 30 minute increments. Is specified to every kirsch three shopping trip and work meetings that were expected to run early or stay late in those Networking Events. And in the effort to stay healthy there is time to work out and see friends. This schedule even included tonya to create the next weeks schedule to people out one half hour time slot and was colorcoded by a category and took up half of the refrigerator. Looking at it filled me with hope. I can do it all. But dread of not a moment to spare. On paper there is time for everything as long as nothing went wrong. Of course, things did go wrong. The car got a flat, a friend would ask for a favor, the water heater broke and flooded the floor. When it happens it is like the proverbial butterfly effected cause the hurricane. One wrong move could set off a chain of events causing a whole schedule to collapse for the worst was when one of us got sick because chances were all of us would get sick that means stock in the house for a week or more getting bored we did everything humanly possible. We took daley multi vitamins. In to get to allergy shots at the slightest hint of a local level given verbal remedies and homeopathic remedies to boost the immune system. We took the of grown up a version. One entire shelf in the kitchen packets of the emergency and tubes of airborne and things i could barely pronounced like i still cant. We avoided sugar because it compromises the immune system weve got to brown rice and a whole grain bread. Who i would sprinkle yeast on the yogurt and for a special treat i would let them let the power right of the spoon. We would cancel play dates if anybody felt slightly warm and our friends did the same. Every working parent we knew was terrified of terms. We washed hands as if we had a zero cd but then i would carry antibacterial wipes in my purse. I eyed every doorknob Dan Bannister with suspicion and the flash public with its with my flood flat and worse and Howard Hughes but yet after jake started day care and i returned to to work we got sick and the second a sick again. Chest colds. Unexplained fevers the last five days, rashers down the bellies and down the arms. Had lice that would only affect one of the kids but everybody in the family would have to be treated to wash every shirt trouble and she in blanket in the house. Martha got the stomach flu in the middle of the night i will apologize ahead of time if you just ate dinner. She did not get any farther than the top of her book bet where she vomited like a sprinkler head managing to hit all four walls of her bedroom. Really. All four of them it could that has been easy. The last thing she had eaten was an entire pint of strawberries and looked as if a dying animal had run around the room bleeding on every surface. Bronchitis. Sinus infection. Pinkeye. Walking pneumonia, asthma attacks, strokes throat, pooping cough . Whooping cough . The disease that was supposed to be eradicated . Yes that won both jake and bright and got its that earned a house call from two very controlled and nurses from cdc they shut down the day care for a week even after he was well enough to go back he could not. And in three months we best 10 days of work between us. If there rest of the year turned out to be like this we would miss more than 40 days. How could this be . I have six paid six per year generous considered half of america does not have any but it was not close to covering the needs of the kids when theyre sick. Of course, i could always use vacation but i needed that to cover professional Development Days at school. I ask the pediatrician for advice she was in her 50s and had seen it all. I trusted her. Why do we keep getting sick i asked . What are we doing wrong . She said this as normal as she put her stethoscope in the pocket. Children on average get between eight and 10 colds pershare. Per year . Per child . It was absurd yet consistent with everything we had experienced. I did the math at home. On average your kid has to be home from school one day per illness some did require any but others could not out of reach easy nine her kid per year. If you have two kids if they overlap by half that means an average of 13 days off per year to be home with a sick kid. Some years better and others worse but of course, that does not include the days when you are sick no matter how many smoothies you drink if you are up all night with a sick kid you are bound to get a. My role was to never take a sick day for myself unless i with throwing up my frequent sniffles garnered sympathy and the steep dive. They wanted to say why did you give us your terms . Because they cannot afford to take a sick day i have three kids. This was a silent conversation we carried out in my head. Often when one of the kids was sec we worked from home. It was generous but face it it sucks to field Conference Calls on you too well the feverish child is on the couch to feel that you neglect your child but you let your coworkers down also. I will stop there. The sicknesses went on and other things happened. Id like to read a sidebar s. A. S. A. Because we are in the Silicon Valley. I would like to read about productivity. This is an issue in almost every industry but in particular with hightech companies, financial firms, all across Silicon Valley with digital agencies israel culture of sacrifice. A cultural expectation beyond anything writed in the employee handbook. Productivity and employees. Since your boss probably hasnt read the story and the chances are youre still stuck like so Many Americans working 50 or more hours a week and about leaves you very little time to leave anything accept this but i will share the highlights. Most people assume if you increase your hours by say 50 , you will get 50 more than, not true. Study after study shows that for industrial workers, productivity dramatically decreases after eight hours a day. Knowledge workers, people like me and most of my friends have only six good hours of productivity at a. After that we are cooked noodles. Studies show after companies reduce workers hours back down to 40 a week am of your business has become and this is a quote significantly more productive and profitable. Sometimes there are shortterm gains when people work 60 or so than tv to cope more hours a week however as the article points out the risk of burnout is after one week. And this is an article from the quote without adequate rest and recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, some people get stupid and cant focus and they spend more time answering email and goofing off and they do working. If they make mistakes that they never make if they were rested and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they are fried. Some Software Teams do send them to a negative progress mode where they are actually losing ground week after week because they are so mentally exhausted the theater make him more errors than they can fix. Despite 150 years of research, proving that long hours is bad for everyone, Americans Still work some of the longest hours of every country in the industrialized world. Shouldnt we know better . By the antisocial workaholic Software Programmers in Silicon Valley who were upheld for their passion and not working on the weekends was terribly oldfashioned but most of us whether we have children or not cannot work this way. So, negative productivity mode that is the term you have to tell your boss that you have to explain why you are going home at five. So one of the reasons that i wrote this book and why i felt my story had something to contribute to this conversation about women and work is because i think that there is an inordinate amount of discussion put on womens personal choices. I think that whenever the conversation comes up about having it all work leaning in or opting out or women in poverty it goes back to its your choice to work or not work. And i think that what we are missing and what the media is missing is that this is actually a Public Health issue when you are hopefully by the end of this book you have read enough research and enough stories to see that the u. S. Has a terrible lack of support for the working families who are at the bottom of the list of developed countries and we also have a cultural goblin that goes beyond policy. But this isnt just making people unhappy. Its actually making a lot of us sick. And so i would like to read this last excerpt from late in the book im at chapter 23 which starts when i stopped working. I wish i could tell you i could find job, took a few weeks to recuperate and emerged refreshed and ready to embrace a new chapter in my life. If i had a quick seven months earlier, that might have happened. Maybe if i had hit the reset button before the ghastly winter, before april, those were two difficult clients we had at work, perhaps i would have just quietly stepped away from my career like so many other moms i knew. This is what happened instead. The first few days after i stopped working, cried constantly. I woke up in the middle of the night shaking, heart pounding unable to go back to sleep. I imagined myself as a car that had run out of gas. I just needed to refuel, but the days turned into weeks they are comfy ambulances for me. But the days turned into weeks and i wasnt getting any better. I havent run out of gas. I had run out of oil. My machinery had ground against itself and fused. If you could have lifted my hood, thick smoke would have bellowed out. I continue to cry on the couch. Sometimes i would move from the couch to my bed where i stared at the leaves in our backyard. When the wind blew through the branches, the underside of the leaves looked silver blue like entrancing like watching goldfish swimming in a bowl always moving but never going anywhere. Brian had started a new project. Every few hours come he took a break from his work to come inside, stroke my hair and a set of reassuring things like your home, everything is going to be okay. You just need a long rest he said over and over. He was remarkably upbeat considering that his wife had just lost her mind. The tension that has steadily grown between us since i started back fulltime had evaporated to be that there was nothing to fight it ou off anymore. It was as if brian had been expecting this and now that i had finally collapsed it was a relief to him. Now there was something he could do. For starters, he