Neha Ruch chose to take an indefinite pause from work after having her second child. She immediately faced raised eyebrows and unsolicited advice. She didn’t bat an eye at her choice. But the reactions got her thinking: why are we riding on outdated stereotypes about moms choosing to exit the workforce to take care of the family for a chapter of their lives? Enter: Mother Untitled, the leading platform dedicated to ambitious women choosing to lean into family life – without shame. Today, Neha shares tips from her new book The Power Pause to help listeners pull it off like a pro.
In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Neha shares:
The importance of her gap year in India and what it did for her self-trust
Why she couldn’t find the peace and purpose at work that she got from motherhood
How stay-at-home-motherhood has been wrongfully labeled as a “luxury”
The percent of women who stop working because of high childcare costs
Financial levers couples can pull to make room in the budget for a future pause
On How She’s Explained Her Decision to Others
Neha: “What do you do” has come to stand in in this culture for “who are you?” I got asked that question and I word-vomited on the first person who asked me because, of course, I over-explained all my career accomplishments. Why I was making this choice, what I hope to do next. This woman didn't care. Truly didn't care. But I was taking all that nervousness about, “how do I fit in this conversation now? How do I prove to this woman who's asking that we're actually more alike than we're different. And I think that fear of losing our place in the conversation or losing our worth and value is really challenging in a culture that puts a lot of stock in what you do to stand in.
On Why Stay-At-Home Motherhood isn’t a “Luxury”
Neha: In polling the American public, they would still say June Cleaver, who is a fictional character from the show Leave It to Beaver, is what comes to mind when they think of a stay at home mother. And so there was this idea of luxury conflated with stay-at-home motherhood. What we know also in the research is that 60% of women pause their work right now because of the cost of childcare. One-in-three feel like they are forced to make this decision. And so it is not to say working motherhood or working out of the home, motherhood is a luxury. It's to say that the real privilege is to get to choose whether you're choosing to pause, choosing to work out of the home, or choosing to exist in between.
On Thinking of Your Home as an Organization
Neha: One exercise that we started doing before having children that continued to serve us – and I lay this out in the second chapter of the book because I think it's an important mindset – we started laying out our home as a home organization. There was a cash flow in and there was expense out. We would budget and assign ourselves categories against what we were spending. As we had children, we continued that practice. As I downshifted my career, we continued that practice and we met at the top of each year to talk about our forecast and then assigned ourselves budgets against travel, against dining out, takeout, and eventually babysitting. This was such an important mindset because what we did was we dignified our household right away as a household organization and a really complicated organization, and we both were equal participants.
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