15 weeks
I've been dealing with a difficult co-worker at work: a middle-aged white, male engineer who is on two of the projects I am leading. He has caused a significant amount of stress to my well-being, and I have spent an inordinate amount of time considering his thoughts and feelings on certain matters. I have lost sleep because of him. I have wasted hours from my projects' budgets taking into consideration his difficult and resistant opinions.
The conflict is finally culminating into a show-down with management presence. And I look forward to it, because finally the root cause of his negative attitude and resistance is becoming obvious to everyone. It seems he has difficulty cooperating with a group of intelligent, female decision-makers on the team, three of which are women of color, including the junior engineer who he is supposed to be mentoring. The junior engineer noticed the overtly sexist comments he made on Friday when she and her supervisor had a meeting with him, and she is convinced that none of the drama from the past two months would exist if the project manager (me) were a man and the junior engineer (her) were also a man.
Even until now, I am giving him the benefit of the doubt. I want to hear his concerns one by one. From what I can glean, he has claimed that I often bypass him in favor of the junior engineer's thoughts and opinions, and that the rest of of the team (mostly women) make decisions without his input. This is 100% misleading and founded in no truth. I am prepared to refute every single one of these claims with concrete evidence to the contrary. I have emails which show how he often underestimates the junior engineer (in a not-so-polite way), and I also have meeting recordings that demonstrate how consistently I seek his input during every step of the project.
Women will shape the future.
I can't wait to tell my baby this story.
Bring it on.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Monday, October 8, 2018
Energy
13 weeks, 2 days
Supposedly my morning sickness is going to subside soon. It hasn't yet if this morning was any indication, but thankfully I have figured out the life hack of taking a small bite of a granola bar in the morning to ease up the symptoms. Mitch is usually up first, so he'll throw one to me while I'm still in bed and he's making coffee in the kitchen.
Milo and I are at Preserve & Gather again . . . I seem to come here a lot lately. One of the owners, Cayla, just had her baby, so I'll have to let her know what this place has come to mean to me during my own pregnancy. It has encouraged me to pause and breathe, to feel a small sense of community. I'm using up one of two days that I have for a mental health day; trying to be more gentle with myself.
On weekends I've been taking it easy. Aside from occasionally visiting with friends, I'm making a routine of Spin Cycle every Sunday, and starting two weekends ago I started swimming again on Saturdays. I'd stopped going to the gym this summer when the weather so nice (biking + hiking were my jam), but now that we're transitioning to the Fall, the colder weather + carrying a fetus makes me a little wary of getting on the road. But I do miss that feeling of being on my own bike. It grounds me.
I feel immensely grateful that I'm still able to exercise and feel energized from it. I always look forward to fueling up after Spin, too, with a veggie quesadilla at the Ballard farmer's market. And because I still find joy in little things like this, I've have concluded that I don't necessarily have perinatal depression.
Friends help, though. They help me a lot.
Supposedly my morning sickness is going to subside soon. It hasn't yet if this morning was any indication, but thankfully I have figured out the life hack of taking a small bite of a granola bar in the morning to ease up the symptoms. Mitch is usually up first, so he'll throw one to me while I'm still in bed and he's making coffee in the kitchen.
Milo and I are at Preserve & Gather again . . . I seem to come here a lot lately. One of the owners, Cayla, just had her baby, so I'll have to let her know what this place has come to mean to me during my own pregnancy. It has encouraged me to pause and breathe, to feel a small sense of community. I'm using up one of two days that I have for a mental health day; trying to be more gentle with myself.
On weekends I've been taking it easy. Aside from occasionally visiting with friends, I'm making a routine of Spin Cycle every Sunday, and starting two weekends ago I started swimming again on Saturdays. I'd stopped going to the gym this summer when the weather so nice (biking + hiking were my jam), but now that we're transitioning to the Fall, the colder weather + carrying a fetus makes me a little wary of getting on the road. But I do miss that feeling of being on my own bike. It grounds me.
