Cribsheet guest blogger and Strib business reporter H.J. Cummins finds that much has changed since she was a working mother in the 1970s….and much hasn’t…. 

Back in the early 1970s the first generation of women marched in big numbers into the workforce, often leaving children at home. Now some of them are doing an about-face and marching out again, following the siren call of grandchildren.

I know these women. I marched into work with them, and I’m becoming a grandmother with them: My grandson, Ben Stanton, is just turning 2.

Now I’m watching friends and colleagues adjust their work schedules to spend time with grandchildren in a way they never did for their children — back when we were hustling to build our careers. They feel freer to ask for flexible schedules, or work part time or even retire early.

I have done none of the above. But Ben lives in suburban Washington, D.C., and I believe the shareholders at Northwest Airlines owe me a big thank you for all my flights between Minneapolis and Dulles Airport.

“I’ve been talking with a lot of grandmothers, and one thing absolutely everyone says is, ‘This is a hugely important relationship to me and I’m not going to miss it,’” said Judith Keyes, a California attorney and grandmother I met.

Keyes finds herself willing to re-arrange business appointments around her granddaughter’s schedule in a way she way she never did her daughter’s — at least partly because she feels she dares to now. And she has heard enough colleagues say the same that she raised this as a new work-life issue for law firms, at the American Bar Association’s annual conference in San Francisco last month.

Then there’s the family therapist in California I met who, with her husband, cares for their grandson two days a week to help their daughter and son-in-law. She’s disappointed that American workplaces overall are no more accommodating of parents than they were in her early career days.

“Our choice isn’t just economic or emotional, it’s political,” said Ellen Pulleyblank Coffey, who also blogs about “feminist grannies.”

And there’s also the Star Tribune. This summer, three veteran reporters — including one grandfather, by the way — who happily took company-offered buyouts at least partly with their grandchildren in mind.

Kay Miller didn’t even consider a buyout in a first round offered in early March. Then Miller became a grandmother on March 13, when Maddie Pierce was born to her daughter and son-in-law, Kelly and Ben Pierce. When the second buyout offer came around in June, Miller, a writer in the Source section, was one of the first to sign up.
She said Maddie was about 50 percent of her decision.

“And I wasn’t thinking so much about the baby, but my daughter and what she’d need,” Miller said. “Then Maddie was born, and you do just fall in love.”

Now she cares for Maddie two days a week, while her parents work. But more than that, she wants to be the available backup she didn’t have as a young mother — because her family was scattered elsewhere when she came to work at the Minneapolis Star in 1978. Kelly was a year old.

Miller feels lucky to be able to take this step, at age 57.

“The work was exciting, it was fantastic,” she said, “but it would have been nice in a pinch to be able to call my mom and say, ‘Could you go get the baby?’”

Kelly Pierce doesn’t hear a mixed message in her ambitious mother’s decision to exit work early.

“It made my mother a happy person to work,” Pierce said. “I think the message now is that you have a sort of life cycle, that you have different parts of your life, and in different moments it’s OK to make different choices.”

Reporter Chuck Haga is evidence that grandchildren are guiding men’s career decisions, too. Haga, who was at the paper for 20 years, took the June buyout and moved to Grand Forks, N.D., where his two grandchildren, Mason, 9, and Morgan, 6, live.

“I like the idea of having breakfast with the kids and it’s no big deal, that it’s not a special occasion when grandpa is there, but rather it’s a normal thing,” he said.

At 58, Haga will keep working, already hired by the Grand Forks Herald. But now he’s in town, so he can be in Mason and Morgan’s memories the way his grandmother is in his.

“I like the idea of being part of a three-generation family again; I think that’s a common desire among people my age,” Haga said.

 H.J. Cummins with grandson, Ben Stanton.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.