AMBITIOUS LIKE A MOTHER

Drawing on interviews, research, and lessons from her own life and family, Lara Bazelon radically reframes the debate about "work life balance" - arguing that prioritizing your career benefits women, kids, and society at large.

Bazelon's work as a lawyer and social justice advocate has made her a highly visible figure in both fields, as has her writing on motherhood and parenting. Her New York Times op-ed "I've picked My Job Over My Kids" went viral and kickstarted a debate about work-life balance for modern mothers. AMBITIOUS LIKE A MOTHER, filled with Bazelon's incisive analysis and refusal to pull punches, continues that discussion in greater depth.

In this singular cultural moment, women have unparalleled opportunities while continuing to face the same impediments to success that confronted our mothers and grandmothers. We encounter entrenched gender bias in the workplace. We live in a political climate where targeted legal assaults on our reproductive rights are the norm. At home, we face additional stresses and burdens, expected to shoulder the lion's share of this labor while being made to feel as if we're never doing enough.

Women are trained to metabolize it all, striving continually for the promised land of a "work-life" balance. In this fantasy of perfect equipoise, women transition seamlessly from professional outfits to yoga pants, from ladder-climbing to soccer-watching, relentlessly pleasant and harassment-free, all five senses perfectly attended to the words, needs, and desires of our children.

It's time for a very different conversation. Work and life are inextricably, intimately intertwined. What if, instead of apologizing or trying to cabin off our work, we teach our children about the benefit and fulfillment it brings us? What if we share lessons about self-sufficiency, independence, and self-worth? We can show our children that when we use our talents to help others or raise awareness about the issues closest to our hearts, we are modeling how to be decent, caring, empathic human beings.

Lara Bazleon is a writer, teacher, and advocate for racial and social justice. She is law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she directs the Criminal & Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics and holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy. Before that, she worked as a deputy federal public defender and the director of a Los Angeles-based innocence project. Along the way, she married, had two children, got divorced, and worked to create a different kind of family. Bazelon's writing seeks to break down the barriers between the various fields in which she works and invites her readers to open their minds to unexpected - even unlikely - ways of thinking about problems that may not be so intractable after all.