could take care of the kids. The cruel irony. I had yearned for years to have more time with my children. Now that i finally have time, being around them was a torment. I felt as if my ears would bleed from their happy squeals. I love them of course i never stopped loving them into being their mother but all he wanted was to lie down alone in silence. I wanted one of those tanks with no light and no sound, so quiet that the silence itself became a noise. I would live there until every thought stopped, until i was as relaxed as a boiled egg noodles and still i wouldnt move. I would stay until it was good and board. I havent been bored in years. It sounded like such a luxury. I would go on lying there in my dark silence will tank until the landscape grew and it started to rain in the desert until i felt the rustle o of wildlife and the birds began a new song, an untii thought completely whole image zooinhuman and alive again. How long i wondered would that take . I made an appointment with my psychiatrist a few days after i stopped working. I havent seen her in five years since ruby was a baby. This time i wasnt going to sign up for any classes. I wanted to be fixed once and for all. I wanted her to pull a hightech vacuum cleaner out from underneath her desk and pull the misery right out from underneath me. Absent that i was pretty sure that i wanted to trucks. She looked exactly the same as i had remembered her, short curly hair and thats pleasantly asymmetrical days. After quickly listing my symptoms like a truck stop waitress reciting the specials, i got to the point. Im quitting my job, i said that i leaned back against the fabric of the couch. That is, sort of. Im on a leave of absence. I was planning to seven months ago but then the economy tanked so i stayed. I think i just got really burned out. She mirrored her eyes and audit almost imperceptibly. Yes, thats what it sounds like. I shifted forward again. What is happening to me . Am i having a nervous breakdown . I hadnt said that phrase out loud before, but as soon as i did come it sounded perfectly right and strangely hopeful. Serious eats temporary. Something i would get through, not something i had to live with. Reflecting on it later i could see that it also implied catharsis, and internal act of rebellion against the status quo like my spirit was going on strike to protest at the constant mindless activity of my body. Well, we couldnt call it a breakdown, thats not a medical term. What would you call it . She looked down at my file for several seconds and then back at me. You may have a depression and anxiety disorder. Often people who are depressed have anxiety that you may have both. I have two disorders, i said . I didnt like the sound of this. I still dont. Nervous breakdown may not be an accepted medical term but it described and events. Doctor light was describing a pathology. She ran her index finger down a page of my files and looked up again. How do you feel about going on antidepressants . Now we were getting somewhere. She could call it whatever she wants as long as she needed to go a way. Will they makwill they make me i asked . Many people find that they are quite effective at relieving anxiety and depression. Her tone reminded me of the disclaimers each year at the end of the rogue commercials. Individual results may vary. She hadnt really answered my question but then what did i expect her to say yes, they will fix you right up. I would like to start you on a new drug, she continued. Its a powerful drug that we used to treat depression and anxiety. Unfortunately it usually takes four to six weeks to start working. Four to six weeks . I fell back against the couch. There are some potential side effects, she continued, and then she began to list them to be a dry mouth, headache, decreased sexual desire, night sweats, anxiety. Did she really just say anxiety . It was like telling a drowning person to take one more big gold of water. My eyes filled with tears again. I dont know if i can do this. If i get more anxious i will spontaneously come thus. We can start you on a very low dose, she said ignoring my hyperbole to be at apparently i wasnt her craziest patient. You can work up to the full therapeutic dose slowly into ant will memorize the side effects but you wont get the benefits until you reach the full therapeutic dose. Each time she said the word full therapeutic dose she slowed down and mmc gate at each word with reference which made me think of a Catholic Priest making the sign of a cross. I will write you a prescription for ativan as well. She swiveled back to her computer and started typing that prescription as if the matter were settled. You can take it every four hours to minimize the anxiety symptoms, she said over her shoulder. Once you have adjusted people take you off of the ativan. Well i got what i came for. I decided to trust doctor light area to she had been right about the class and she obviously knew what she was doing, which made one of us. When i got home that afternoon, i emptied my little white paper bag of medication on the paper to the coat table as if i had been out trickortreating. See, i held up the bottles to show brian. Ive got my uppers