Pumping Milk By A Rhinestone Top Hat

Five weeks after giving birth, I was sitting in the ringmaster's dressing room at The Boston Garden with a breast pump, counting the minutes until the next performance.

The room smelled like hairspray and sweat. Somewhere above me five thousand people were finding their seats to the walk-in music playing through the concourse, and the hallway outside was all chatter and motion, wardrobe crew tracking down performers for between-show costume repairs. I had about twenty minutes, which meant I was doing arithmetic on a letdown reflex while a sequined tailcoat hung on the door six inches from my head.

I remember thinking, with total clarity, how did I get here?

Let me back up. I was in Florida in the middle of ice show rehearsals when my water broke at thirty-one weeks. I then did the thing you are emphatically not supposed to do, which is get on a plane. I flew back to New York and went directly into a hospital bed, where I stayed until our daughter decided at thirty-four weeks that she had baked long enough.

Then I went back to work, not eventually, almost immediately.

When people asked whether I was enjoying being a mom, I could not really parse the question. I loved our daughter completely. Being a mom sounded like a job posting for somebody else, someone with a meal prep system and a drawer of coordinating athleisure, and I was fairly certain I had not applied.

What I wanted was to be back among the energy of the performers and creatives I worked with. I wanted to be anywhere other than home, doing the business of being a mother to a newborn.

When I was with her I wanted to be back in action, when I was at work I felt guilty for not being with her, so no matter where I was, I was somewhere else.

The business I'm in exists to hand families an escape into something spectacular and magical. That is the actual product. People drive for miles, find parking, buy the light-up sword and popcorn, find their seats, and for two hours they get to be somewhere else entirely, on cue, regardless of what kind of week anyone backstage is having. I loved that work, I was raised in it, so I want to be plain that I am describing my own industry and not pointing at someone else's.

The conceit behind reliably delivering a feeling to an arena full of guests is that it runs on people who have agreed to suspend their own, for the sake of the audience. We have a phrase for that, and we say it like a compliment. The show must go on. Nobody ever finishes the sentence, though. The show must go on, and what goes on with it, and who does it go on without.

I am not describing something that only happens under a rigging grid. Every industry has its version, the trial that cannot be moved, the quarter that has to close, the IPO, the product launch date already promised. The specifics change and the arrangement does not, which is that somewhere a person has decided their own hard week is a scheduling problem to solve rather than information worth hearing.

Nobody at my company would have blinked if I had taken the full leave, and I know now that I was hardly alone in not taking it. If I am being honest, I was not even considering how it looked not to, or what message I was sending to our associates as a leader in the company. People were watching to see what was permissible, and I was quietly setting the number. That was an identity I was carrying too, and I was ignoring it completely.

I was in that dressing room because I had built a self that only registered as real when it was producing something, which is where it gets absurd, since I had just produced an entire person and somehow that one did not count. Producer was my actual title. I had spent years getting credit for things that took eighteen months and several hundred people to pull off, and here was the most complicated thing I would ever make, delivered six weeks early under conditions nobody planned for, and it did not occur to me to file it anywhere. There was no opening night for it, nobody in a headset told me it went well. A newborn does not applaud, she simply needs, and I did not yet know how to be a person who was needed rather than a person who delivered.

I was talking recently with a friend who just had her second child after a long road to get there. She seemed genuinely at peace inside the sleepless nights, and she told me she remembers almost nothing of this stretch with her first because she was growing a business and a baby at the same time. This time she is fully present and she trusts the business to run without her for a while.

My instinct was to feel a sting of remorse, and I did, briefly, but where I landed instead is that she has not become a different person, she has just stopped auditioning.

The qualities I was so afraid of losing in that dressing room were never issued to me by a company. My eye for detail, my read of a room, the way I can see a finished thing before it exists and reverse engineer how to get there. That is what made me useful at work, and it is exactly what would have made me a steadier new mother, if I had been willing to spend any of it at home.

I cannot rewind those weeks, and I have made real peace with them, because the same restlessness that could not sit still with a five-week-old is what eventually told me the truth when a career I loved had grown into something that no longer quite matched who I was becoming. That signal is worth having, even when it shows up at an inconvenient hour.

Our daughter remembers none of it and the score I was keeping existed only in my own head. What she has now is a mother who is around, and who is needed in an entirely different way, which as a teenager mostly means being available at unpredictable hours for conversations that cannot be scheduled, which is its own kind of production challenge.

What I would offer is a question rather than a plan.

If your job disappeared tomorrow, what would you still be good at? Sit with it until the answer stops being a title and starts being a list of qualities, because the qualities are the durable part and the title is the rental.

You might also notice which version of you shows up when nobody has bought a ticket. She is not a lesser draft of your professional self, she is the original, and everything you get paid for is downstream of her.

I spent years waiting for someone in a headset to tell me I had done well. She never needed one.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole