The fifth trimester : the working mom's guide to style, sanity, and big success after baby / Lauren Smith Brody.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Fifth Trimester is your new best friend: a brilliant, tells-it-like-it-is guide that helps moms cope with the demands of the real world after the baby arrives

The first three trimesters (and the fourth--those blurry newborn days) are for the baby, but the Fifth Trimester is when the working mom is born. No matter what the job or how you define work, you're going to have a lot of questions. When will I go back? How should I manage that initial "I want to quit" attack? Flex-time or full-time? How can I achieve 50/50 at home with my partner? What's the best option for childcare? Is it possible to look like I slept for eight hours instead of three? And . . . why is there never a convenient space to pump?
Whether you're in the final stages of pregnancy or hitting the panic button on your last day of leave, The Fifth Trimeste r is your one-stop shop for the honest, funny, and comforting tips, to-do lists, and take-charge strategies you'll need to embrace your new identity as a working parent and set yourself up for success.
Based on interviews with 700+ candidly speaking moms in wildly varied fields and incredible expert advice, The Fifth Trimester tackles every personal and professional detail with the wit, warmth, and inspiration you need to win when you head back to work.
Like What to Expect When You're Expecting and The Happiest Baby on the Block , this is an indispensable guide every new mom needs on her shelf.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Introduction   As soon as I heard my husband's shower running, I changed my mind.   I'd been up since 4:30 a.m., hanging out on the couch, having a much calmer early labor than I'd imagined. My water hadn't broken, and the pain wasn't anything I couldn't handle. I'd felt just not-right enough to get out of bed, proud of myself for resisting the urge to nudge my sleeping spouse awake. Ben, who was finishing up his first year of medical residency at a big hospital nearby, worked hard. We both did. And I wasn't about to pull the rookie move of waking him up just to watch me have one manageable contraction every twenty minutes. If these things even were contractions. Surely I'd have at least one round of false labor, I thought.   By the time Ben's alarm went off at 6:15, I was pacing the floor, as much as one could pace in our little apartment.   "Definitely shower and go to work," I told him breezily, as he gave me a hug and wrinkled his forehead, looking one part skeptical, two parts impressed. "I'm fine. It's going to be so many hours." I figured--if this was even real--I'd call him when things got interesting. I'd grab a cab, and he'd leave his department and meet me a couple of floors down at Labor and Delivery. Simple. Low-maintenance mother-to-be. That's me. Plus, it was a Monday. I'd finished up my last day of work on Friday, spent the weekend getting organized like a maniac (nesting . . . right . . . that must have been nesting), and wanted at least half a day to sit around and do nothing for the first time since college. Maybe I'd go to a movie or watch all the junk TV I'd never had time for. I didn't even know which channels were the junky ones.   My cervix had other plans. Over the course of Ben's four-minute shower, I had two contractions. And as I leaned over the desk chair in the living room swaying my hips--in a way I'd never been comfortable doing on a dance floor--I changed my mind. We were having a baby. Today. Now.   On our way out the door, Ben grabbed the bag I'd so lovingly packed a full two months earlier: a blanket, a first little "going-home" outfit, our good camera, nursing bras, maternity yoga pants. We looked at each other, wide awake and thrilled. Here we go.   "Oh my God, wait!" I said as we buzzed for the elevator. "I forgot my folder!"   "Your folder?" he asked. "Why do you need a folder?"   I ran back in toward the bedroom, stopping to have another contraction leaning over that same chair--sway, sway, sway, done-- and grabbed a yellow folder that held everything I would not want to be doing during my time in the hospital: insurance paperwork; maternity leave disability information from my employer, a big media company; and, yes, some actual work that I took with me from the office before tearfully hugging my boss at Glamour magazine goodbye on Friday. I'd do it in labor, I thought. Ha! There was a famous story inside my industry about a particularly She-Ra-like editor-in-chief who'd faxed back edited copy to the office minutes before pushing out her fifth child. My own boss's boss had taken a quick two-week leave with her first child, and was photographed and interviewed by The New York Times (dressed in Miu Miu, in her beautiful Soho loft) just days after having her second baby. This was what women did, I thought. They balanced!   You know how the rest of this story goes. I did not do any actual work at the hospital.   What I did do was: have a pain freak-out, then an immediate epidural (I'd arrived at four centimeters dilated--still proud of that). From the hospital bed, I did a little bit of texting, a lot of moaning, and made a couple of elated high-on-the-epidural phone calls to friends and family--not the office--and then, finally, I gave birth. Easily, thankfully, with my awesome husband cheering for me harder than he's ever even cheered for his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers. Our son was born. And with eyes nearly swollen shut and a face full of baby acne, he was the most gorgeous thing I'd ever seen. That work folder? It sat.   