Melissa Nicholson intro

MELISSA NICHOLSON: And I thought I’d share a little bit about my own Mother’s Day experiences and motherhood journey, and why it felt so complicated for me. I know there are so many people who. This holiday brings up a lot of painful feelings around. 

Introduction

INTRO: Welcome to Job Share Revolution. The show about job sharing—a partnership between two people to bring two minds and skill sets to one full-time position. I’m Melissa Nicholson, former job sharer turned founder of the first U.S. job share company. But it wasn’t long ago that I felt like an utter failure at work and as a new parent. Job sharing was my game-changer. I reclaimed four days a week to fully engage in my life while my capable partner handled everything. Together, we achieved more than I ever could solo. Fast forward to many lessons learned to bring you the training and support I wish I’d had to change lives and the modern-day workplace. Let’s live life and slay work.

Melissa NICHOLSON

MELISSA NICHOLSON:

Hey there, it’s Mel. I hope that you had a wonderful Mother’s Day. As I’m sitting here one day after Mother’s Day, it really hit me last night.

Kind of like a pound of rocks. It really hit me how very complicated this holiday is for so many people. And I just wanted to address it here on the podcast. First and foremost, job sharing is about finding a true work-life balance at work and at home by sharing the load with an incredible work partner that you can hand off your work hat to half the week and enjoy your life.

But when we get back to our lives, there’s something very complicated about the holiday of Mother’s Day. And I know not everybody who job shares is a mother, but many people who job share our mothers and so many of us are mothering, whether we are actual birth mothers or not. And I just thought it was worth taking a time out and actually addressing it.

Why is it so complicated for so many of us? You may have just complicated feelings about what Mother’s Day means and how you want to spend it, or what your role is with your own family. And I thought I’d share a little bit about my own Mother’s Day experiences and motherhood journey, and why it feels so complicated for me.

But I know there are so many people who. This holiday brings up a lot of painful feelings around. You may have lost your mother, and have a very complicated relationship with your own mother. You may be somebody who’s lost your own child, or you wanted desperately to be a mother, but you were unable to conceive, and the thought of Mother’s Day is just so extremely painful for her.

You might just be a person who is a single mom, and you’re literally helping your kids plan your Mother’s Day. You may have been through a divorce, and this might have been your first Mother’s Day doing it all a different way. That’s rough. And then there are my friends that I think of who were adopted or who have adopted children. And that’s complex and complicated. So there’s just a lot of different circumstances that make this holiday so very complicated for many of us. And if we’re really honest, for the majority of us, I mean, let’s think about being a mother and all of all that comes with being a mother in the world. Mothers faced so many obstacles, especially from society and our workplaces.

There’s so much stigma unbecoming a mother at work. Nearly all mothers face the motherhood penalty. Quite frankly, discriminated against because they are mothers. There’s also that other side of it where their priorities have shifted. They don’t want to step back in their career. They just want to work their career in a different way. They want time to be intentional about how they parent, and to be there for their kids at every stage of the game.

I would just was thinking about this last night, and this wasn’t a planned episode, but I feel really strongly about it, and I thought I’d share a little bit of my own struggles with this holiday, in case it is something that resonates for you. And just to give you some permission to know that it is okay to have these complicated feelings around Mother’s Day. 

Whatever your circumstances are, you deserve that. I am one of those hard-loving, completely mushy moms. I love my kids with every ounce of my being. I have to say, I was loved in that very same way I was. I was loved so fully and so completely by my mom. And it was such a blessing in my early years.

But my mom did not have a strong role model. She was an orphan. When she was almost nine years old. Her mom died of colon cancer and she lived with three different aunts, so three different families after her mother and father until she graduated high school. So for her, mothering was protecting you with every ounce of her being almost in a smothering way sometimes.

I came out with a very bold personality. I probably was not the easiest kid to mother in the way that she knew or the way that she was working, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my mom loved me very much. She expressed it every night before I went to bed. She owned a child development center for about 120 kids when I was growing up, and our small town, and she hired an assistant director so that she could be there, she could be the person who picked us up after school and was present for us.

