Janet’s guest this week is Neha Ruch, a writer and speaker on parenting, women, work, and identity. Her personal journey from career through parenthood led her to question and ultimately reject society’s stereotypical view of the stay-at-home parent and its limitations, and instead celebrate the possibilities. Neha is the founder of Mother Untitled (.com), which seeks to reimagine parenthood as a pause or “downshift” and an opportunity to find our passions. Through Mother Untitled, Neha connects a growing community of like minded parents with resources geared to support and further their goals. Her new book, “The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids—and Come Back Stronger Than Ever” will be out in mid-January.
Transcript of “Embrace the Privilege of Parenthood (With Neha Ruch)”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Today, I welcome Neha Ruch. She’s the author of the soon-to-be-released book The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids—and Come Back Stronger Than Ever. Neha has built the first and most prominent community platform for parents interested in exploring the possibility of taking a career pause in the early years with their children, and then making the most of that experience as an opportunity to explore and discover themselves. Neha has a whole host of encouraging resources on her website, motheruntitled.com. Which is also for the increasing number of fathers choosing to stay at home, by the way. Wherever you are in your career and parenting journey, I know you’ll gain a lot from Neha’s perspective, so I’m really excited about this conversation.
Hello there, Neha. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Neha Ruch: It’s such an honor to be with you. Truly. I have your book right next to me, so this feels like meeting an idol.
Janet Lansbury: Oh, thank you. That’s so sweet of you.
Well, I love the work that you’re doing. You have supported so many parents now and all these resources that you offer, they’re really incredible, your website is awesome. And it’s all focused around this idea that we may have more options open to us as parents than we’d imagined. And this transition, of course, becoming a parent, really there’s no transition in life that’s more intense than this, right? There are maybe some that are equally intense, but now we’re responsible for this child for their lifetime and our lifetime. All of that sense of responsibility, but also the identity crisis, which I really related to, that you talk about in your book, The Power Pause.
I’ve learned so much reading your book, but can you describe for listeners what your book is about? What’s important for parents to know about this and really what you can offer?
Neha Ruch: I think you said it right, which is that parenting is such an immense transition, but we often get the message that we are “losing ourselves” in parenthood. And then we compound that with career. If women step into a career shift for family life, whether they’re pausing their career or they’re stepping into a downshift in some way to make room for family life, this sense of identity loss compounds, and we get further messages that in some way we’re going to lose ourselves.
You see this in a broad sense with parenting, that actually just like we change from age five to 15 or 15 to 25, the reality is we will change in parenthood and our priorities will shift, but it actually can be that our priorities shift and our perspective shifts, and that can actually be a real time full of possibility.
And so The Power Pause really is a book that I needed and wanted when I made the choice to shift my career to make room for family life. And it was the height of the Lean In movement and the Girl Boss era, it was 2016. I was looking around and there was so much great content for the traditional working parent, but it seemed to leave anyone who was choosing to change their relationship to their career for a chapter back in the 1970s, with this caricature of apron strings. There was nothing speaking to us as a modern, ambitious collective.
So I started my work in the fringe hours of family life as a small project to really speak to women who were making that change, to create a new picture of what the modern at-home parent looks like. Because it is a much more dynamic archetype than the phrase “stay-at-home mother” denotes or that old archetype denotes.
The work is really an expression of that. It’s a guide for women to make the choice to pause or downshift with a little bit more confidence, a little bit more financial dignity, set up the day-to-day with a real sense that you get to grow along this stage of life too. And you get to set up day-to-day routines where you thrive and get the support you need to thrive. And then really be able to unlock the possibility in your network and in your creative exploration so that you can ultimately return to work on the other side.
Janet Lansbury: Yes, this idea that this is a lesser role that people are choosing, instead of actually a very, very powerful role that can be so life-changing in a positive way that opens up new things.
I’m the perfect example of that, actually. I don’t really want to talk too much about me or my own personal experience, but I was an actress for a long time, but I always wanted to be a mom. I didn’t have any idea how hard it was going to be for me. And that’s the whole journey that I went on, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing as a mother with my baby and how I found the approach that I now teach. But at the time, I just knew that I wanted to do that, but still a big part of my identity was that I was an actress and had been a model. And however sporadic the work was—which it definitely was for me, as for a lot of people in that business—that was what I did. That was me. So I still even did a little work with my first child.
By the time I had the second one, though, and by then I’d already learned this incredible approach and I was so into it and studied with this mentor, Magda Gerber, and was very passionate about this, never thinking of it as a job or career per se, but it made it easier for me to let go of being an actress. Plus, that was never a career that felt like me. I never felt settled in it in any way, it didn’t feel like what I was born to do or anything like that. So I was able to, finally, with my second child say, Okay, that’s it. I’m letting go of this.
But it was hard, it was painful. It almost seems silly to me now how painful it was, but it makes sense. I had put 15 years into that almost, and just, So who am I now? And I remember I would be watching the Academy Awards or something and I’d be thinking, oh gosh, I should be feeling kind of envious of these people. And then I’d realize, oh no, I’m not in that business anymore. I don’t have to feel envious. In that sense it was good, I guess.
At that time, I feel like if I didn’t have something that was so captivating to me, this way of seeing children, I don’t know if I could have let go so easily. But I was able to shift into that. And I was blessed that my husband had a job and I could stay home. That sort of elevated the whole experience for me. But I think otherwise it’s tough to feel like what you’re doing is really powerful and important when you’re staying at home.
Neha Ruch: And enough. I think so many parents are similar to you and me. I was with a group of women in Philadelphia, and I heard from a woman who was at Google currently, and she said, “You know, what I’m really interested in doing is not just being at home with my toddler, but wondering how I might rediscover hobbies. What else might light me up?” And then there was this other woman who introduced herself as a retired lawyer, she was probably sort of in her mid-thirties. And she said, “I’ve always loved reading and I’m rediscovering reading through my children and I’m actually interning at a bookseller.”
So there’s these fascinating stories, more and more, of modern women who have developed 10 years-plus in a career, because women are having children much older than generations prior. And so they do have an identity that they’ve derived from the work that they do, the paid work they do, and it can feel really hard to let go of that. Especially when that is attached to your sense of ambition and your sense of feminism, your sense of independence. I think that’s the tricky part.
And then when people are able to move past that, which is a lot of the work that I lay out in the first part of the book, and step into it, then they start saying, Okay, I wonder if I’ve already parted with the ego of my paid work and I’m stepping into a chapter of caregiving—which most people undervalue—I wonder what else I could make room to explore. And I think that’s what the really interesting part is. For you, that was really diving into childhood education and psychology. And I think that raising kids, even if you were doing nothing else, unlocks that sort of creativity and exploration and understanding. And then oftentimes, just by nature of meeting new people in baby groups and play spaces and letting your mind wander in new ways, you may discover new and other interesting things. It just starts with that giving yourself permission to stay open to grow alongside your kids.
Janet Lansbury: I love that, you really captured it beautifully there. Our children, they inspire us to revisit the child in ourselves and, like you said, this exploration, this play, this, Okay, what do I actually like to do? What am I into? It does give us a little bit of freedom to do that. And certainly the inspiration taken from our children in the way that they learn and they explore themselves and they create their own worlds and do all these things in such a healthy way, and it’s so therapeutic as well. So we have these possibilities.
And that’s what I love about your book too, is you give all this support and you give so much hope and just positive light on how we can perceive this hard, hard, hard, hard, hard time in our life. There’s no getting around how hard it is. I had an interesting experience when I wanted to have another baby—and I waited four years, which I tried to do kind of purposely, and it ended up working out that way. My first daughter was quite intense and, I don’t know, I was scared about introducing another child in there. As parents that listen to me know, I talk a lot about those sibling transitions and how hard they can be. I remember saying to my husband, “I’d like to have another child.” And he said, “But that was so hard for you.” And I realized, yes, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it again. I think that’s true, when you find your calling or when you find something that’s really a fit for you, that you’re willing to do the hard work.
Neha Ruch: And you get fulfillment. Not just fulfillment, but you get engagement and interest in it. I remember one of the challenges in transitioning to stay-at-home parenthood or a career shift for family life of any sort, I remember I initially downshifted my career to part-time work, and even still, I started hearing some of the stigmas that haunt stay-at-home mothers, right? I’d get, “Well, aren’t you going to be bored all day?” And I remember just wanting to shake these people, being like, Oh my gosh, let me tell you what’s boring. It’s sitting in the back-to-back meetings during my days at work. The average person is bored 10-and-a-half hours a week in the corporate setting.
Parenthood of course has its boring moments, but I think oftentimes we minimize parenting to the diapers and the laundry. And the reality is there’s just so much intellectual and emotional labor that goes into it, and I think we write that off in our culture. If we do a better job of shining a light on that work of really looking at your child and looking at your family and figuring out, Okay, what are the rhythms that work for us, the intention around what parts of our days can we sort of let go of? Who are the social connections we want to nurture because they feed our sense of community? If we look at it that way, it has so much more interest and it’s so much more interesting than we give it credit for.
But I also think at a macro level, if we could dignify it with that realization that it’s so much bigger and so much more dynamic than the rote moments that we’ve distilled it down to in all the memes, I think we would give parents a lot more credit for these chapters in parenthood. And it would explain why someone like you would want another child in the mix. I did not have that same experience, but I love that for you. Two was it for me.
Janet Lansbury: Oh, well, so you had the second one. I’m only talking about the second one, then I wanted to have another one. I always thought I wanted three and I got three, so I feel totally blessed about that.
Yes, all those things you were just saying though, that is exactly what your book gives and why I think, well, everything you have to offer is so special. Like you say, it’s a rebranding of a career pause. It’s not a career “I’m leaving and I’m just going to be at home the rest of my life as a parent.” It’s a pause, as you say, with dignity, growth, and potential. That’s how it should be. And I love that you’re rebranding it for parents so that they can embrace the opportunity if they have it and not feel in any way like this is a lesser role in society or life. It’s a fantastic role.
You talk a lot too about how, unfortunately, childcare is so expensive. It is hard to be a working-outside-the-home parent and afford childcare. That is also challenging.
Neha Ruch: I think part of why I bring that up is because so often in this culture and some of the many tropes we’ve developed around the stay-at-home mother, right? One is that it’s luxurious. And I think when we associate one side with luxury, we deem it not worthy of support. And the reality, what we know, is that actually 60% of mothers choosing to pause their paid work is actually a financial consideration for the house. 87% would still say it’s a very valid want to have time with their kids, and many say it’s just for less stress in the house. But one in three women feel, and I don’t love this word, but feel forced, like it’s not a choice, that they had to because of the cost of childcare.
I bring it up not because working parenthood then is the real luxury. It’s to say that all are hard, neither are a luxury, all deserve support. But really, the privilege is to get to choose. Once we get there, then we can say, well, it’s all work and it all deserves support.
The reason I think the finances are so important is because in a two-parent household, if one parent is pausing their paid work, I want that parent to step into this chapter with financial dignity. To be able to have the conversations with their partner so that they know that everyone’s on the same page, that the partner working out of the home is equally dependent on the person doing a lot more of the care work in the home. They’re an equally dependent household. And the reason why that’s so important is because that way, as you sort of move through the arc of this chapter in your life, you’re both able to budget for what you need within the joint household income that is equally shared, to support yourself being healthy and full. Because what we never want to see is someone make the choice to part with their paid work or have to choose to part with their paid work and then feel disempowered in their family dynamic. And so that real understanding that this work has value to the whole home.
And then that when and if they choose to bring on help, that no one should work 24/7 without breaks, including at-home parents. I think the saddest thing I’ve seen from research, and I wonder what you think about this, but first of all, there’s a lot of guilt that surrounds bringing on help in this country. And then you add to that, if someone is not working out of the home for pay, we see one in three stay-at-home mothers in this country have never used any help, including family assistance. And that’s just so sad. It’s just so disheartening because you realize that’s because they’ve absorbed, and I was guilty of this too, sort of absorbing this belief that if you don’t do paid work, you don’t deserve help. And the reality is that everyone deserves to be healthy and whole, and our kids are best served with healthy and whole parents. And so there are an increasing pool of creative childcare solutions, but the baseline starts there: that the work has value, that you’re contributing to the joint household, and that the household benefits from two healthy and whole parents.
