A recent article on The Bump highlighted the 10 Biggest New Mom Surprises (and How to Deal) . Amidst noisy poop and bad breastfeeding experiences they mentioned this nugget: "Going back to work is hard." This is one of the top 10 surprises? Really? I have not yet met a single mom who is thinking about going back to work who hasn't thought the transition back will be hard. What surprised me? How much I WANTED to go back to work, even though I KNEW it was going to be hard. I love The Bump - as much as I loved The Knot when I got married and The Nest when we were settling in to our new life as a...

Yes we can” was Obama’s great rallying cry – what happens when we girlfriends adopt it as our own? Marathoners Paula Radcliffe and Kara Goucher just reminded me. The New York Times tells how Goucher went to Radcliffe for advice – how to compete at the top while pregnant. Since Radcliffe herself was pregnant (2nd child), she had both tips and camaraderie to offer. In contrast, this weekend I watched Tooth Fairy, the movie about a proud hockey player who’s lost confidence in himself and throws cold water on the dreams of others. I thought of an otherwise kind women who looked a me when I was...

In 2002, Norway enacted a law requiring that 40 percent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies be women by 2008. Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015. Do quotas work? Would they work in...

I recently went with my family on a wonderful trip to the Mayan Riviera, a beach community about 1 hour south of Cancun. A great adventure trip with snorkeling, kayaking, cave explorations and jungle ziplines. It was a perfect week except for one challenge: my blackberry. The red light was blinking. Messages were coming in. I felt a constant pressure to check to see if there was anything important. There wasn’t, but there was always that nagging feeling that I should be checking in. When is a vacation really a vacation? As a working mom, I truly treasure spending a full week with my kids. I...

At 2AM last Friday, Roseanne Roseannadanna (1) was keeping me company. My head kept trying to sooth itself with her famous SNL mantra: “If it’s not one thing, it’s another“ followed by her wonderful laundry lists of foul items. Mine: fluids of many sorts -- gallons of liquid from our burst water heater into my son’s room, spare room, walls (leaving the flood refugee sleeping with his parents); then, geysers from my daughter’s stomach sending partially-digested dinner all over the place, all night. Times like these remind me why negotiating our way to more equality often seems so daunting...

My daughter came home from kindergarten reciting “I Have A Dream” so we decided to watch the YouTube. Her 8-year old brother Max furrowed his brow as MLK talked about the day to day ugliness of racism. “What kind of people could be like that?” Max wanted to know. We’ve talked about the horrors of slavery, the brave people who stood against it and the segregation that followed. “It’s all better now, right mom?” Humm. Is it a sign of progress that my kids can think this chapter of history-gone-wrong is anything near corrected? Maybe. But with so much more work to do, I’m thinking it’s better to...

“What about the holidays?” a women in her 20s asked me, “You see all these capable women running around stores, decorating homes, cooking big meals -- how much does the girl/boy labor gap widen in December?” A lot it seems. While the average hours men spend with children are up big in our generation, holiday planning does not seem to have attracted a similar surge of male interest. So this time of year offers an interesting lens on why it’s often hard for men and women to co-pilot family life together -- and why it can be so liberating. I speak as someone who has all but given up holiday...

It’s almost unanimous: 93% of moms say there’s a “father absence” crisis according to a great new report by The National Fatherhood Initiative released yesterday. Interestingly, very few of us moms (15%) think we have much to do with the problem. Aren’t we the ones providing our husbands all those lists and useful suggestions? As we’ve learned from our book talks and psychology experts, that motherly impulse to “help” men parent has gotta change. Clearly there are many layers to father absence - some that moms can’t influence at all. But I’m often amazed how easy it is to overlook the power...

Do men resent powerful women? One of the most intriguing statistics in “A Woman’s Nation,” the recently released survey by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, is this: 69% of women think men resent women who have more power than they do. Only 49% of men agree. Who knows who’s right. What we know for sure is that men and women can’t agree about power–and aren’t very comfortable talking candidly about it. To research Getting to 50/50 , the book I wrote with Joanna Strober, we found that fear of candid talk is the biggest logjam blocking the progress of women in the workplace...