COVID May Be Coming To A Close, But Problems For Working Lawyer Moms Are Not

We’ve all heard of gender inequality, but motherhood inequality isn’t as commonly discussed.

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Charise Naifeh to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

Ever since becoming a mom, Beth had cobbled together a series of part-time legal jobs. Her latest gig had been cut for a lack of funding and she was struggling to find another part-time job.

She received some amazing full-time job offers. But she turned them down because she was already struggling with another full-time job: parenting two young children and doing 90% of the housework.

In the course of two years, she had gone from an ambitious, razor-sharp
attorney at the top of her game to a doubt-ridden person struggling with
increasing fears and insecurities about her career. She felt utterly trapped.

Motherhood Inequality

We’ve all heard of gender inequality, but motherhood inequality isn’t as commonly discussed. What is it? It’s the inequality that occurs only to mothers, not to all women. Contrary to what one might think, a legal career provides no exemptions to motherhood inequality. In fact, it can even exacerbate the issue.

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Before children, Beth and her husband had been equals in their marriage. Both were lawyers who worked full-time and together contributed to the family’s economy and household chores. They both felt free to make their own career decisions. Gender inequality was not present for Beth pre-kids.

When Beth became a mother, a dramatic shift occurred — not just with the presence of a newborn — but in the minds of both her and her husband. Her new role included a list of obligations of encyclopedic proportions. That list is what I call the motherhood manual, and it’s one of the main causes of motherhood inequality.

Motherhood inequality can be present regardless of whether Mom’s legal career is on the sidelines or center stage. It surfaces with Moms who are not working at all as well as those who are clocking 80 hours a week as the family breadwinner. The common denominator is that Mom is last in line.

Motherhood inequality wreaks havoc on women’s careers for this simple reason: It’s impossible to drive a car from the back seat. It keeps many women from advancing their careers once they become mothers. It’s also a leading cause of burnout among lawyer moms. The good news is that the problem of motherhood inequality is solvable with three key steps.

1. Rewrite Your Motherhood Manual
One of the first things that needs to change is the motherhood manual — that unspoken collection of rules and standards that is passed down to every new mother. In traditional cultures, the manuals were clear and concise. In today’s world, they have become increasingly fragmented, complex, and difficult to follow.

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For Amelia, giving birth to two children in two years provided a stark Before and After reality. Before, Amelia had tended to her career. Now, with a suddenly activated motherhood manual inherited from her hard-working immigrant parents, Amelia followed it to the letter: She was in charge of the physical and emotional well-being of everyone in her household. This was something she was unable to turn off, even when her very capable au pair was in charge of the children.

When we started working together, one of the first things we did was tease her manual into the future. She realized that staying on her current path would lead to results that she didn’t want 15 years from now. She would have an abandoned career and the loss of her prime earning years. She’d also have two teenagers who believed that Mom is there to serve everyone else and ignore her own needs.

To avoid that, we dismantled her motherhood manual and rewrote it. When we shined a light on the requirements that she had felt obligated to meet, she realized that she didn’t even agree with most of them. Example: Self-care is selfish. The vast majority of these “rules” had been passed down from her family. When she realized that they made no sense in her current life, she felt free to let them go. She wrote a new motherhood manual premised on her core values, including equality. Once she did this, her career took off. And her family doesn’t love her any less. In fact, having a (mostly) well-rested, balanced, and calm mother has improved everyone’s level of happiness at home.

2. Shift From Zero-Sum Game To Win-Win
One of the reasons so many women get stuck in motherhood inequality is that they’ve convinced themselves it’s them or me. This puts them in a dilemma where they believe that what they want is directly at odds with what everyone else wants. Given that choice, women almost universally default to taking care of everyone else first. In this scenario, there’s no way to win. After a long week at the firm, Amanda was not enjoying her weekends. Her kids would watch cartoons while her husband enjoyed coffee and the paper. But she couldn’t relax in a messy house.

