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"  Arranging the interview took months of patient pleading with the CEO&amp;#039;s staff, and now that I&amp;#039;ve been waiting for almost an hour in the chief&amp;#039;s vast beige and teak inner office, one thought keeps running through my head: She better be as brilliant as everyone says. Ten minutes later, the CEO walks through the door, smoothing her pantsuit and flashing a purposefully desperate smile. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so sorry to have kept you waiting,&amp;quot; she says, plopping down in the sleek armchair next to me as I reach out to shake her hand, &amp;quot;but my nine-year-old had a bad night because of a test today\u2014throwing up and everything\u2014and she just called in to say she thinks she aced it. Everything is so dramatic with that one; all her stress goes right to her stomach.&amp;quot; I try to cut her off with a tight grin, barely enough to pass as polite. I don&amp;#039;t like where this is going.  &amp;quot;Do you have kids?&amp;quot; she asks brightly, leaning toward me.  &amp;quot;A daughter,&amp;quot; I say, in a clipped tone, hoping she&amp;#039;ll get the hint. &amp;quot;Three. She&amp;#039;s great.&amp;quot; I flip open my notebook to signal that I&amp;#039;m ready to start our interview. &amp;quot;A baby!&amp;quot; she squeals. &amp;quot;Mine are so grown-up now. I loved that age. I&amp;#039;ll bet she&amp;#039;s delicious.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah, it&amp;#039;s great.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Tell me,&amp;quot; she says, gripping my knee with a cool hand, &amp;quot;isn&amp;#039;t it just the best thing you&amp;#039;ve ever done?&amp;quot; I try to control my face, make sure my nostrils don&amp;#039;t flare or my eyes roll back in my head reflexively. It&amp;#039;s the dreaded nonquestion again, as deep a rhetorical trap as &amp;quot;When did you stop beating your wife?&amp;quot; Like the countless other professional women who&amp;#039;ve asked me this since my daughter was born and who no doubt ask it of every relatively new mom they encounter on the job, the CEO lands hard on the word best, as though it&amp;#039;s a secret mommy high five. The tips of my ears burn. &amp;quot;Absolutely,&amp;quot; I lie.   It&amp;#039;s not as though I don&amp;#039;t love my daughter. Or that I take her for granted. Infertility made her birth a novel-length saga, and I marvel daily that she&amp;#039;s a healthy, fearless, slaphappy toddler. I am mesmerized by the sound of her Betty Boop voice serenading stuffed animals and moved by the sight of her flapping pigtails as she tears through the playground. Each night before we turn off the lights, my husband and I recap, often in numbing detail, her triumphs and setbacks of the day. But I have never once thought of her as the best thing I&amp;#039;ve ever done. Perhaps that&amp;#039;s a function of having had a better-than average work life, but it&amp;#039;s also because I&amp;#039;m loath to take credit for my daughter as an accomplishment. Reproducing, even for me, who had to go to such lengths to become a mother, doesn&amp;#039;t feel like a personal achievement; it&amp;#039;s just a natural part of the human cycle. That&amp;#039;s one of the reasons I love being a parent; it&amp;#039;s comfortingly prosaic, delightfully unremarkable. Can you imagine women in small Indian villages standing around the local well asking for reassurance from the others that having their brood of kids is &amp;quot;the best thing they&amp;#039;ve ever done&amp;quot;? It&amp;#039;s a ready-made caption for a New Yorker cartoon.  So why do so many accomplished women, even in the most rarefied professional environments, feel compelled to treat their children as something to be celebrated publicly in minute, often embarrassingly scatological, detail? Why do they assume that tales of their offspring&amp;#039;s quotidian doings will envelop everyone else in a cloak of bliss? While there are indeed a few colleagues with whom I&amp;#039;ve developed a real friendship and whose children&amp;#039;s lives I love hearing about (part of the reason I chose these pals is their ability to endow even a toddler tantrum story with wit and irony), it&amp;#039;s a tiny club. And it surely doesn&amp;#039;t include the acquaintance who corralled me during a break at a recent seminar on the world economic crisis, nearly bursting to compare stories of our kids&amp;#039; capricious bowel habits, school issues, and general adorability. That such talk is tedious to the young, unmarried women in the room (yes, they&amp;#039;re Twittering right now about how lame we are) and deeply irritating to the older, child-free ones, not to mention off-putting to most men who happen to be within earshot, doesn&amp;#039;t seem to matter. &amp;quot;I know I&amp;#039;m an idiot,&amp;quot; one woman told me sheepishly when I gently suggested she put a lid on explicating to a colleague the soaring heights of her preschooler&amp;#039;s standardized test scores as we sat waiting for our boss in a conference room. &amp;quot;But I just can&amp;#039;t stop myself. I&amp;#039;m just so over the moon.