I brought the folder home from the hospital, and it sat some more. On a table right next to the bassinet, actually (like I said, small apartment). Eventually, it was covered up by piles of baby detritus: gifts, half-written thank-you notes, an unused Boppy. Still, it haunted me a bit every day. I knew it was there, a little time bomb, just ticking off the minutes until my twelve-week maternity leave would be over. Worried about money, I filled out the disability paperwork, then shoved everything else right back under that pile.   Our baby, Will, was six pounds of wonderful, but over those three months, I had what is kindly referred to as "a hard time." He wouldn't nurse well or soothe easily. He seemed so tiny; that "going-home" outfit I'd packed for him was miles too big. My body was torn up from top to bottom for weeks. I worried and had crazy, frightening thoughts. Young for parenthood--by NYC standards, anyway--I had no close friends who'd been through this yet. It took all I had just to stroll the carriage one block to the drugstore for diapers. A perfectly capable person, I'd made it through college, moved to New York City, broken into publishing, and was on leave from an executive-level position at one of the biggest magazines in the world. In my real life, my work life, I led an award-winning team of editors. I negotiated with celebrities (or, rather, with their "people," which is harder). I won awards and got promoted and edited stories urging the women of America to live full lives and demand what they deserved at work, and to do it all in fabulous shoes, damn it.   And now, suddenly, simply crossing the street with my newborn baby gave me heart palpitations.   After a few days, Ben went back to work, and his life resumed some semblance of normalcy, except for the crazy wife who now greeted him desperately at the door when he arrived home. Used to be, I was the one who worked late.   I told everyone that Will was an easy baby, assuming the problem in this equation was me. When he was fussy I relied, appreciatively, on the bible of baby soothing, Dr. Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block. Dr. Karp advised swaddling, shushing, swinging, and a whole bunch of other S verbs meant to replicate the feeling of being in the womb. The first three months of a fullterm baby's life, he explained, were actually premature. Because of the size of our brains and heads, human babies are born three months early and essentially have a "fourth trimester" outside of the womb. By around week twelve, the good doctor reassured me, my baby would start to wake up to the world. He'd laugh, hold his own head up, and look me in the eye and connect. He would be slightly less fragile and fussy, and maybe even start to sleep six hours in a row and nap at the same times every day. I just had to soldier on to week twelve.   Week twelve? The irony slapped me hard. That was exactly when I'd be going back to work.   ***   And thus, the idea for this book was born right alongside my son. Sure enough, Dr. Karp was right. By about week eleven, the hormone clouds started to part over my head. I had loved my child from the beginning, but now he was giving something back. I experienced pure baby joy for the first time. And also, suddenly, work dread. I'd never disliked work, always loved the ladder climb and even the late nights. I adored the people I worked with: mostly women, a handful of cool, creative men. All so smart and funny. Incandescent personalities. These were people who preached the gospel of feminism and also gathered round the conference room TV together to watch the world debut of J. Lo's twins.   But the thought of leaving my baby--who now, newsflash, loved me back--killed me. How could I trust this nanny I'd just hired? How could I possibly pump enough milk to feed my child? How would I not make an idiot of myself on the job running on only four hours of sleep a night? This going-back-to-work thing was going to be hard. Maybe even harder than what I'd just gotten through.   And if I--a person with a stellar partner, a decent-paying job, a fair boss, and a supportive work environment--felt this ambivalent about looming working motherhood, surely millions of other women did, too.   What I needed was what's in this book.   (What I really needed, let's be honest, was three more months at home with my baby. But that wasn't an option because as the primary breadwinner back then, I also needed an income, and a career that didn't move on without me.)   So instead: I needed camaraderie. I needed new ideas and solutions. I needed the actual words to have the conversations that were going to make this transitional period surmountable.   I needed to know that it really was just a transitional period, simply a Fifth Trimester.   ***   As predicted, reentry was rough at first. I hardly recognized myself. I sat in the same office as before, with that same yellow folder of work poking out of the pocket of my breast-pump bag on my commute, but I was a changed person with new priorities, and a new identity. I saw myself differently now that I was a mother. I could tell that my colleagues saw me differently, too. I'd never, ever, ever been the kind of worker to "just get by," and now that's what I felt like on a good day. At the office, I mostly kept it together. But at home, I picked fights with my husband over little things that were really about one big thing: He didn't feel as completely at the end of his rope as I did 24/7. I resented friends who made us all reservations for 9:00 p.m. dinners. On the phone, I worried my poor mother endlessly and only took her good advice after rejecting it, tearfully, first.   