Her desire for a tidy home seemed directly opposed to her family’s desire to spend the weekends relaxing. To avoid creating conflict, she did all the housework herself. This meant resting and recharging were off the table, and it was beginning to show. She felt stuck and resentful. She didn’t want to go to battle in her own home, but she didn’t want to be the family doormat either.

Together we identified a third option: she could have a tidy home and spend the weekends relaxing. At bottom, everyone in her family actually wanted those two things. Once she realized that this wasn’t a zero-sum game, she began to look for and find creative solutions. She held a series of family meetings to figure out how to create the dual outcome of a tidy house and relaxing weekends.

That required some strategic adjustments to their daily routine as well as a commitment to consistent communication. Now her 5- and 7-year-old children put away their own laundry, her husband is in charge of the dishes, and time is reserved each evening for keeping clutter in check. While the house may not always be 100% perfect, Amanda is more relaxed at home knowing that keeping the house in order doesn’t rest entirely on her shoulders. She recharges during her weekends and meets her workweek with renewed energy.

3. Empower Yourself
After 15 years working as an attorney, Ruth had hit her career stride. She had a busy but manageable law practice at a firm, and she was earning a good salary. Her job also allowed her to enjoy weekends and evenings with her husband and three children. Then, the pandemic hit. Within a few months, she found herself agreeing to quit her job and prioritize her husband’s career.
This triggered intense fears, insecurities, and feelings of powerlessness. Her new role, as she saw it, was to provide everything to everyone else in her home. She didn’t even feel like she could spend time trying to figure out her next career move. This was not a role that she enjoyed or wanted. But it didn’t seem like she had a choice because, after all, she was the mom. She was stuck in a rut and didn’t know what to do next.

Ruth attended one of my online trainings and realized that, far from being powerless, she was in a position of incredible power: To finally build her own practice that would enable her to control her own schedule. This was something she had long wanted, but she had been waiting for someone else to give her permission to pursue it. When she realized that she was never going to get permission from anyone else, she decided to give herself permission to establish a practice of her own.

Now, she’s now building that new practice with a new intention: To create a career that will serve her. Because she chose to empower herself, even in a larger circumstance that she didn’t control, she was able to move past motherhood inequality and create what she wanted.

Action Is Required

With the world reopening, many moms assume their load will lighten. But if motherhood inequality persists, lawyer moms as well as women in other
professions will simply continue to bear the lion’s share of work, with burnout an ever-growing danger.

Not surprisingly, motherhood inequality often prevents moms from taking the very actions needed to eradicate it. For example, Beth decided to put her career goals on hold until it was more convenient for her family. She did so in the belief that pursuing what she wanted would hurt her family. But research shows the opposite is true. As Carl Jung famously said, “the greatest burden a child can bear is the unlived life of a parent.” Learning to honor what you want is the greatest gift you can give your children because it models for them how to do the same in their own lives.

Women like Amelia, Amanda, and Ruth go from feeling stuck to empowered in a short amount of time when they see that doing so is actually good for their families. Happy, strong moms create happy, strong families. Women can begin to see immediate results if they address this problem in their own lives and families. This shift begins within each individual woman and ripples within the family system. When we do this, we help ourselves and our families, while also impacting future generations of families. It’s something worth doing, and it’s worth doing now.


Charise Naifeh is an attorney, a mother of two, a Professional Certified Coach, and the founder of Happy Law Mom, a community of lawyer moms committed to creating authentic happiness in their work, motherhood, and personal lives. After the birth of her second child,
Charise knew she needed a new approach to blend lawyering and motherhood. Through much trial and error, she discovered the key skills that took her from struggling to happy. In 2018, Charise began teaching these skills to other lawyer moms and went on to create the Happy Law Mom Coaching Program. She is also the creator of a forthcoming podcast, How To Be A Happy Lawyer Mom. Connect with Charise on Instagram @happylawmom, LinkedIn @charisenaifeh, Facebook
@HappyLawMom, or at charise@happylawmom.com.