Monday Morning Meetings
“Oh, shit!” were my words as I pulled into my parking spot at work.
“Oh, shit, Mommy!!” four-year-old Grant mimicked back to me from his car seat.
Grabbing my bag with two minutes to spare at 6:58 a.m., I had just noticed that Grant was still in my back seat rather than playing with his preschool friends.
My plan was amiss.
I was supposed to be at a 7 a.m. work meeting. Grant was supposed to be at preschool. His drop-off was last on my checklist to complete on my carefully scripted morning timeline. Instead, my youngest son was smiling at me from the backseat, eating the last of his fried hash browns from a McDonald’s bag.
My 5 a.m. wake-up call gave little leeway for me to suit up and deliver three boys to their respective schools before 7 o’clock. Showers, breakfast, and filled backpacks needed to run like clockwork for me to make my mandatory in-office management meeting.
Grant, my youngest, was the last I would gather out of bed, placing him in his car seat as his uniformed brothers buckled in for drop-off to their school’s extended care program. On that 2004 fall morning, I noticed an empty gas tank after packing the boys into my Honda Pilot.
My timeline for the morning did not include a trip to the gas station, nor did it include my forgetting to grab Grant’s breakfast as we raced out the door. A trip to the McDonald’s drive-through adjacent to a gas station saved me some time, but the lack of napkins in the McDonald’s bag to clean up Grant and the gas I spilled on my shoes left me frazzled. Opening Grant’s chocolate milk, my mind refocused on the digital clock in my Pilot.
Although I did make it to work on time for my meeting that Monday morning, unfortunately, so did Grant. Backtracking to his preschool had me walking into the meeting twenty minutes late.
Disheveled and smelling of gasoline, my apologies fell on deaf ears as the guys were still at the top of the meeting agenda: summarizing sports outcomes from the weekend. Our Monday discussions began with play-by-play weekend sports rehashing and how well they made the spreads on their bets.
I reviewed my mental grocery list as the guys continued their jabbering but now moving on to their golf scores. Smiling as though playing along, I thought through what needed to be handled at home. Was the field trip sack lunch left on the kitchen island? Did I take the boys’ smelly football pants out of the washer? What was in the frig for dinner?
Finally, the meeting progressed to its purpose of sales accountability. Going around the room, we each listed our top efforts in bringing in new clients for the upcoming week. The goal was to stay focused on sales. When these meetings began in the early 90s, they were effective with just a handful of managers. But as the company evolved and grew, the meetings stayed the same.
As with most mandatory work meetings, the focus went from the desired outcome to maintaining tradition. For me, the working mother trade-offs that went with getting to a 7 a.m. meeting did not offset my assessed low value of the meeting. I kept my mouth closed and was rarely late, but I was always anxious to check my box for attendance and get to work.
My first son was born in 1993 when many women chose to be stay-at-home moms. Many who chose to continue working often dropped to a part-time level or stepped back from work responsibilities to focus on home responsibilities. I felt like an outlier with my choice of being a full-time career woman. Around that time, Katie Couric was chastised for commenting that she didn’t need to be home pouring ginger ale for her daughters to be a good mother. I did not publicly weigh in on Katie’s comment, but I could relate. I was happy with my choice while supporting the moms pouring the ginger ale.
These were the years when phrases like ‘work-life balance,’ ‘me-too,’ and ‘gender pay equality’ were non-existent. On one of my first promotions, I learned that a male counterpart received a higher raise than me, although our job descriptions and longevity with the company mirrored each other. When I brought this up to management, I was told without hesitation that my male counterpart was the breadwinner of his family. My household had a couple who both worked, thus why I was paid less.
In defense of the men talking sports scores at 7:18 a.m. that Monday morning in 2004, none were part of my past pay inequity discussion. I still dreaded Monday mornings. The meetings had evolved into a weekly episode of fraternity ‘sports talk’ with the business portion focused on politics and posturing. But I shut up, and I showed up. That was my mantra.
As my boys grew up and began expressing their opinions on school rules, I often told them to stop complaining. Venting to me on the validity of a rule did nothing. They had three choices: 1) Go to the powers that be and share why you think the rule needs change, 2) change schools to one without the unfair rule, or 3) accept the rule you cannot change.
After many years of tolerating Monday morning meetings, I finally followed my own advice. I started an internal office discussion on changing the format of these meetings. What I discovered was that I was in the minority of wanting change. Some people get a lot out of the social aspect of work, and some don’t. My co-workers had a variety of different perspectives on the worth of these meetings. Similar to today’s debate on work-from-home to back-in-the-office, the correct answer to these working debates is….well, it depends.
Life comes in seasons where we make the best decisions based on our life circumstances at the time. Although I did not look forward to Monday mornings, I appreciated the flexibility around my work schedule throughout the rest of the week. I marked out my calendar for my kids’ activities and missed very few school events. Training the next generation of young mothers after me, I coached them to simply say they had a conflict when choosing future meeting times with male counterparts. We do not need to apologize for being mothers who show up, just like they don’t need to apologize for blocking an afternoon for a golf outing. In sharing scheduling details, less is always more.
Life experience ultimately gives us perspective.
Experiencing non-productive meetings made me attuned to valuing people’s time in the many meetings I have led since.
Experiencing me juggling work and family has given my boys a lesson in resilience and some really good stories to tell into their adulthood. A favorite was my giving them a flashlight to take into extended care when the neighborhood lights were out. Surely the lights would be back on soon, and a flashlight would work for the short term? In my defense, it was Monday morning and I had a meeting to get to…
Many people like to look back at their past and declare, “I have NO regrets! I would not change a THING!”
To that, I call bullshit. Wouldn’t hindsight and a transporter be wonderful? Although I tried my best to make the best decisions at the time, there were things I would have done differently. At the top of the list would be to give myself grace in not making every Monday morning meeting. And giving the kids a flashlight when there was no power…well, I wouldn’t do that again. We learned many life lessons with a ton of fun along the way as I stumbled along as a career mom.
But I just can’t get over my Monday morning flashbacks. Even with my last meeting attendance over ten years ago, I still cringe at the memory.
In an ongoing act of defiance, I never set an alarm on Monday mornings and am careful not to schedule a meeting until after 11 a.m. My barista (husband, Garrett) brings me coffee in bed as I read my news of choice, which rarely includes sports updates from the weekend. Instead, I plan my week while gazing at the mountain view out my bedroom window and enjoying my new normal of Monday morning silence.
