Melanie Saunders

On April 1, 2001, I found out I was pregnant and, based on my lab results, it was most likely more than one baby. My husband and I were overjoyed. We had been waiting, hoping, and praying to become parents, trying for almost 5 years. At that time, my career at NASA essentially consisted of negotiating international agreements and contracts and representing Johnson Space Center on various agency teams working commercialization projects. I traveled a lot. I knew the flight crews and gate agents between Washington, DC, and Houston, Texas. The prospect of trying to suddenly carve out a series of medical appointments was daunting!

When I found out I was expecting triplets, I was thrilled but suddenly had a bigger challenge. I had been planning for a somewhat reduced travel schedule and a couple of months of maternity leave followed by a gradual reemergence to the status quo. The triplet news put an end to that. This was a fundamental collision with my work life. And it was a collision that was going to continue for years. I started reading up on triplet pregnancy and found that I should plan on bed rest and hospitalization for a good part of my pregnancy. I became a member of the child care facility onsite and got my spots on the waiting list. My doctor said travel was limited to first and second trimester. I went to on a few trips during the first trimester, but I was so tired and so pregnant it was as if I was at the end of the second trimester. My doctor told me to arrange my work schedule to work from home starting in the third trimester. Given that I looked and felt 9 months pregnant at that point (people everywhere I went would pat my stomach or nudge me and say “any day now”), the work-at-home arrangement was fine with me. Fortunately, my management could not have been more wonderful or supportive, and I was able to telecommute for the last trimester. The triplets were born at the end of November and thankfully were all healthy and normal. I went on extended leave, farming out most of my portfolio of work to my colleagues with the grim realization that I would probably never be able to pick it back up.

After returning to the office when the triplets were 8 months old, I went through a new-mother crisis (which I still hope served in lieu of a midlife crisis). I realized I could never go back to doing what I had done before. It was too unfair to my children, to me, to my husband. I had to find something else to do. I talked to several senior people I trusted and admired and they all told me to give it time. I struggled with that. I had been such a hard charger before the babies it was difficult to adjust to patience. But I gritted my teeth and found new things to work on. The first months back at the office, I climbed the mountain of getting the kids and their supplies to daycare and me to the office at a reasonable hour. I would sit down at my desk, already exhausted but also exhilarated at being in the land of complete thoughts and sentences.

What I learned along the way is this: on any given day, my life is not in balance. But over time, it achieves a basic equilibrium. I started out thinking that work-life balance meant regular work hours and found out that for me it means that there are weeks where work is crazy, I have long days, and if I haven’t made big plans with my crockpot we are likely eating soup or eating out. There are other times where I can leave work and go to school and be there for a class party or to eat lunch with my kids or see a class play. It takes constant vigilance to keep both as a priority. Most of the time I feel like I am swinging back and forth between two very imbalanced states and that may be true. But I have done it long enough to know that even though I hit the opposite ends of the spectrum on a regular basis, most of the time I am somewhere in between and the middle is a big manageable space. I will probably never balance it perfectly. However, I have learned that being a room mom and a fee determining official are not mutually exclusive roles. And that is enough balance for me. I don’t need to do both in the same afternoon. Usually.