Janet Lansbury: Also what you’re saying about getting some kind of help, and I love how you frame all these different ways that could look and actually how it could be even not as costly as it could be. You suggest all these different tasks like laundry, tidying, deep cleaning, transportation, meal prep, cooking, groceries, family administration, paperwork, scheduling, home organization, morning childcare, afterschool childcare, evening childcare, party or holiday planning, miscellaneous errands. And then you also suggest all these different possibilities of resources for those things. A partner, a retired caregiver or teacher, a TaskRabbit. Is that a site, TaskRabbit?
Neha Ruch: Yes.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I haven’t used that one. Instacart or grocery service. It’s amazing how we don’t take advantage of that. And we used to have a place that would do free delivery. It was a godsend for me with my second and third child when I was home and just didn’t have to go to the grocery store. And I didn’t like someone picking out my produce, but too bad. It was definitely worth that exchange to have that, and it was free.
Neha Ruch: Well, I love that because it was also very specifically in that transition, right? Because so often we can also reevaluate all of these things in different seasons. I remember the one time I had a mother’s helper, and it was for just under a year, maybe 10 months. And it was that transition to two kids that really brought me to my knees, hence why I never had another one. And I think we get these black and white ideas of help, which is full-time nanny or daycare or nothing. And there are so many creative solutions in between, and there’s so much that goes into family administration and household help. Depending on what lights you up and what doesn’t, you can let go of the things or delegate the things that don’t. Sometimes that feels like it takes extra work to write it all down and delegate, but the ability to come back and figure out, well, how do I get to set myself up to thrive and what can I also let go of, right?
Sadly, and I don’t know if you’d approve of this, but I let go of the expectation that my kids were going to have great home-cooked meals every single day, especially when they were younger. We leaned on frozen foods a lot for a period of time. And so it’s delegating, but it’s also letting go of pieces.
Janet Lansbury: Just weighing in: I’m all for the chicken nuggets or whatever works. I remember corn dogs, frozen corn dogs, were a thing for us, and I think they were the veggie ones, but still, taking advantage of all that.
And as you said, delegating and trying to open up to other people helping. A parent rotation, that was one of your other ideas, where one parent takes the kids for several hours. And are they going to do it your way? No, they’re not going to do it exactly your way, but that letting go and trusting your child to make secondary bonds with people, it’s a fantastic thing. It’s a gift to them. The more we can let go of perfection, the more we’re going to actually understand and see about our child and what’s going on. And when it’s all about these feelings in ourselves, what we’re trying to live up to. I know that maybe I give people that impression with my podcast, and it’s one of the things that most bothers me, that people take away that you have to be perfect and you’re always unruffled. And that’s absolutely not what I’m suggesting at all.
What you’re doing is helping parents create that village that we always hear so much about that’s missing, that community. You’re giving them ways to actually find that. With a teenager in the neighborhood; those teenagers love doing that job for very little money, most of them. It’s a gift to them and to you and to your child to make those relationships, to get to know these other people is just a win-win. And I was guilty of this in the beginning when I was learning this approach that I teach because it’s quite specific. And when you’re so excited about something, you want everybody to do it your way, maybe. But I realized soon that that was not survivable, nor was it really healthy. So anyway, when you do open up, it feels so much better. When you let go.
Neha Ruch: And I think what you just said, which is so helpful to hear as a parent, and I have some other experts weighing in in that chapter, “Get Help Without Guilt,” something similar around this idea that kids benefit from knowing that they’re safe with other capable caregivers. I am a child of immigrants, and so when we were new to the country, I was young and they didn’t yet have that village around them. And so I remember being really fearful about what would happen if something happened to my parents. And I think about that a lot, every time I feel a little wince of guilt, that what I’m giving my kids is a real sense that there are a lot of people who love them and care for them and that they’re safe in a web of loving adults.
It’s unfortunate that we need that on the permission slip too, that it benefits not just us, but the whole family. But I do think that was what ultimately helped me invest in help in all its forms. Whether it’s a play date with the grandparents on Saturday or whether it’s an afterschool at the class where the parents can come at 4:30 instead of 3. It’s helpful to know that not only is that investment beneficial to the whole household system, but it’s also beneficial to the kids.
