“Ok mommy don’t move!” my meatball-shaped son, age 3, hollered at me as he waddled into pre-school. “STAY RIGHT THERE” he insisted, pointing to the random circle etched into the sidewalk where I was standing in front of his school. Every morning, he would part with these words and consequently, at every pickup, I would find my way to that circle on the sidewalk. I maintained his belief that I existed in statue mode – frozen in space and time, eagerly awaiting his dismissal – for as long as I could. But of course, the day eventually arrived when I had a scheduling conflict and wouldn’t be the person to collect him from school. That’s when I had to reveal the truth to him: I’m not a mommy robot who powers off when you leave the room. As shocking as it was to his system, I explained I’m a person with errands to run, work to complete, appointments to keep, and all kinds of things to do. I could see from his reaction, a mix of suspicion, confusion and intrigue, this would take more than one conversation and probably some suave marketing to get him on side.
By way of background, I had made a career of developing thought leadership and strategic communication in the sustainable finance space. After working in investment banking and earning my MBA, I joined a sustainability focused-fund called Generation Investment Management which was co-founded by Vice President Al Gore and David Blood, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs. At Generation, we used our investment results, research, and strategic partnerships to engage the broader finance industry on the case for integrating sustainability themes across businesses and investment mandates. The work required a deep understanding of the issues at hand and the ability to distill them into palatable formats for the “uninitiated”. Now, as a mom, it felt like a skill set I had never needed more.
I channeled my learnings/mishigoss, from the situation with my son into a children’s book, Your Mom’s a Person Too! to provide a fun and loving way for other parents to manage situations similar to the one I faced. I had two goals for my book. One, write a story that would make kids and parents laugh at the same things together. Two, create an opportunity to deepen the empathy and connection children already hold for moms. The story touches on how moms – like all people – make mistakes, have obligations, want to see friends, cycle through emotions, and ultimately need understanding and love.
I also hoped the book would contribute to ongoing conversations about modern motherhood. The chapters of a woman’s life are typically described along the lines of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and being postmenopausal. In more recent years we’ve added additional and important nuances to the timeline like “tween years” and the acknowledging the changes many women confront during perimenopause. However, the years of motherhood are painted with broad strokes and opacity. I advocate for bringing the word matrescence into the vernacular. A term first coined in the 1970s, matrescence describes the profound physical, hormonal, psychological, and social transitions a woman experiences in motherhood. It’s a vital term to recognize the dramatic and multifaceted changes that accompany motherhood. And yet, the word matrescence was only adopted into the Cambridge Dictionary in the last few years. Try looking it up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (which touts itself as “America’s Most Trusted Dictionary”)…spoiler alert, it’s not there.
My book is a light-hearted approach to engage kids on the societal imperative to show more compassion towards mothers. Yes, we desperately need system-level changes like improved maternal healthcare, paid family leave, and affordable childcare. But we also need to start from the ground up and ensure we are doing right by the moms in our lives day-to-day.
Being a mom isn’t just caring for children. It’s doing so while also navigating shifts, sometimes extreme ones, in how you feel, how you look, how/where/if you work, all while trying to find your place in the world with this newly assumed identity of MOTHER. While moms often achieve superhuman tasks, we are still simply people who need your patience, hugs, and maybe just one bite of your snack.
Daniela Saltzman is a NYC based mom of 3 young kids. Her new book, Your Mom’s a Person Too! is available now here. It’s a book for anyone who is a mom, has a mom, or knows a mom.
