The Professional Women Who Are Leaning Out

To be a working mother during a global pandemic is to be constantly torn between your kids and your clients. At times in the past year, Amy Conway-Hatcher, a lawyer at a big firm in Washington, D.C., would overhear her two children having dinner with her husband and not be able to join them, because she was working 80-to-100-hour weeks on a big case.

For Allison Fastow, “having it all” meant listening to her 6-year-old sob and bang on her door in search of comfort and not being able to give it to him, because she was in the middle of an important call. “The distance that you have as a parent working outside of the home keeps you from seeing these things,” she told me, and then started to cry. Parents might tell themselves, My kids love their nanny; they love their teacher. But sometimes, in moments of anxiety and uncertainty and stress, Fastow said, “there really is no replacement for Mom and Dad.”

Last spring, Molly Quigley was working seven days a week as the communications director for Clyde’s, a restaurant group in D.C. Many days, she, too, was in tears,.”