A Working Mom’s Story

By Sophie Fletcher (Chicago)

As Jenna Porter drops her four-month old son, Milo, off at the McGaw YMCA in Evanston, she thinks to herself how much easier it is to say goodbye to this son compared to her 12 year old; he is still too young to hang on her leg and ask, ‘Mommy, do you have to work?’

“That’s not to say Milo doesn’t know what is going on,” said Porter. “He smiles when I come back but he doesn’t have a concept of time.”

Milo was born in August of this year. Porter took a two-month maternity leave from her job as Vice President of Operations at Capital Markets Consulting, a financial business and technology consulting firm located in downtown Chicago. While she enjoyed her bonding time with Milo and the extra time she had to help Marcello off to school every day, she eventually needed to go back to work.

Now back fulltime at Capital Markets Consulting, Porter strives to spend quality time with Milo, Marcello, her husband Jabari, and her friends while working Monday thru Friday and “weekends too!” Jenna wonders sometimes if she will wake up at 60 and wish she had prioritized differently.

“It is hard when they tell stories and I am not in them,” said Porter. To make up for missing their days, she makes a point in asking about them. “I’ve learned that boys don’t talk so you have to ask them in silly, creative ways like I ask Marcello what was the worst thing that happened to him today.”

The Porter family also has a disciplined home schedule which helps Porter balance her career and work priorities. She explains that dinner is always at 7:30 PM, Marcello’s homework is completed soon after and then he is in bed by 9 PM. It is only after the kids are asleep that she gets to relax.

She admits that it helps having a supportive husband as well. Since she doesn’t cook, she lets Jabari prepare meals. She took care of the cleaning until about two years ago when she hit her wit’s end with work, taking care of the family, a new family dog named Ruby, and cleaning on the weekend. She finally cracked and hired help. She smiles as she explains that offloading the cleaning chores to her husband wasn’t an option because they have two very different versions of what a clean house should look like.

“It’s hard to balance with the time I spend at work and then time with the kids. I don’t have much time for myself which is the first thing that usually goes…doing dishes late at night, so I don’t wake up to a dirty kitchen is about the only me-time I have lately,” said Porter as she sits at her desk in her office on Wacker Drive and Adams.

On this particular day, Porter has a client in town from Colorado and a staff member that flew in from Rhode Island. She is supposed to lead a meeting in a half hour about a current project she is managing but Marcello’s school just called – he has vomited in the hallway and they are asking that she pick him up. She is not surprised that her son didn’t make it through the day. She sent him to school even though he wasn’t feeling well. “I’m going to have to prep everyone for the client meeting and then get out of here to pick Marcello up,” she said.

Yevgeniy Brailovsky is a senior software engineer at Capital Markets Consulting and works for Porter. He has had to take on more responsibility since Porter announced that she was pregnant in January. “I had to take on more of a project manager role when Jenna was gone,” said Brailovsky. His desk overlooks a Western scene of the Chicago River. “I didn’t run into anything serious but that’s because she didn’t leave in the middle of a project.

When planning her return to work, Porter admits that she delegated many of her prior responsibilities. She recommends that returning mothers clearly communicate with co-workers if they don’t think they can do it all.

“Be okay letting things go if you can’t handle everything. Tell your boss when things seem overwhelming,” advises Porter. “You have to set an expectation so people can understand where you are at and don’t be afraid to ask for support if you need it.”

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Porter was one of the first to come back from maternity leave. When she decided she wanted to breast-feed Milo, it was one of the few things she needed to work into her office schedule. Her company helped facilitate that, finding her an empty, windowless room that locked for her to use.

Porter believes that because she has shared so much of her family with her co-workers, they understand her needs. “When Marcello was little, I used to bring him to the office and he would climb around the cubicles…I have been very open with my home life and if I need, they are very generous about giving me time off.”

Ana Barun is the Executive Vice President of Marketing of Porter’s company. She has known Porter ever since Porter started working there eight years ago. Barun sees signs in Porter of lack of sleep and the challenges of dealing with a new person and a new personality at home. However, Barun emphasizes that Porter’s commitment to her family is concomitant with her commitment to what she loves and the people that depend on her at work.

Since returning to work, Porter can’t help but recall the challenges she faced as a working mother years earlier when Marcello was in kindergarten. At the time, her husband had just started a new job and her own job responsibilities included the management of a project taking place in Ireland. Because of the time difference, her work had to be done while the city of Chicago slept.

“I couldn’t leave my family to go to Europe on an indefinite basis,” said Porter, “so I set up an office in my basement and worked through the night for about three weeks. Sometimes I would sleep until about 11 o’clock in the evening and be up until about nine in the morning.”

While it was hard to work the night shift, Porter knew the alternative was impossible.

“I look back now and appreciate that my counterpart in Ireland was a woman. She just wanted to get the project completed and didn’t mind that I had to work remotely. I always wonder though what would have happened if it was a man on the other end…”

Many working mothers face challenges similar to Jenna’s – time constraints leading to hard choices about priorities, and more often leading to sacrifice of personal time (including sleeping time) to make sure all obligations are met. And while it can be difficult, Jenna has proven that it is not impossible to find a semblance of balance amidst the chaos.