&amp;quot;  I know my attitude seems uncharitable and certainly unmotherly. I accept that I&amp;#039;m among the retrograde few with an aversion to wearing my parental status on the sleeve of my suit jacket. After all, baby talk is ubiquitous in pop culture these days, so who can blame my colleagues for fetishizing their young? Give a female celebrity a soapbox, and you can bet she&amp;#039;ll eventually wind up effervescing on the joys of motherhood. No clich\u00E9 is too hoary for these gals as they gesticulate madly with their slender arms and toss their high-gloss manes; they seem unaware of the cultural ironies embedded in the reveries. These mistresses of mass media (and you know who they are) have perfected the mixed message: I&amp;#039;m a regular mom, just like you. Pay no attention to the three nannies who have been cropped out of this picture or the fact that I spend four nights a week on the red carpet. I&amp;#039;m really just a harried hausfrau who can&amp;#039;t stop talking about my kids&amp;#039; organic diet. Have I told you that having a baby is the best thing I&amp;#039;ve ever done? Who can tell if these women are taking their cues from us or we&amp;#039;re taking ours from them, but somewhere along the way, babies became the ultimate badge of honor on the job. It seems like only yesterday that women were complaining they had to suppress their femininity to succeed, that they had to become one of the boys to get ahead. I know that my mother, who had a high-powered job in the 1970s, never confided to her colleagues, even the other women, the daily stress of raising three children. How did we go from that absurd stance to one in which a woman trots out her reproductive bona fides as though she&amp;#039;s won a MacArthur? Linda Hirshman, the philosopher and feminist author, says the current tendency of women to blather at work about their children is a by-product of the &amp;quot;Mommy Wars,&amp;quot; the heightened tension that developed a decade ago between stay-at-home mothers and their employee counterparts. The same drama is now played out even between women on the job, she says, away from shibboleth of the SAHM. &amp;quot;Women who talk incessantly about their kids are practicing a kind of political oppression that&amp;#039;s probably born of guilt. You have to declare your mothering intentions, show you&amp;#039;re not selling out your children by caring about your career.&amp;quot;  The question, she says, is &amp;quot;how much of your banal, private reproductive life is appropriate in the public space? No one is saying you should be a man in a skirt, that you shouldn&amp;#039;t leave early for a soccer game or that you should hide your pregnancy, but that&amp;#039;s not the same thing as abolishing the boundaries between the personal and professional spheres.&amp;quot; Hirshman, who has a grown daughter, suggests that incessant banter about children at the office ultimately feels forced because it conflicts with the true nature of paid work. &amp;quot;Women try to use children as a way to bond with other women at the job, to say, `I&amp;#039;m your sister, not your competitor.&amp;#039; They aren&amp;#039;t comfortable thinking of other people as instrumental to their ends, even though that&amp;#039;s the bargain we all strike when we take a job.&amp;quot; Kid talk can also, ironically, wind up creating just the sort of exclusionary environment that women historically resented on the job. &amp;quot;You run the risk of isolating women without kids, who these days make up a big part of the people you work with,&amp;quot; says Rebecca Walker, third-wave feminist and editor of the new anthology One Big Happy Family (Riverhead). &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s just what we hated about the men&amp;#039;s club atmosphere of the pre-women&amp;#039;s movement workplace.