The Moment I Stopped Apologizing For Having Children

Last week I was in a meeting with a female senior executive from an organization I work with, along with another consultant, a man who was about my age. I was tasked with editing some documents the consultant had worked on, and during our meeting, he interrupted me with a laugh, asking, “Wait, is that your mom voice?” Gales of his own laughter followed.

I felt like I had been slapped. The executive and I looked at each other, somewhat stunned into silence. When I recovered, I asked him point blank, “If I were a man, would you have asked me if I was using my dad voice?” To his credit, he got a little red and laughed his comment off as being “all in good fun,” but I was seriously angry.

Here I was, balancing work, kids, and a hundred other things, and I was being mocked for it by a single, childless man who had no clue about the absolute vortex many of us live in as we awkwardly attempt to lean in or have it all or just get by.

And worse, I had to be careful how I responded, lest I be forever labeled a bitch. (I’m fairly certain I would not have been called assertive or a leader, although at that point, I’m not even sure I would find that term offensive. I think, in that moment, I would have even considered owning it.)

I was, however, proud that I didn’t launch into some defensive tirade about my professional qualifications and experience. Nor did I defend my decision to have children and work part-time. No, I have at least gained some confidence and matured beyond that point. Still, I was completely shocked that in this day and age, a male peer would speak to a colleague like that in a professional environment. After all those glass ceilings, and finally sharing household and kid responsibilities, have we actually progressed nowhere?

Still, I wasn’t blameless that day. I did find myself apologetically going through all my edits. In fact, when the consultant left the room to take a call, the executive and I admitted to each other that we were both prefacing our comments with “I’m sorry, but . . .” way too many times. The two of us feebly tried to figure out why we felt the need to apologize and be liked by this man who clearly did not respect us or our opinions (or our decision to have kids).

The reality, though, is that the issue was less about our male colleague than about us.

In my field – as in so many others – the male dominated culture still seems to be rife with men like this who feel the need to use our femininity or positions as mothers to take us down a professional notch.

(In all fairness, I’ve had my share of supportive male mentors and colleagues, too.) But regardless of my colleague’s shortcomings, I still had to face my own insecurity demons.

When I went back to work after my first child was born, I remember saying more than a few times that “I had a baby not a lobotomy.” I intuitively recognized that some colleagues treated me differently – almost as if I was not as capable as before. I understand that our culture, for the most part, regards mothers as warm, nurturing beings who rarely are viewed as cutthroat executives. I get it. But are we any less smart or capable because we birthed a child? I think not.

And yet, for some reason, I have always felt less valuable in the workplace after I had children.

This stems mostly from knowing that I had other priorities – more important priorities – that sometimes meant making sacrifices at work. I internalized this so much that I often lost my voice, apologizing in meetings and being conciliatory so that my skeptical colleagues would look past my split focus and like me again. Back then, it didn’t occur to me to care about respect more than fondness; time and experience changed that.

I’m fairly sure I’m not alone in this; even the executive I was with during that meeting acknowledged that although she never takes a lunch break, she is afraid to answer her phone when her daughter gets off the school bus because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is being unprofessional or unfocused. I wonder, do men who are fathers worry about such things?

So when my colleague returned from his phone call, I stopped apologizing for his mistakes that resulted in our edits. I’m not proud of it, but honestly, I wasn’t as nice. Professional, yes.

But any sort of collaborative tone evaporated the moment he chose to use my children and my role as a mother to undermine my professional capabilities.

Maybe I should have owned my motherhood or laughed it off, maybe I should have “been one of the guys” and made a joke, too. But it wasn’t funny because his comment was meant to attack me, to make me feel that I couldn’t cut it in the professional world simply because I had children. And it was done out of his own insecurity because he could not handle two women editing his work.

That meeting reminded me that as far as we’ve come, we have so much further to go. Many of us have to work twice as hard as our childless, and sometimes less-educated, male colleagues to be valued and heard. Most of us will continue to be paid less for the same work.

And instead of being respected for our ability to both raise decent, well-adjusted children and produce high-quality work-products, we will have to continue to prove that, yes, we can do both well – even if it’s not all at the same time.

I promised myself that day that I would never – ever – again apologize for having children or making them my priority. And I would respectfully use my voice, regardless of how I would be labeled professionally. These may be small steps, but I hope that consultant will think twice before undermining a female colleague simply because she’s a mother.

And maybe, perhaps by the time my own son and daughter are engaged in their professional careers, our generation will have eradicated this nonsense once and for all.

* This article originally appeared on The Mommy Vortex.