“How do you feel about being a stay-at-home mom?” I ask Shannon. She had started working for a bank in town right after she graduated from college and was the manager when she had JJ. She took maternity leave, planning to go back to work, but she never did.
“Well, I wish I were home more!” Shannon says, laughing. “I’m so involved at school in JJ’s class and then I’m on the parents association at Parker’s nursery school plus I’m on the board at the library, so while I don’t work for money, I feel busier than I was when I worked at the bank.”
Right then, JJ and Parker run back to the table asking for dessert, and Sam gets up to check on Allie in the kitchen.
Matt gets up from his chair, comes over to mine, and kneels next to it. “I want you to know something,” he says, clearly not wanting anyone else to hear.
“What?” I ask.
“Nick called me a couple weeks ago to ask for your hand. He said he didn’t exactly know when he was going to propose but he wanted to make sure he had the family’s blessing. I want you to know that he was so sincere. The things he said about you, about how he feels about you.”
“Wow,” I say. “I had no idea he called you.”
“We all,” he says gesturing around the room at my family who are now busy clearing the table and getting ready for dessert, “love Nick. And we love you, Luce. We only want the best for you. I don’t want you to hold back in your life.”
“I know. I understand what you’ve been saying. Thank you.”
He gives me a kiss on top of my head and then picks up both his boys at the same time, holds them upside down, and tickles them until they cry, “Mercy, mercy.”
I didn’t tell Matt, or any of them, about the list or the eloquent note Nick wrote me last night. At this point, I’m not sure marrying Nick is still even an option. Not something I will get to decide. I texted him and called him a handful of times between last night and this afternoon to apologize and explain why I was late. He never wrote or called back. Maybe I should have been really angry about the note he left me, but I knew he had been drinking and I knew he didn’t mean it as maliciously as it had sounded. That being said, I knew he was really angry. And I understood why he felt so hurt. I just wish he would have let me explain.
After we eat dessert and clean up the kitchen, I go outside with a cup of coffee to watch JJ, Parker, and Ella play on the ancient little swing set out back. The same one my brothers and I played on when we were little.
“Are you sure that thing’s still safe?” I ask my mom, with a laugh, as I head out the back door, the rusty screen door slamming behind me.
I walk toward the orderly arrangement of aluminum chairs my mom has near the swing set and am happy to see our neighbor Grace sitting there. Her boys Henry and James are playing in our backyard with the kids.
“Hi, Grace,” I say. “I’m so happy to see you.”
“Hey, Lucy!” Grace says, giving me a hug. “How’s life in the big city?”
“You know. Stressful. Busy.”
“How’s life with Madame Balance?”
“Well, Madame Balance may be very balanced conquering the worlds of business and motherhood, but my life trying to coordinate hers is anything but balanced.”
“Oh, Lucy. No one’s life is perfectly balanced. Not even Katherine Whitney’s.”
“I’m starting to realize that.”
“I’ve been at this working mom thing for a few years. And I have a lot of friends who are working moms in some way or another—either they’re unpaid volunteers, or they work part time from home, or they commute into the city every day and have an army of help, or a million other ways of being a working mom—and we all talk about it all the time. How can we do it all? Can we do it all? Is there such a thing as balance?”
“And?” I ask.
“I really believe, Lucy, and this is after talking to lots of women and reading loads of articles and books, including The Balance Project, that you can’t have the idealized version of ‘it all,’” she makes quotation marks in the air, “and be perfectly balanced at the same time. The combination of those two conditions is virtually unsustainable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Grace continues, “when most people think of the term ‘having it all’ they think of being really successful at your job, being a great wife and a great mom, and when I say great, I mean fully attentive and involved and not distracted all the time with work stuff. And on top of those two things, it also means taking really good care of yourself. But in the real world, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all those things successfully. And unfortunately, with books like The Balance Project and Katherine Whitney on television glorifying this idea of balancing it all, it makes most women feel incredibly inadequate.”