I feel immensely grateful that I'm still able to exercise and feel energized from it. I always look forward to fueling up after Spin, too, with a veggie quesadilla at the Ballard farmer's market. And because I still find joy in little things like this, I've have concluded that I don't necessarily have perinatal depression.
Friends help, though. They help me a lot.
Like a Mother
13 weeks, 2 days
When I told my friend Megan that I was 11 weeks pregnant, we were sitting in a grey "green space" in downtown Seattle eating Indian food from Columbia Tower. She asked me at the time, "Are you scared at all?" It was a great question, but surprisingly difficult to answer. I didn't feel particularly scared at that moment in time, and I was encouraged to articulate why.
I feel like I'm standing on the shoulder of giants. There are so many women throughout history, so many brave souls who have ventured into motherhood, including my own mother. That, alone, was enough to give me a feeling of of comfort, normalcy, and connection.
But, more specifically, I've also been actively seeking the perspectives of thoughtful and brilliant mothers. Angela Garbes's book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy has given me a lot to chew on, and I love that it is written from the perspective of a Filipina-American who is outspoken about the colonial, racist, and sexist history of our medical care system. This is important because the bulk of mainstream literature and media about maternal care and motherhood seems to be written from the perspectives of white, urban mothers from middle-class families who have benefited from white feminist movements where others have not. Take, for instance, the work of Dr. J. Marion Sims, referred to as the "father of modern gynecology." Sims is known for developing a surgical technique for repairing vaginal fistulas in the 19th century, but he developed this technique by first performing on a dozen enslaved women. "Only after mastering his technique (he operated on Anarcha thirteen times) did Sims repair the fistulas of white women, all with anesthesia."
Unless you actively seek it (and even then), it can be hard to find stories from women of color, poor women, and women across the globe.
Additionally, she implores women to better understand and respect our bodies, to be less ashamed of the physical changes we go through. One of her most famous articles published by the Stranger, titled "The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am," helped inspire her writing of the book. I had no idea that our bodies took in bits of saliva from the baby to intrepet it and adjust our breast milk accordingly for the baby's needs. It kind of blew my mind, and while I don't think Garbes's intent is to shame mothers who can't produce milk, this makes me appreciate and respect my own growing body parts — no matter what others may see and perceive.
When I told my friend Megan that I was 11 weeks pregnant, we were sitting in a grey "green space" in downtown Seattle eating Indian food from Columbia Tower. She asked me at the time, "Are you scared at all?" It was a great question, but surprisingly difficult to answer. I didn't feel particularly scared at that moment in time, and I was encouraged to articulate why.
I feel like I'm standing on the shoulder of giants. There are so many women throughout history, so many brave souls who have ventured into motherhood, including my own mother. That, alone, was enough to give me a feeling of of comfort, normalcy, and connection.
But, more specifically, I've also been actively seeking the perspectives of thoughtful and brilliant mothers. Angela Garbes's book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy has given me a lot to chew on, and I love that it is written from the perspective of a Filipina-American who is outspoken about the colonial, racist, and sexist history of our medical care system. This is important because the bulk of mainstream literature and media about maternal care and motherhood seems to be written from the perspectives of white, urban mothers from middle-class families who have benefited from white feminist movements where others have not. Take, for instance, the work of Dr. J. Marion Sims, referred to as the "father of modern gynecology." Sims is known for developing a surgical technique for repairing vaginal fistulas in the 19th century, but he developed this technique by first performing on a dozen enslaved women. "Only after mastering his technique (he operated on Anarcha thirteen times) did Sims repair the fistulas of white women, all with anesthesia."
Unless you actively seek it (and even then), it can be hard to find stories from women of color, poor women, and women across the globe.
Additionally, she implores women to better understand and respect our bodies, to be less ashamed of the physical changes we go through. One of her most famous articles published by the Stranger, titled "The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am," helped inspire her writing of the book. I had no idea that our bodies took in bits of saliva from the baby to intrepet it and adjust our breast milk accordingly for the baby's needs. It kind of blew my mind, and while I don't think Garbes's intent is to shame mothers who can't produce milk, this makes me appreciate and respect my own growing body parts — no matter what others may see and perceive.
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