Boardroom to Back Seat: The Whiplash of Working Motherhood
At 4:52 you are the person in the room who knows what to do. The deal is stalling, or the patient is asking the question she doesn't want the answer to, or the client is finally saying the thing she came in to say, or the numbers don't add up and the meeting is in four minutes. Every eye turns to you because you are the one who can handle it. And you can. You went to school for this. There was a curriculum. There were exams and a credential and a first year where you were terrible at it and a fifth year where you weren't, and now you are standing in the room doing the thing you trained to do. Your brain is running on a track it built over years: read the room, hold the thread, remember what was said twenty minutes ago and what it means for what happens next.
At 5:06 you are in the car line.
The door opens and a small person climbs in already talking. She is somewhere in the middle of an argument about whose turn it is to sleep with Yuli — the stuffed unicorn roughly the size of a third grader, the subject of nightly tug-of-war since the day it arrived — and there is a question in there, and the question is for you, and it is urgent. For one full second you are not sure who Yuli is. You wonder, genuinely, if it's a new nickname for you. Forty seconds ago your brain was still moving slides around in a presentation due tomorrow morning, and now it is being asked to rule on unicorn custody.
So you say "wait, who?" and she says "YULI" with the exasperation of someone who cannot believe she has to repeat herself, and you feel it. That half-second where you are behind your own life. Where you are not fully in the last room and not fully in this one.
I think about this moment a lot. I see it in my office in the women who sit across from me, and I know it from my own car, my own daughters, my own "wait, who?"
We budget for the pickup. We don't budget for the switch.
We have a lot of words for the logistics of a working mother's day. The pickups and drop-offs, the calendar, the snacks, the who-has-what-on-Thursday. The mental load has a name now, and a hundred articles, and a very funny comic. Good. That conversation was overdue.
What we don't talk about is the seam. The actual moment of switching from one self to the other. We treat it as if it should be instant and free, as if you can be the woman closing the deal and then the woman finding the lost water bottle with nothing in between. And if there is something in between, if you feel a lag or a snap or a wave of irritation that isn't about anyone in the car, that must be a personal failing.
It isn't. It is a cost, and you are paying it dozens of times a day.
The lag is real. Your brain is doing it right.
Cognitive researchers have a term for what happens when the mind moves between tasks that need different rules: switch cost (Monsell, 2003). When people alternate between two simple tasks in a lab, they are slower and less accurate on the trial right after a switch, and the cost shrinks but never fully disappears even when they know the switch is coming and have time to prepare (Rogers & Monsell, 1995). The old task lingers. This is true for everyone, on simple tasks, with no one in the back seat asking about a unicorn.
Now scale that up. The switch you make at 5:06 is from one entire way of being a person to another. Different tone of voice. Different posture. Different definition of what counts as an emergency. Different rules for how much of yourself you show. And you do it with no buffer, on a hard deadline, while being asked questions.
Of course it feels like whiplash. It is whiplash.
The discomfort you feel in that seam is information about the difficulty of the task. Your brain is telling you "this is hard and we are in the middle of it." That is a very different message from "you are bad at this," and most of us have been reading it as the second one for years.
Neither one is the “real” you
Here is the other thing the lag can trick you into believing: that one of these women is the true version and the other is a performance. That work-you is the costume you put on to be taken seriously, or that mom-you is the costume you put on to be forgivable.
Both of them are you. The one who holds the thread in the room and the one who sings the same four lines of Twinkle Twinkle for the eleventh time because it works. They have different jobs. They are good at different things. They need different things. The shift between them is a skill, and nobody gave you a curriculum for it. No syllabus. No supervisor. No terrible first year you were allowed to have. You learned it in the car line, in real time, with an audience of other moms. An audience that is also, somehow, in full athleisure at 5:06 on a Tuesday with a blowout, while you are in the blazer you've been in since 7am and one earring, and you would like to know when she had time for the blowout, and you would like to know it in a way that is definitely not a shift of its own.
Something in you has already learned to do this. Nobody does it perfectly. But you do it, every day, and you do it while thinking you should be doing it better.
Part of why it feels so hard is that these two women have never actually met. They pass each other in the car line every afternoon, one leaving, one arriving, and neither has any idea what the other is good at. Most of what each one believes about the other is a rumor. It helps to put them in the same room on purpose.
Try this: the two-column hand-off
This takes ten minutes and a piece of paper. Do it once, alone, when nobody needs anything from you. Bedtime is fine. The car in the driveway before you go inside is fine.
Step 1. Draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left write the name of the version of you that shows up at work. On the right, the version that shows up at home. Give them actual names if you want. "Boardroom Me" and "Kitchen Floor Me." "The Closer" and "Snack Lady."
Step 2. Under each name, write three things she is good at. Things she is good at, not things she does. What does she notice that other people miss? What does she handle that other people would drop? Write until you get to three on each side.
Step 3. Under that, write two things each of them needs in order to do her job well. Silence. Coffee. Ten minutes nobody is allowed to talk to her. A partner who has already read the email. Anything.
Step 4. Read both columns as if a friend handed you the page and said "this is my coworker, tell me about her."
What you're looking for. Almost every woman who does this finds the same thing: the columns don't look like a strong woman and a weak one, or a real one and a fake one. They look like two competent people with different skill sets who share a body and a calendar. Neither one is carrying the other. Neither one is the fraud.
Keep the page. The next time you feel the lag in the car, you don't have to fix it. You just have to know who is handing off to whom.
Maya Kruger, MA, LCAT, LPC, RDT, PMH-C, CTT3, is the founder and clinical director of Overture Therapy, supporting women through pregnancy, postpartum, and the wider transformation of motherhood in NY, NJ, PA, CT, and DC.
References
Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00028-7
Rogers, R. D., & Monsell, S. (1995). Costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124(2), 207–231. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.124.2.207