Thank God, it was all temporary. Just like my baby, this working mom had been simply thrown in over her head about three months too early. Maybe you've seen the pie charts friends post on Facebook about the United States' maternity leave policies compared with the other nations in the world. It's abysmal. In Croatia, women get more than thirteen months of paid leave. In the U.K., it's fifty weeks, also largely paid, that you split up with your spouse. In France, workers are paid for at least sixteen weeks at 100 percent of their salaries. Even Japan--a country that employs people with sticks to smush commuters onto the crowded subways so they get to work on time--grants mothers fourteen weeks at 60 percent pay.   Here in the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to hold a job for you for twelve weeks (if you've been there longer than a year, and work full-time, and your company employs more than fifty people)--unpaid. Zero dollars. The only countries with lousier stats than America are Papua New Guinea and Suriname. (Oman, which used to be on this naughty list, recently got with the program.)   The reality is that stronger parental leave policies do not negatively impact the economy at all. Of the seventeen countries in the world with the highest consistent economic performance, the United States is the only one that doesn't guarantee paid leave for new mothers. And the United States and Switzerland are the only ones of the bunch that don't also have guaranteed paid paternity leave.   Why? Why do American parents get so little when 182 other countries around the world prioritize paid leave? We're a young country, and we were founded on the American Dream: Work hard and move up fast so one generation laps the next. Don't look back, don't press pause. It's not that different from how I felt working in magazines in my twenties. I worked insane hours, often until 2:00 a.m. at one start-up. As a twenty-two-year-old editorial assistant in 2001, my annual salary was $30,000, but I took home nearly double that thanks to overtime. It was an investment in my future, I thought, and I got a lot of experience very quickly and moved up and out to bigger jobs at bigger magazines. I didn't realize back then that things actually would get less flexible as I advanced in my career.   The problem with U.S. maternity leave policies has become front-page news and talk show fodder as the situation gets more and more obviously wrong. More than half of mothers of infants under one year old are currently in the U.S. workforce. And as HBO's John Oliver so perfectly put it in his 2015 Mother's Day episode of Last Week Tonight , there's "nothing we wouldn't do for moms, apart from [this] one major thing." In late 2013, and again in 2015, the Family Act, a bill led by New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, proposed twelve weeks off at two-thirds pay, financed by a minuscule 0.2 percent salary contribution to Social Security by all workers (to give you an idea, that would have been $60.00 of my editorial-assistant base salary annually). Sounds sensible, but it hasn't passed yet. Representative Carolyn Maloney from New York has been proposing some form of a similar bill on the federal stage, regularly, doggedly, since 2000. And in the 2016 primaries, the issue burned bright. Bernie Sanders cosponsored the Family Act, Hillary Clinton called for paid leave and affordable childcare as key components of her campaign, and Marco Rubio proposed tax credits for companies that offer paid leave. The plans were debated, but the general consensus on both sides of the aisle was that something must be done . . . or, at least, as Donald Trump put it, "Certainly there are a lot of people discussing it." But no dice, yet.   Meanwhile, that leaves the private companies out there to decide to do better than required for new moms; perhaps you work at one of them like I did. Even still, only 11 percent of American workers in the private sector are eligible for paid family leave.   A few companies, blessedly, bravely, are sticking their necks out extra far to redefine the norm by offering much more. The tech and big finance industries in particular--booming, competitive, healthy companies fighting to woo and keep the best and the brightest workers--have made enormous strides recently. And guess who runs those companies? Parents. Sons and daughters. People who get the importance of supporting the next generation of workers and thinkers--and the mothers who turned their bodies inside out to give them life. When Richard Branson announced in June 2015 that Virgin Management, a division of his Virgin empire, would extend the new shared parental leave, nearly every news outlet showed pictures of him with his own three grandbabies, all born within the previous year. "As a father and now a grandfather," Branson blogged, "I know how magical the first year of a child's life is, but also how much work it takes." Hopefully soon that magic will be offered to the tens of thousands of Virgin employees who aren't top executives, too.   In March 2015, Vodafone, a massive telecom conglomerate in thirty countries, changed its policy globally to grant a minimum of sixteen weeks paid maternity leave to women who would then return to thirty-hour workweeks (at 100 percent pay) for the first six months they're back. This isn't just goodwill. Vodafone commissioned a report from auditing firm KPMG that showed that the money saved by retaining talent--by not losing good workers and having to search for and train new ones--would far outpace the cost of this new benefit. Globally, the report claims, businesses could actually save $19 billion per year by offering sixteen weeks of paid leave.   And for those economists who argue that these kinds of "accommodations" ultimately harm women's earning power and seniority--because businesses will be less likely to burden their budgets by hiring women--I offer up these two rebuttals:   1) Paid paternity leave. For every month of parental leave a father takes, a mother's future earnings increase by almost 7 percent. And . . .   