Janet Lansbury: Yes, it builds confidence. You can imagine just feeling like, even if I didn’t like this, I didn’t want my parent to leave me with this other person or with this group of children, or this felt really uncomfortable, I made it through. Obviously we’re not going to put them in situations that are problematic, that we would worry about that. But that feeling that it was okay in the end, I feel better, I feel okay. And that experience is so empowering for children, so much more so than the bubble that we all maybe want to put our children in.
Neha Ruch: Especially in early parenting. In early parenting when you’re sort of figuring it all out, you’re figuring out the routines and rhythms that let your family work, it’s very scary to let go because you’re worried someone’s going to disrupt the sleep or disrupt the food or disrupt the discipline status. And I think a lot of that does come a little bit with experience. Knowing that that one sleepover at the grandparents’ where they stayed up until 9:00 PM or whatever that was, and ate popcorn for breakfast. Everyone survived.
Janet Lansbury: And what some people don’t realize too is that children are learning very early on, as babies, that different people do it differently. They’re learning that from, if there’s two parents, that each parent has their own different style of the way they talk to the baby, the way they pick the baby up, the way they handle. And it’s okay for children to learn that. They’re not going to be shocked that somebody else does something different. They can understand that and frame it as, this other person that does things differently. And that only opens them up, it’s only positive.
Another part of that that’s wonderful for us and our children is to be able to return to our child and have missed them a little bit. And then come back to them with that feeling of being excited to see them, instead of Ugh, another hour. How many more hours in the day until they go to bed? Which, we’ve all been there as well! But that feeling of, I’m coming back to see this person I’m in love with again, and it’s exciting. For children to receive that from us and for us to feel that, it’s a win-win.
Neha Ruch: Yeah. And so much of what that is is that wholeness, right? That sense of, I have allowed myself to invest in my whole self, which includes more than just my child. And I’m sure you’ll have something to say about this, but chapter four was my most fun to write because it was about designing goals that keep you feeling like you’re moving forward in this stage of life and separating those goals from your children’s behavior.
I remember so distinctly that when I parted with work, work in sort of the traditional sense, and no longer had promotions or salary raises to measure my forward progress, just for that first year, it became, How quickly is my son speaking? How social is he? And then that first temper tantrum and you’re like, Oh my gosh, am I a failure?
The sad thing is so many stay-at-home parents fall into that same trap, where their children’s behavior becomes their number one metric of success. And that’s a lot of pressure on your child, and it’s a lot of pressure on yourself in this stage of life. So I really encouraged myself, and now of course through this work, other women, to set their own independent goals. Personal goals. That was huge for me in this stage of life, setting really measurable goals around working on patience, which was big. Professional or creative goals. For me that was getting into writing and researching this work. And so for a while that was one blog post a week or three blog posts a week. And family goals. To feel like we’re a team and we can set intention to what we care about, whether that’s building community or building rituals. Figuring out what that is that can make you feel whole outside of your kids. Then whenever you have an hour to yourself, you can feel like you’re dignifying that time by moving yourself forward. And then I think it’s not just that you’re coming back to your kids with a sense of I miss them, but coming back with also a sense of I feel fulfilled and I feel like I’m growing in the right direction.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah, that’s so important to have that. And yeah, I love the way that you explain that and make a roadmap for parents to be able to find that for themselves. It’s really, really important because everything’s top down. It all comes from how we’re feeling. That sets the tone for how our children are going to feel. That’s not a guilt trip or anything, but it’s just more encouragement to be self-accepting, to be interested in self-exploration. I mean, it’s easy for me to say now because I’m out of those young years with my children. They’re all adults now. It is a limited time, not that you have to make the best of every moment and all that stuff. I don’t agree with that. There’s so many great moments to come. I’m having fantastic moments now, probably better than ever. But it doesn’t last like this, where it’s this hard. You will come out from under this, if you feel like you’re under it now, and you’ll come out of it stronger, with a lot more self-knowledge.