“But Katherine does seem to have it all.”
“It may seem that way, Lucy, but I can bet you that she’s making sacrifices somewhere. If she’s doing so well at work, which it appears that she is, then maybe either her relationship with her husband is suffering a bit or maybe she’s not around for her kids as much as she and they would like. I’m not suggesting that women have to be all things to everyone. And I’m not suggesting that kids can’t or shouldn’t have a nanny or go to day care. Tons of my full-time working mom friends use child care and their kids are great. I’m simply suggesting that women can have a variation of ‘it all’—their own definition of it—and be really happy. But when women like Katherine Whitney say something like, ‘We can all be perfect at everything and look at me and how fabulous I am,’ well, I think it’s a huge disservice to most women out there who struggle with this immensely. Who don’t have reliable or affordable child care. Who don’t have the type of job where you can talk to your boss and get time off for your daughter’s dance recital. Anyway, sorry, I’m going on and on. I just get so passionate about this topic, and I don’t want you to think that it’s as cut and dry as Katherine Whitney makes it seem.”
“JJ kicked me,” James cries to Grace.
“All right, time to go in,” Grace says to her boys. “It’s late, and it’s a school night.”
Henry and James run toward their house, and Grace says her good-byes to the sundry Coopers who have gathered to watch the kids play. They all start getting up, too, ready to leave.
“It was so nice to see you, Lucy,” Grace says turning to me. “I hope I didn’t burst your Katherine Whitney bubble in any way.”
“No, no. It’s fine. I thought what you said was interesting. I don’t have friends with kids, just my brothers, so I don’t really know what that’s like at all. It all seems so hard to navigate.”
“Well, that is true. And having kids is hard and frustrating in so many ways. But I wouldn’t give up those two little buggers for the world. You’ll see when you become a mom. It’s an amazing kind of unconditional love. There’s nothing like it.”
“Thanks, Grace,” I say and we hug good-bye.
She turns toward her house and I go into my mom’s. Matt drives me to the train station, and I have a lot of time on the eight nineteen to Grand Central to think about what everyone has said to me tonight. It’s all starting to make me think differently about marriage. About motherhood. And especially about balance.
Chapter Eight
“Hey there, Luciebelle. Is she in yet?” Evan asks, bright and early Monday morning, leaning against my desk and looking debonair, as usual.
“Hey, Evan. Nope. Not yet,” I say distractedly. I’ve got The Balance Project website open on one of my monitors and I’m trying to answer e-mails on my other monitor. E-mails from Brooke about Katherine’s schedule. E-mails from Abby’s school about her enrichment program application that’s late. Random e-mails that come into the e-mail address associated with the book’s website.
Just then, Katherine rushes toward us like a turbulent cyclone approaching an unfortunate Pacific island. It appears she’s limping, and she’s most definitely shouting at someone on the other end of her cell
.
“As I just said, we’ll have it to you in two hours, Nigel, I promise,” we hear Katherine bark.
Evan and I make a face at each other. Happy that neither of us is Nigel. Or Katherine.
She rushes right past Evan and me without a word and we hear her throw her bag onto her desk and huff into her chair.
Evan and Katherine have been friends since high school. They grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, an opposite-sides-of-the-track story. Katherine was an only child with a single mom who worked two jobs, one as a secretary at Kellogg’s during the day and then, once Katherine was old enough to be home at night alone, as a waitress at the Bee Bee Diner. Evan’s dad was a senior executive at Kellogg’s. Head of US sales or something like that. Katherine and Evan became close friends through the honor track in high school, even going to the prom together. As friends.
They stayed in touch when Evan went off to Brown and Katherine went to the University of Michigan, which she paid for through a patchwork of scholarships, a work-study job, and a small contribution from her mother’s savings. Once Evan had finished with his MBA at Wharton and Katherine had impressed a lot of CEOs with her insightful work as a management consultant at McKinsey, Evan asked Katherine if she wanted to get in on the ground floor of a company he was starting: Green Goddess & Company. That was almost twenty years ago. Together they built it into the behemoth business and brand it is today.