2) the sunny state of California, which began offering paid family leave in 2004. By 2010, 91 percent of businesses said that paid leave had a positive effect on profitability or no effect at all. And get this: Between 2007 and 2015 the percentage of women in director and highest-paid executive positions for companies based in California increased by 40 percent. To be clear, the percentage of women in those highest-level positions is still crap, at just over 12 percent (just under the national average), but the graph is headed northward, and fast. (It's also worth noting here that longer maternity leave has been shown to increase job satisfaction.) Excerpted from The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby by Lauren Smith Brody All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Veteran women's magazine editor Brody writes nimbly and wisely about a subject she is well versed in: the conflicts, struggles, and triumphs of returning to work after having a baby. Brody was an editor at Glamour when the first of her two children was born, and, like many working mothers in the U.S., she returned to her office at the end of her 12-week leave, just when "baby wakes up to the world." The timing, argues Brody, is unfortunate, but working women must nevertheless find ways to cope with the transitional period that she calls the fifth trimester. In 12 solution-packed chapters, Brody covers (among many other topics) childcare, sleep deprivation, wardrobe, breast-pumping, and dad's involvement, basing her advice not only on her own experiences but on input from more than 700 survey respondents. In addition to discussing solemn subjects such as postpartum depression, Brody makes her readers laugh with commentary on subjects such as preparing for the inevitability that "your baby will puke on you." The meatiest chapter is the last, in which Brody provides tips for communicating with employers. Working moms will find a wealth of ideas to help navigate the challenging transition period in this friendly and practical guide. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The fourth trimester is often used to refer to the 12 weeks after a baby is born, and Brody, former executive editor of Glamour magazine and mother of two, brings us the fifth trimester the period when American working moms often return to the workplace. It can be a hectic and difficult period of adjustment physically, mentally, and emotionally, and Brody's goal is to help women navigate the return to work with confidence. Each chapter covers a different aspect of working motherhood, including choosing child care, pumping, finding time for yourself, and coping with workplace stress exacerbated by a lack of sleep. A final chapter provides scripts and suggestions for essential conversations working moms may want to have with their bosses or their partners, including suggestions for requesting flextime, discussing postpartum mood disorders, and tactfully asking well-meaning relatives to stop offering unwanted advice. Stories from a variety of working moms are interspersed throughout the book, providing added perspective and insight as well as a view of working motherhood outside of a major metropolitan area. Millennial moms are the target audience of this practical guide; Brody takes on the role of a wise mentor who's just a bit more chic than most of us but who takes us under her wing nonetheless.--Donohue, Nanette Copyright 2017 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

How professional women can "make those first three months back more than just an exercise in treading water."After the birth of her first child, former Glamour executive editor Brody took 12 weeks of maternity leave. At the end of that time, however, she quickly discovered she was unprepared for the physical and emotional toll that came with her return to work. After her second child, she was a bit more prepared but still wished there was a helpful guide to aid her during the transition. Seeking to help other soon-to-be and new mothers, the author interviewed more than 700 women via a 50-question survey and compiled the results and her own experiences into this book. Brody discusses the pros and cons of hiring a nanny versus sending your infant to day care and points out to parents what to look for in both situations. She discusses the practical and emotional ups and downs of having to pump breast milk at work and offers useful suggestions on the type of clothing to wear, how to store the milk, and how to continue to work efficiently while pumping. She analyzes the emotional distancing necessary to return to work after such a short span of getting to know your new child, how to avoid resenting your male partner for his seemingly easier role in the process, and how to juggle the workday and an infant if you work at home. Throughout, Brody's advice is sound and easily assimilated, like having a well-trusted friend impart bits of wisdom before a meltdown occurs. She also instructs readers how to look presentable at work even when exhausted and still carrying extra pounds and how to carve out some much-needed alone time to recuperate and relieve stress. A candid, straightforward, and helpful guide for mothers returning to work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Lauren Smith Brody is the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement, which helps businesses and new parents work together to create a more family-friendly workplace culture. A longtime leader in the women's magazine industry, Lauren was most recently the executive editor of Glamour magazine. Raised in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.