The Choice Working Mothers Should Never Have To Make

There are a lot of conservative companies that love to talk about family. Have children. Have more children. Motherhood matters. Family comes first. Children are a blessing, not a burden.

I agree with all of it. But after working for one of the biggest conservative news organizations in the country, I learned there can be a pretty enormous difference between preaching those values and actually practicing them.

I know this because, before I had children, I was part of the problem. Then I became a mom. Suddenly, I understood what it felt like to worry that your child might make a noise during a Zoom call. I knew the panic of trying to work while also being a mother, terrified that someone might decide the two couldn’t coexist.

At my former workplace, working mothers were talked about in a negative light if their children appeared on Zoom or if they were caught working from a laptop at the playground while their kids played during the summer. Imagine that for a second. A mother isn’t skipping work. She’s literally sitting at the playground doing her job, laptop open, while simultaneously making sure her children have a summer. That was a problem.

One former colleague was frequently working from her laptop while caring for her children. She was pushed out. There may have been fine print and official explanations surrounding her departure, but I was told by very senior people involved that her inability to secure childcare was at the heart of the problem. So much for practicing what you preach.

Then there was maternity leave. When I had my first child, she suffered several health issues during her first three months of life. I was a brand-new mother trying to navigate doctors, sleepless nights, and the overwhelming realization that this tiny human depended entirely on me. And I was contacted about work. Numerous times. On maternity leave. Instead of being allowed to focus entirely on my newborn, I had work stress hanging over me too.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m writing this with my baby sitting on my lap. I now work at The Daily Wire, and I’ve never felt more empowered to be a working mother. If I need to step away to feed my baby, nobody interrogates me. If I need to take my kids somewhere or give them some one-on-one time, I can do it. I’m not made to feel guilty about it. In fact, it’s encouraged.

And here’s something that might surprise people: One of my biggest advocates for putting motherhood first isn’t another mother.

It’s my direct report. A father. Imagine that. A man who can celebrate the work I do while also celebrating the fact that I’m a mom. He doesn’t treat motherhood as an inconvenience he has to work around. He reminds me that it’s more important than anything happening on a homepage that day.

I’ve been told numerous times that nothing I do at work will ever be more important than being a mother. And here’s the funny thing: That mentality doesn’t make me want to work less. It makes me want to work harder.

I realized that one morning at 2 a.m. I woke up to feed my baby and, like any exhausted mom, planned to get him back to sleep right after, and hopefully get myself back to sleep too. Then I looked at my phone. Senator Lindsey Graham had tragically and unexpectedly died. Suddenly, there was major breaking news to cover. So when the baby finished eating, I didn’t go back to sleep. I grabbed my laptop and got to work. And strangely enough, I felt blessed.

There I was in the middle of the night, exhausted, with my baby next to me, and I got to be the person awake to cover one of the biggest stories of the day while most Americans were still sleeping. I wasn’t annoyed that I had to work. I wasn’t frustrated that I was awake. I felt lucky that being a mom was the reason I happened to be awake when my team needed someone.

Nobody told me to cover breaking news at 2 a.m. I wasn’t scared of what would happen if I didn’t. I did it because I wanted to. And that difference means everything.

My colleagues have been a blessing from God, too. I’m surrounded by mothers whose children are older than mine, women who have already survived the sleepless nights and toddler meltdowns I’m living through right now. They check in on me. They remind me I’m not alone. And they make sure I know that when motherhood feels overwhelming, I have women around me who have been there and are ready to listen.

Recently, I had an absolutely brutal night with both of my kids. I woke up exhausted and defeated and happened to see a tweet about postpartum struggles from a coworker. She hadn’t written it for me. She probably had no idea I needed it. But I did. Her words pulled me up that morning more than she’ll ever know. I sent her a message to thank her for being so real and told her that what she’d written was exactly what I needed to get out of bed and keep going that day.

“If you ever need a mom to chat with give me a call!!” she told me.

Now that her children are older, she can look back and see what can be nearly impossible to see when you’re in the trenches with little kids. The sacrifices were worth it. Sometimes that’s exactly what another mom needs to hear.

And maybe the biggest difference between my two workplaces can be summed up by something as simple as a child wandering into the camera. At my old job, I would panic if my four-year-old made a sound during a Zoom call. I would find myself getting angry with her for being a completely normal four-year-old because I was scared of how my managers would react and did react if it happened.
Think about how backwards that is.

At The Daily Wire, when my colleague Tim Rice had one of his young children climb onto his lap during a live appearance on “Wired In,” nobody freaked out. Host Cabot Phillips celebrated it.

“We practice what we preach,” Cabot said. “At the Daily Wire we love children.” He called children “a gift” and “a blessing from God.”

That moment stuck with me. A toddler climbed onto Dad’s lap while Dad was working, and everyone kept going. Nobody shooed the child away. Nobody acted embarrassed. Nobody treated being a parent like some unprofessional secret that needed to be hidden from the audience. That’s what being pro-family actually looks like.

Being a working mother shouldn’t require pretending that you stop being a mother between 9 and 5. Children make noise. Babies need to be fed. School closes. Babysitters cancel. Kids wander into Zoom calls. That’s life.

A company can put “family values” in a mission statement. It can publish a thousand articles about the importance of motherhood. But you learn what an organization actually believes when a baby cries during a meeting.

For years, I thought being a great employee meant making sure nobody could see that I was also a mom. Now I work somewhere that has taught me the exact opposite. I don’t have to choose. Being given the freedom to put my children first has made me more dedicated to my career than I’ve ever been.

The Daily Wire gave me my family life back. And in doing so, it made me enjoy working again. Every day I wake up thankful that I get to be part of this mission without sacrificing the most important mission I’ll ever have: being a mom.

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This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.