Interesting! See How This Mom-Of-2 Shut Down A Question All Successful Moms Are often Asked
It seems every successful mom has been asked this same question: How do you do it all?
How do you manage to fulfill your motherly roles while also spending so much time focused on your career? Even though this question may often come from a well-meaning place, not all mom take kindly to it.
It might be comforting and inspiring to other women struggling with the ever-elusive “work-life balance” which is great and all, except successful men are rarely asked this question.
Interestingly, a fiction writer of short stories and author of several novels, including Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff delivered the perfect response to that question.
Groff was recently interviewed by the Harvard Gazette and of course, the infamous question reared its ugly head.
Mom-of-2, Groff was absolutely asked how she balances motherhood and her writing. What’s amazing is how 40-year-old Groff took that question, trampled on it, lit it on fire, and blew it up into smithereens with the perfect answer ever.
Interviewer: You are a mother of two. In 10 years you have produced three novels and two short-story collections. Can you talk about your process and how you manage work and family?
Groff: I understand that this is a question of vital importance to many people, particularly to other mothers who are artists trying to get their work done, and know that I feel for everyone in the struggle. But until I see a male writer asked this question, I’m going to respectfully decline to answer it.
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Following Groff’s remarks, the author has pretty much become Twitter’s hero overnight. Plenty of people agree this is not only noteworthy, but it’s the only way to get people to stop placing the burden of “balancing” a career and being a parent squarely on the shoulders of already overly-burdened moms.
“Lauren Groff politely but firmly says she won’t answer questions on how she manages to write books and be a parent until she sees male writers asked the same question,” one Twitter user wrote.
“If more people did this it would help dismantle the notion that family=women’s work.” Yasss!
Another person simply tweeted, “Lauren Groff is one badass woman.”
Yet another Twitter user wrote, “I’ve never read anything by Lauren Groff but her answer to a sexist interview question makes me want to.”
This isn’t Groff’s first go-around. Back in 2016, Groff answered this type of question a bit differently during an interview with The New Yorker — in that she actually entertained it.
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“I’d made the decision before the boys were born that I was going to feel no guilt or shame about my parenting,” she told the publication at the time.
“I’m a good mother and want to spend as much time as possible with my kids, but I travel a lot, I shut myself away from my family to work every day, I do not do birthday parties, and I went to one play-date in my life and wanted to break the Perrier bottle on the floor and stab myself with it.
We have intense conversations in my house about apportioning responsibility, because neither my husband nor I wants to assume roles based on messed-up collective assumptions about gender dynamics.”
The mom-of-two continued:
”I think that, in our society, the idea of motherhood is pathologically ill, and even well-meaning people assume martyrdom in a mother.
Guilt and shame are the tools used to keep people in line; the questions I get most at readings or in interviews are about being a mother and writer, when I’m expected to do this this sort of tap dance of humility that I have no desire or ability to dance.
I think people are mostly kind and don’t know that, when they ask these questions of women, they are asking us to perform a kind of ceremonial subjection — that we’re not allowed our achievements without first denigrating ourselves or saying, with a sigh, ‘Yes, that’s correct, I’m a writer and a mother, and it’s so hard, and, no, I don’t do it well.’
The truth is, doing these things is hard because being a good parent is always hard, but the difficulty of parenting is separate from the difficulty of work.”