Voices
LISA
BELKIN
HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
JEMAL COUNTESS/GETTY IMAGES FOR TIME INC.
Please Stop
Saying
Your Baby
Is ‘Easy’
DEAR MARISSA MAYER,
So, your “baby’s been easy”?
That’s what you said last month
while being honored as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women,
right? “The baby’s been way easier
than everyone made it out to be.”
Please stop saying things
like that.
We are happy for you. Really, we
are. Two-month-old Macallister
is adorable, and your fellow members of the new-mom club wish you
nothing but the best.
And we are rooting for you. Truly.
Working mothers everywhere understand that you’re breaking ceilings as the first to give birth while
heading a Fortune 500 company.
We want you to prove that pregnan-
cy and childbirth are not incompatible with, ya know, thought.
But we admit to mixed feelings.
Putting “baby” and “easy” in
the same sentence turns you into
one of those mothers we don’t
like very much. When you do, it
makes us feel (more) inadequate;
starts us wondering (again) what
we are doing wrong.
We believe you when you say
your baby is easy. Some babies
are easy. (Or so we are told.)
Sometimes easy babies stay that
way even after their mothers dare
to tempt fate and talk about their
easiness aloud. But sometimes
these easy babies go to bed like
angels and wake up like demons
who can’t be soothed unless you
Lisa Belkin
is The
Huffington
Post’s senior
columnist on
life, work and
family.
ABOVE:
Yahoo! CEO
Marissa
Mayer.