“What’s up?” I hear Evan ask Katherine as he makes his way into her office.
I push my chair back from my desk so I am closer to Katherine’s office and can hear their conversation.
“Nigel is really making this way more difficult than it has to be,” Katherine says, sighing.
“Can you get that, Lucy?” Katherine shouts at me. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring.
“Katherine Whitney’s office.”
“Nigel on line one,” I intercom to Katherine.
“Tell him I’m no longer with the company,” she yells.
“Okay,” I say through the intercom. “And you have the interview call with Working Mother in five minutes.”
I scoot my chair back again.
“I can’t do all this, Evan. I just can’t,” Katherine says, sounding exasperated.
“What, Kath? Do all what?”
“This!” I hear her yell. “London. The book. Theo.”
What’s wrong with Theo?
“What’s wrong with Theo?” I hear Evan ask.
“He’s giving me a hard time about everything these days. He used to be so understanding when I had a lot going on at work. Now he acts resentful and pissed off all the time.”
I turn around and catch sight of Evan draped over a Kelly chair, tapping his well-shod foot.
“And I’m either going to shoot Nigel or he’s going to give me a heart attack,” Katherine says, her voice starting to get angrier. And higher pitched. “I’m just not sure which. I think we’re trying to do this London launch way too soon. We need at least another month if we’re gonna pull this thing off the way it should be done.”
“Katherine Whitney’s office.”
I tell Katherine that Working Mother is holding on the line for the interview. She doesn’t respond. I just hear silence in her office. Eventually, Evan walks out and raises his eyebrows at me as he walks toward his office. Then. . . .
“Hello, this is Katherine Whitney.”
It’s incontrovertible that I have a lot more pressing things to do than listen in on one of Katherine’s umpteen interviews. But I can’t help myself. I’m sickly interested to hear how she’s going to pull this one off in the state she’s in.
“It’s so nice to talk to you, too. Working Mother is one of my favorite publications.” Katherine voice is professional, calm, and in control. That woman is good.
Working Mother’s turn.
“I wrote the book because I thought it was important to share what I’ve learned throughout my career with other women who are struggling to find balance.”
Working Mother.
“I do. I do believe you can have it all. I’ve experienced that in my own life,” Katherine says, not smugly, but confidently, earnestly.
Working Mother.
“Yes. Absolutely. There are a lot of people who say that you can’t have it all. I respect their opinions. But I think a lot of women who say that are stuck in old patterns that don’t allow them to reach their full potential. The Balance Project gives great strategies that will allow every woman to do it all. And to do it all well.
Working Mother.
“I’m fortunate in that regard because my husband Theo is so supportive of me and the long hours I devote to my career. And my girls love having a mommy who goes to an office every day. Unfortunately, I don’t get to spend that much time with them in the morning and it’s close to their bedtime when I get home at night, but we spend all weekend together. It’s special family time. It works. They’re very happy little girls.”
Working Mother.
“Thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you, too.”
The phone rings just as Katherine hangs up with Working Mother.
“Katherine Whitney’s office,” I say into the receiver. “Nigel on line one,” I intercom to Katherine.
I hear her pick up her extension and yell, “WHAT?”
I check my phone for the first time since I arrived in the office and see there’s nothing from Nick, despite my having texted him last night when I got home from dinner with my family and again when I woke up this morning.