I’m a really good model of how late you can start a career in life, too. So I was into this, but just as a parent. And then I trained to become a teacher in it, and I started teaching once a week when my kids were little, teaching parent-infant classes and parent-toddler classes. So that was just once a week. And then it wasn’t until I was in my late forties that I started to share about this online in a way that it eventually has become a career. Where I’m now working more than I ever have in my life, than I ever would’ve dreamed of working! It’s all passion, so it doesn’t necessarily feel like work, but it’s a lot. And I’m pushing retirement age.
I love that I’ve been able to show my kids this, and I always remind them too, Look, you don’t have to figure it out now. There’s no rush. You don’t have to hold onto something that you think you’re going to lose if you let go of it. There’s so many new doors opening up for you, you don’t even know. And it’s just a journey. Nobody’s putting a time limit on you, except for you.
Neha Ruch: I love that you just said that, because that is basically so much of the last section of the book, if not the whole book. It is this idea that, just as you described, really discovering your passion for it, first of all, through parenting. And then planting seeds for it in the time you had available by teaching one class and then building up that portfolio work to a place that you could start sharing about it. And now pushing “retirement age,” the reality is retirement’s getting later, life is getting longer, and it is just all in all a longer game.
So much of this book and this work is to shine examples, like yours, that through parenthood you discover a lot about yourself. If you’re lucky, you’re able to approach it with intention so you can let yourself enjoy it and feel more supported in it, but ultimately it can actually reveal a lot more about your interests. And you might not have the nine-to-five availability right away, but you can start to plant seeds. Whether that’s a class once a week, whether that’s a blog post once a week, whether that’s volunteering in your kids’ school in an area that you’re interested in. Whatever it may be that feels like it’s something you’re doing just to move that goal forward or that interest forward.
And then it is a long game. I think about that ahead of releasing this book. People are like, “Oh, how long did it take?” And I keep wanting to tell them, well, it took nine years. Because I had to live it, then I get to plant the seeds for it during naps and nighttimes, and then it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I really started to build it up the way you see. But I love that you shared that story, Janet. I actually didn’t know that full story. So I love that you get to be sort of a living example of this work.
Janet Lansbury: Thank you. And what you’re doing is you’re helping parents make this intentional. Did you know you were planting seeds? I had no idea I was ever planting seeds or had sprouts or anything. I was just going with what was inside me, that just felt like what I wanted to do. But I think being even more intentional about it is all to the good, it’s really going to help even more. But yeah, mine felt totally accidental. But it was about opening myself up to myself, basically, and letting my children open me up to myself, which children are so good at doing. They’re so good at teaching us so many things about being in the moment, about what matters, about not being afraid to be ourselves. So with all their rough behaviors and all the downsides of it, they do teach us a lot. I’m a big fan of children, as you can tell.
Neha Ruch: And so am I. And I think that motherhood gets bad PR. That’s a lot of the work that you do and I do. I think this is what you’ve done, you sort of started this wave of really being able to show how parents can really grow in parenthood. How the real work of parenthood is also raising ourselves and relearning the way in which we are wired and we communicate. Just in the day-to-day, minute-to-minute of caregiving, there’s so many lessons to be had. Parenting is such the ultimate leadership training. But I think it just gives you this heightened sense of perspective that I can say now, as I return to more work on this, as my kids have aged into school and I feel ready and the culture feels ready. I think it ended up being this superpower of perspective of what’s important and what’s not, which, especially in this day and age when everything feels so important, it’s a real gift.
Janet Lansbury: Absolutely. And thank you for all these guidelines that you share with parents, all these resources, your panel of experts that you offer on your website too. There’s therapists, there’s business coaches, there’s financial coaches. It’s really incredible, this group that you’ve put together, all with your goal to help parents navigate what’s been, as you say, a gray area. Although I have to say, you make it much less gray and much less daunting, and a lot warmer and fuller with community and support. So thank you again for all of this work that you’re doing.
Neha Ruch: That means so much coming from you. Thank you, Janet.
Janet Lansbury: Your book’s coming out in a couple of weeks, right?
Neha Ruch: Yeah, January 14th.
Janet Lansbury: Thank you so much again.
Neha Ruch: Oh, I loved being with you, Janet. Thank you so much.
Janet Lansbury: And best of luck with your launch of your book.
Neha Ruch: I really appreciate it.