&amp;quot; And then there&amp;#039;s the stealth power gesture of bosses who mention their children\u2014and the frustrations of mothering\u2014in an attempt to humanize themselves to women below them in the hierarchy, Hirshman adds. In some cases, the boss may be a genuine softie, as focused on the needs of her employees as she is on her kids, but more often such mentions are &amp;quot;a powerful if illegitimate weapon. They create commonality, but that&amp;#039;s just a device. You don&amp;#039;t get to be the boss by being a nice mom type.&amp;quot; This is, I realize, a variation on the tactic used by the CEO who trotted out the tale of her daughter&amp;#039;s test anxiety. I was a reporter who could damage her troubled company further, so her instinct was to create an artificial bond that might make me go easier on her. I wonder how she would have reacted if I&amp;#039;d answered her rhetorical question honestly: &amp;quot;Actually, having a child is not the best thing I&amp;#039;ve ever done. And I find it hard to believe it&amp;#039;s on the top of your r\u00E9sum\u00E9, either. Surely you wouldn&amp;#039;t have said that to a male reporter sitting across from you with a tape recorder. You&amp;#039;re one of the few women who&amp;#039;s ever run a company this big. You&amp;#039;ve made history.&amp;quot; I know there are many women\u2014smart, evolved, successful women\u2014who think I&amp;#039;m nuts not to see the charm and leverage of office baby-chatter. The way they view it, there is no greater mark of how far we&amp;#039;ve come than our willingness to blab about our kids. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s incredibly healthy that we feel comfortable integrating our lives that way without fear that it will destroy our careers,&amp;quot; says Dale Atkins, a Manhattan psychologist. &amp;quot;It helps women allay their anxiety about being away from their children, and it makes the workplace a warmer, more natural place.&amp;quot; One woman I know, who works in an office dominated by men, including a hyper-male gay boss, nearly chokes when I suggest that child-oriented patter can be irritating. As the only mother in her 50-person department for years, she never dares call attention to her two young sons. &amp;quot;I would love to be able to talk about them or at least acknowledge their existence a little more fully. But I&amp;#039;m always afraid of being ghettoized as The Girl. &amp;quot; When another woman in the office gave birth a year ago, my friend was deeply grateful. &amp;quot;We share stories on the sly,&amp;quot; she says. My husband too thinks I&amp;#039;m overreacting. A woman talking about her kids at work is like a man knocking the Knicks at the watercooler, he insists\u2014a benign way to break the ice. A bookish foodie, he is also a 6&amp;#039;5&amp;quot; former jock, so he gets snagged in casual sports banter by most males he encounters\u2014doormen, cabbies, his colleagues, the guy who fixes our Subaru. It gives him an easy way to relate to other men. It&amp;#039;s a democratizing force, he insists, that levels the social class distinctions. He advises me to suffer the indignities of office baby talk gracefully. &amp;quot;So what if you have to choke down one more poop story?&amp;quot; he asks. On the walk to a long-ago scheduled dinner with a colleague who has an infant, her first, I resolve to be less uncomfortable when the baby talk begins. Jennifer, one of the most talented and accomplished people I know, is, after all, a relatively new mom. In the past, we&amp;#039;ve spent hours talking about the substance of our work, teasing out the deeper meaning in the issues and people we write about, but now she will want a sympathetic audience for her swoon, and I am determined to be one. We can talk about puke and drool until the espressos come. Bring on the effluvia.  &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;s the baby?&amp;quot; I ask, brightly, when our drinks arrive. &amp;quot;Fine,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;No stories?&amp;quot; I ask, choking on a slice of lime. &amp;quot;Nope. The kid does not generate any anecdotes,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Oh, come on.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, really, he&amp;#039;s just a regular baby, doing all the baby things.&amp;quot; I know she&amp;#039;s lying, that she and her husband, like me and mine, spend countless hours marveling at their child&amp;#039;s very existence in that annoying singsongy voice. But as her firm, offhand response makes clear, they choose to do their marveling in private. As the conversation turns to work, a warm glow spreads through my entire body, and it&amp;#039;s not just the rum. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a9665/die-mommy-die-286525/>