But there is a text from Ava:
Guess what?!? There’s an opening in the digital media dept at my company. Not at cosmo but for esquire. You must apply. Check the site. xA
Ava works at Cosmo—she is a fun, fearless female—as an associate features editor. She loves her job, and by love I mean she would make out with her job if she could, and is very close, she tells me, to getting a promotion. Her dream is to be a beauty editor. Her bathroom counter is cluttered with overflowing bins of makeup and beauty products. She’s been that way since high school and has experimented with every beauty trend from plucked and arched brows to Brooke Shields brows, from lined lips to red lips, from Chanel Vamp to Essie Ballet Slippers to Deborah Lippmann Boom Boom Pow, and from blue hair to short hair to pink hair to red hair to her current brunette ombré.
I turn around and see Katherine crouched over her keyboard, typing frantically, so I bring up the Hearst website and click on the Careers tab. It asks me to choose between “magazines” and “television” so I click on “magazines.” Under “category” in the first drop-down menu, I choose “digital media.” And under “location” in the second drop-down menu, I choose “New York.” Voilà.
I scroll through the openings. (ScrumMaster? What the hell is a ScrumMaster?) I see the job she’s talking about, along with a couple other ones that sound interesting and decide that I’ll complete the online application later tonight in the safety of my own home.
“Lucy?” Katherine calls.
I get up, grab my pad, and walk into her office.
“Hey,” Katherine says, looking at her computer monitor. “One sec.” She types a reply to an e-mail and clicks send. “Sorry,” she says looking at me, but clearly distracted. “I broke the heel on my shoe coming in this morning.” She points to a sad state of Louboutin black ankle bootie on her desk. “Do you mind running over to my shoe repair guy on Sixty-Seventh and Columbus and asking him if he could fix these? If, for some reason, he can’t do it right away, can you go to my apartment and grab me another pair of black ankle booties? I have that dinner tonight so I need something.”
“Sure, no problem,” I say as Katherine hands me her apartment keys. “I haven’t had a bootie call in a while.” I know she’s not in the mood, but I can’t resist.
“Very funny, Lucy,” she says, laughing. “I’ll text Pancho and have him meet you outside.”
“Okay,” I say, appreciating that I won’t have to waste valuable
time running up and down the Upper West Side.
I answer a few more e-mails, grab my coat, and head outside, the sad Louboutin safely tucked into a Green Goddess reusable tote.
The shoe repair guy apparently is unable to fix heels while you wait. “Are you freaking kidding me?” I think were his exact words. So Pancho drives me to Katherine’s apartment a few blocks away.
“Do you want me to ring you up?” Cute Doorman asks as I give him a smile.
“Nope, they’re not home,” I say, dangling the keys in the air as I walk briskly toward the open elevator.”
“Are you sure?” I hear Cute Doorman ask as the elevator doors close.
“I’m sure,” I say smiling at myself and redoing my ponytail in the mirrored elevator walls.
I unlock Katherine’s apartment door and laugh about the fact that she has a backup pair—possibly pairs—of black ankle booties. I’ve always thought of black ankle booties as something that you’d only need one of. I just have boots, for God’s sake. No subcategories.
I head toward Katherine’s bedroom and HOLY SHIT, THEO!
Shit! Shit! My brain explodes. I stare at Katherine’s bed and the lively business going on within it, and in that split second I consider my options: I can sneak quietly into the closet to get the shoes and hope the frolickers in the bed are none the wiser of my presence. I can make a noise so they are alerted to my presence. Or I can get the hell out of there and have Pancho take me to Saks to get Katherine a new pair of black ankle booties that she may or may not realize didn’t come from her closet. But my decision is made for me, because as I was standing there quietly contemplating each lousy option, Theo must have heard my brain working. All of a sudden, he turns away from his lively business and spots me.
“Lucy, shit!” Theo yells.
“Oh my God!” I yell back.
Theo’s co-frolicker has what looks like auburn hair. Yep, I can see that clearly now that he’s no longer on top of her. She bolts up wondering what the commotion is about and I can also see that, in addition to her auburn hair, she has very large boobs, which she just realized are exposed to the air and me, so she grabs the sheets and pulls them up. The sheets, not the boobs.
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