Introduction. Thank you for coming out. I wanted to thank keplers for hos hosting this event. This is a great option, you dont have to buy by book, but buy a book and support the organization. I have three short excerpts i would like to read for you. And then i thought we could have a short question and answer. Has anyone read the book yet . Some people have started it. Some people finished it. Some people working on it. Just to give you context. The format of the book is unusual. One of my publishers told me it is category stretcher. It is written primarily as a memoir. It is a personal experience of trying to balance a demanding career and motherhood and how i completely failed. But i tried to make sense of the failure and put it into a bigger context. And the idea for turning it into a book started when i started hearing stories from other women that were similar to mine about burning out and i realized how maxed out we are and i wanted to understand it in a bigger way. I tried to include a sidebar of research. Like a mini essay where i take on a scene from that chapter and i will share one of those as well with you. I would like to start in the middle, i guess. So in the beginning of the book i had a baby girl and a step daughter who was a toddler. I started a big management job at a Web Design Firm in san francisco. I loved everybody i was doing but i was wracked with guilt and struggling from the getgo. But over the years, i figured it out. I thought i had figured it out. I put my guilt in a box. I took classes on anxiety management and they helped me. Then i had another baby and this part of the book takes place after i return from maternity leave. So i have a new biby and two older kid. Although i was working only a four day week schedule, we had one child more than when i worked five days. Brian and i were both moving as fast as we could, and yet concern tasks were still not certain done. Jake was behind on vaccines. I needed new glasses. All of us were overdo for a trip to the dentist. Martha had a play coming up, the same day as rubys school conference. When did we make time for stuff that was part of the normal lives but not ours. Someone had to pick up the dry cleaning, buy stamps, organize family photos, get our taxes ready, plan birthday parties, rsvp for other parties, shop around for life car and home insurance, stock the earthquake kit, bake brownies, rubys swim lessons, invest retirement saving, pay the bills and cap roan rubys class trip. And the work obligations that fell outside of work hours. Dinners with clients, launch parties it was bad form to miss them. Brian had invoicing, negotiating contracts and other things he didnt get paid for. We were consultants and we needed a good project plan brian declared. Each sunday night after the kids went to bed brian and i hunkered down to create the plan. We listed everything that needed to be done and decided which one were top priority and divided an elaborate spreadsheet into his and her 30 minutes. It was every child drop off and pick up. Work meetings and professional networking events. School events like marthas science fair and rubys preschool art show. And time to work out and see friend was scheduled. This included time to create the next week schedule. Color coded by category and took up half of the refrigerator. It filled me with an odd mixture of hope. I can do it all. And dread, not a moment to spare. On paper there was time for everything as long as nothing went wrong. But of course, things did. The car got a flat. A friend called for a favor. The water heater broke and flooded the floor. It was like the butterfly effect that caused the hurricane. One wrong move set off a chain of events causing the whole schedule to collapse. The worst was when one of us got sick because chances were all of us were sick, stuck in the missing school and work and getting bored off our nut. We took daily multi vitamins and i doled out holistic medicines and one entire shelf was devoted to tinctures and things i can barely pronounce. We avoided sugar because i read sugar compromises the immune sism. I sprinkled yeast on the kids yogert and let them lick the white powder off the spoon. We canceled playdates if anyones forehead felt slightly warm. Every working parent was terrified of germs. We washed our hand as if we had ocd and i carried wipes in my pours purse. I flushed public toilets with my foot. And after jake started day care and i returned to work we got sick and sick and sick again. Chest colds. Unexplained fevers that lasted five days. Rashed that bloomed on the kids belly, under air arms and faded away. Head lice which might only invest one of kids but required us to treat everyone in the family and wash every towel and sheet and blanket in the house. Once martha got a stomach flu in the middle of the night and i will apologize if you just had dinner, she tried to get to the bathroom but hid the pole on her bed and somehow managed to eat all four walls. The last thing she had before head was an entire pint of st strawberries. It looked like a dying animal ran around the room. Sinus infections, whooping cough the disease eradicated in the 1940s . That whooping cough. That earned us a free house call from the centers for Disease Control and shutdown the day care for a week. In three months brian and i missed ten days of work between us to stay home with sick kids. If the rest of the year turned out to be anything like those three months we would miss more than 40 days of work. How could this be . I had six paid six days a year. Generous considering half of American Workers dont have any. But wasnt close to covering all of the days one of my kids were sick. I needed Vacation Time to cover the holidays that only children and postal workers get. I asked our pediatrician for advice. She had seen it all and i trusted her. Why do we keep getting sick i asked during one of the many visit to check on a childs lingering cough. She had this is normal. Children get on average 810 colds and fevers a year. It