I always felt that my mom was going above and beyond to try her very best for me. But as I got older, we had a very complex relationship in my family. My parents weren’t on the best of terms for much of my childhood. I think they were just two separate people. I know that they loved us with all their hearts and they tried their very best. But my brother struggled with mental health from the time he was around middle school age, maybe before then, and also struggled with abuse. It just set up a lot of very destructive, codependent patterns in our family. But as I got older that codependency grew and later on, my parents separated and divorced when I was in my mid-20s. They became very involved in their own lives, and my brother struggled, so that didn’t go away. It was a constant.

It drove a huge wedge between how close I could actually be with my parents, who were such enablers. It caused me a lot of angst. I went to Al-Anon. I really worked on myself, and I had a lot of healthy boundaries, I think, with my family of origin, my mother, my father, and their partners, because they both remarried to other people and also my brother. I just had to.

So there was a significant period of time from my mid-twenties until my mid-40s, where I had a love-from-afar relationship with my mom. I loved her with all my heart. I knew she loved me in the capacity she could, but really, I only saw my mom on her birthday and Mother’s Day on, you know, big holidays. Like she would stop by for Christmas or around Christmas time. Once I started dating my husband, Mike, his parents moved to Austin, which was wonderful. But once I became a mom, every Mother’s Day, there was a huge weight to celebrate the two other mothers in my life, my mother-in-law and my own mother.

I didn’t have to, but I felt I really needed to. And so I was always trying to figure out what could we do? How could we do a brunch? So we started doing Mother’s Day here at our house. It still brought up a lot of complex feelings because I really only saw my mom around those holidays. I just never really felt like I could relax on Mother’s Day.

My husband Mike, he’s wonderful. He was trying to plan what could the kids do with me that was a little separate from our moms, or maybe later in the day. And what could we do to celebrate the moms? So I was always running to the grocery store or the flower market to grab flowers, and he was doing a phenomenal job making a full-on brunch. I mean, pancakes, eggs, bacon, the whole thing. Right? Really making sure everybody felt celebrated. But it just never felt like a holiday. I couldn’t just enjoy time with my little ones and just me.

Then during the pandemic, his parents moved. And right about that time, my mom suddenly came into my care with Alzheimer’s. And definitely during that time my mom suddenly was a whole different mother to me. You know, she was not the same mom and she’s not the same mom. In one way, it gave me back the relationship that I had with my mom early on. Once we got through the figuring out how do you handle a parent with Alzheimer’s? She’s very close by. We are very fortunate to have part-time caregiving help. And in many ways, she’s like a teenager at this point.

So I had the best of my mom in so many ways. She is very light, very happy and very sweet, and everybody in her community loves her. So this year, I have to say it was kind of like the perfect Mother’s Day. We have dinner with my mom every Sunday night. So she was really thinking that, you know, we’re going to do that Mother’s Day dinner, which is great.

It’s right in her routine. So this year we did get to really celebrate the holiday. The kids completely made it special. So we went to a state park and went swimming and took the dog. We took Howard and it was a great Mother’s Day. Really, the first one that I’ve had in a long time now. It extended really long, like we had Mother’s Day from the morning all the way to about 830 at night because we ended that Mother’s Day with my mom and even had a try, such as cake at the end, and it was about as perfect as it gets.

It was a really bittersweet holiday for me because it’s my last Mother’s Day that my daughter is going to be here. She is a graduating senior from high school this year. That comes in a couple more weeks, so I’m feeling all the feels like course with all of that. She’s going to go to Boston for college and it’s really far from Boston.

They may sound like Boston and Austin, but they’re really far away from one another and I know that she is not going to be home for Mother’s Day for the next four years, and then she’ll be a young adult. She’ll be off in the world. I definitely was having all the feels around that. And anyway, I just thought, if I can’t share this on the podcast, when work means it’s not just about a flexible work practice, it’s about designing your career and your life.

And so many of us are caregivers. I just felt a real need to honor that, to give you permission, that if Mother’s Day brings up a lot for you, it’s okay. It’s okay to not want to celebrate this holiday at all and to let the people who love you know that it’s okay to say what you need and what you want on the holiday and do it in a way that works for you. Your mother loves you and they’ll understand.

I really would love to hear your thoughts about this episode.

We need to have more conversations like this and more awareness for allowing us to feel the feelings that we have and to honor those feelings. And I hope this episode gives you the permission to celebrate Mother’s Day the way that you want in the future.

I love you so much and I will see you next week.