was absurd and consistent with everything we had experienced. When we got home i did the math. Lets say on average your kid has to be home one day per in illness. That is nine days per did per year. Lets say you have two kids and their nine suck days overlap. That means you need 1314 days off a year to be home with a sick kid. Some years are better, others are worse. That doesnt include the days when you, the parent, are sick. And no matter how many green smoothies you drink for breakfast if you are up all night with a sick kid you are bound to get whatever is keeping them awake. My rule was to never take a sick day for myself was was unless i was throwing up. My frequent coughs garnered sympathy from some and eye stars from others. People would say why you exposing me to your germs and i thought i cannot afford a sick day. When one of the kids were sick and brian was unavailable i worked from home. It sucks to have Conference Calls on mute why your feverish child is moaning on the couch. You feel like your letting your coworkers and your children down the most. The sicknesses went on and other things happened. I would like to read a mini sidebar and i would like to do one about productivity. Lets all work a 30hour week. Ive noticed that in morning meeting, morning work meetings, my colleagues tend to be more attentive and get a lot done. As the day wears on, our meetings become less and less productive. Then i read a story on salon by Sarah Robinson that described this phenomenon showcasing research proving that long hours kill profits, productivity and employees. Since your boss probably hasnt read this story and chances are youre still stuck, like so many americans, working 50 or more hours a week, and since that leaves you very little time to read anything except this book, i will share the highlights here. Most people assume that if you increase your hours by, say, 50 , you will get 50 more done. 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 a day. After that we are cooked noodles. Studies also show that when companies reduce workers hours back down to 40 a week, their businesses become this is a quote significantly more productive and profitable. Sometimes there are shortterm gains when people work 60 or 90 hours 70 hours a week. However, as the article points out, the risk of burnout begins after one week. And then this is a quote from the article without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They cant focus. They spend more time answering email and do you having off goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that theyd never make if they were rested, and fixing those mistakes takes longer because theyre fried. Some Software Teams descend into a negative progress mode where they are actually losing ground week after week because theyre so mentally exhausted that theyre making 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 any country in the industrialized world. Shouldnt we know better . Thats the end of the quote. Robinson blames this on a culture problem created by a bunch of geeky, workaholic Software Programmers from Silicon Valley who were upheld for their passion and made be not working on the weekend seem terribly oldfashioned. But most of us, whether we have children or not, cant work this way. So negative productivity mode, thats the term you have to tell your boss. Why i felt my story had something to contribute to this whole 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 or leaning in or opting out or women many poverty even, it goes back to, well, its your choice to work or not work. And, um, i think that what were missing and what the medias missing is that this is actually a Public Health issue. When you are, you know, hopefully by the end of this book you, um, have read enough research and enough story to see that the u. S. Has a terrible lack of support for working families who are really at the bottom of the list of developed countries, and we also have a culture problem 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, chapter 23, which starts when i stopped working. I wish i could tell you i quit my job, took a few weeks to recuperate and emerged refreshed and ready to embrace a new chapter in my life. If i had quit seven months earlier, that might have happened. Maybe if i had hit the reset button then before our ghastly winter, before vlad and april those were two very difficult clients we had at work perhaps id 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, i 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 here come the ambulances for me. [laughter] but the days turned into weeks, and i wasnt getting any better. I hadnt run out of gas, id run out of oil. My internal machinery had ground against itself and fused. If you could have lifted my hood, acrid, thick spoke would have billowed out. I continued cocry on the couch to cry on the couch. Sometimes i would move from the couch to my bed, or i stared at the dark reddishpurple leaves of the plum tree in our backyard. When the wind blew through the branches, the underside of the leaves looked silveryblue, like the bloom of a raisin. It was entrancing, like watching goldfish swimming in a bowl; always moving, but never going anywhere. Brian had started a new project. Every few hours he took a break from his room to come inside, stroke my hair and say reassuring things. Youre home. Everythings going to be okay. You just need a long rest, he said over and over. He was remarkably upbeat considering his wife had just lost her mind. The tension that had steadily grown between us since i started back full time had evaporated. There was nothing to fight about anymore. It was as if brian had been expecting this. And now that id finally collapsed, it was a relief to him. Now there was something he could do. For starters, he could take care of the kids. Cruel irony. I had yearned for years to have more time with my children. Now that i finally had time, being around them was a torment. I felt as if my ears would bleed from their sleeks and shrieks and happy squeals. I loved them, of course. I never stopped loving them and being their mother. But all i wanted was to lie down alone in profound silence. I wanted one of those sensory deprivation tanks with no light and no sound, so quiet that silence itself became a noise. I would lie there until every thought stopped, until i was as relaxed as a boiled egg noodle. And still i would not move. I would stay until i was good and bored. I hadnt been bored in years. It sounded like such a luxury. I would go online go on lying there in my dark, silent little tank until the air rid landscape of my aired land scape of my bones grew moist, until i felt the rustle of wildlife, until the birds began a new song, until i felt completely whole and human and alive again. How long, i wondered, how long would that take . I made an appointment with dr. Light, my psychiatrist, a few days after i stopped working. I hadnt seen her in five years, since ruby was a baby. This time i wasnt going to sign up for any classes. I i longed to be fixed once and for all. I wanted dr. Light to pull a hightech vacuum cleaner out from underneath her desk and suck the misery right out of me. A misery removal machine. Absent that, i was pretty sure i wanted drugs. Dr. Light looked exactly the same as i remembered her. Short, curly brownishyea hair, no makeup, and that pleasantly asymmetrical gaze. After quickly listing my symptoms like a truck stop or waitress reciting the days potentials, i got to my point. Im quitting my job, i said; that is, sort of. Im on a leave of absence. I was planning to quit seven months ago, but then the economy tanked, so i stayed. I think i just got really burned out. She narrowed her eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly. Yes, thats what it sounds like. I shifted forward again. Dr. Light, what is happening to me . Am i having a nervous breakdown . I hadnt said that phrase, nervous breakdown, out loud before, but as soon as i did, it sounded perfectly right and strangely hopeful. Serious yet temporary. Something i would get through, not something i had to live with. Reflecting on it much later, i could see that it also implied catharsis, an internal active rebellion against the status quo like my spirit was going on strike to protest the constant mindless activity of my body. Well, we wouldnt call it a breakdown, dr. Light said. Thats not a medical term. What would you call it . She looked down at my file for several seconds, then back at me. You may have a depression disorder and an anxiety disorder. Often people who are depressed have anxiety, but you may have both disorders. 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 neatly described an event. Dr. Light was describing a pathology. She ran her index finger down a page of my file, then looked up again. How do you feel about going on antidepress sames . Now we were getting somewhere. As long as she made it go away. Will they make me feel better, i asked . Many people find antidepress sames are quite effective at relieving anxiety and depression. Her tone reminded me of the disclaimers you hear at the end of drug commercials individual results may vary. She hadnt really answered my question, but then what did i expect her to say . Yes, theyll fix you right up, dear. Id like to start you on a new drug called she lex saw, dr. Light continued. Its a powerful drug that we use to treat both depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, it usually takes four to six weeks to start working. Four to six weeks . I slumped back against the couch. There are some potential side effects, dr. Light continued, and then she began to list them; dry mouth, headaches, decreased sexual desire, night sweats, anxiety anxiety . Did she really just say that . It was like telling a drowning person to take one more big gulp of water. My eyes filled with tears again. Dr. Light, i dont know if i can do this. If i get any more anxious, ill spontaneously come bust. We can start you on a very low dose, she said, ignoring my hyperbole. Apparently, i was not her craziest patient. You can work up to the full, therapeutic dose slowly. That will minimize the side effects, but you wont get the benefits until you reach the full, therapeutic dose. Each time she said the words full, therapeutic dose, she slowed down and enunciated each word with reverence which made me think of a Catholic Priest making the sign of a cross. Ill write you a prescription for atavan as well. She swivelled back to her computer and started typing up the rings as if the matter the prescription as if the matter were settled. You can take it every four hours to minimize the symptoms, she said. Once youve adjusted to the celexa, well wean you off the atavan. Well, i thought, i got what i came for. I decided to trust dr. Light. Shed been right about the anxiety class. 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 Kitchen Table as if id been out trick or treating. See . I held up the two bottles to show brian. Ive got my uppers, and ive got my downers. Just like elvis, he on is served. All youre missing is the Peanut Butter and banana sandwich. Thats where im going to stop. Um, so obviously, im fine now. [laughter] hopefully its obvious. But i wont tell you what happens after that. Youll have to read the book. I think now would be a good time to answer any questions that anyone may have. And theres a mic in the back. And if theres no questions, we can stop [inaudible] oh, do you want to do the thank you. Im curious how your children related to you during that period, because that must have been scary or difficult, and kind of how did you, how did you work through that part of it . Right, how did my kids relate. Well, when i first stopped working and, by the way, i am working now, so its not like i stopped forever. Its funny, i so the early days when i first stopped working were total crisis mode. I mean, i was barely i wasnt functional really. And its amazing how the village kind of of appears sometimes when you need it