Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Fifth Trimester
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Manhattan
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.thefifthtrimester.com/about/ * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2134928/lauren-smith-brody
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016036099
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016036099
HEADING: Brody, Lauren Smith
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670 __ |a The fifth trimester, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Lauren Smith Brody)
PERSONAL
Married; children: two sons.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, public speaker, and consultant. The Fifth Trimester program, New York, NY, founder. Previously worked in magazine publishing, including serving as executive editor of Glamour magazine at Condé Nast, where she produced the Women of the Year awards.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lauren Brody, who grew up in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, worked in magazine publishing for for more than sixteen years. Working as an editor at Glamour magazine, Brody began to wonder about the support women needed at work following pregnancy and the ups and downs of postpartum life. Brody had become the mother of two boys and knew firsthand the pressures that working mothers faced following the birth of a child. As a result, Brody founded a program called The Fifth Trimester to help enhance the work environment for working mothers. She also authored the book titled The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby.
“Thankfully, I worked in a supportive environment with many women,” Brody noted in an interview with Jewish Boston website contributor Kara Baskin, adding: “I wasn’t going to fake my way through it. There was a day a few months into coming back where I wasn’t really sleeping yet but I could see the light.” Brody went on in the interview to note what the title The Fifth Trimester means, noting: “It’s when the working mom is born.”
Brody notes in The Fifth Trimester that she took three months maternity leave when her second son was born but “was unprepared for the physical and emotional toll that came with her return to work,” as noted by a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Wanting to develop a guide for mothers returning to work, Brody interviewed more than 700 women via a survey. She then took the surveys and coupled them with her own experiences to write The Fifth Trimester.
Brody details many of the practical aspects that new mothers have to prepare for when returning to work. Brody addresses issues such as pumping breast milk for the child, finding good child care, coping with a lack of sleep, and mothers seeking time for themselves. Brody also delves into coping with the work environment after returning from maternity leave. Throughout the book, Bordy includes real-life stories about working mothers, including working mothers who do not live or work in major metropolitan areas. A final chapter provides scripts and suggestions for conversations about issues such postpartum mood disorders and the potential desire to fend off unwanted advice.
Mothers returning to work “will find a wealth of ideas to help navigate the challenging transition period in this friendly and practical guide,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor, who also noted the book’s humor. Booklist contributor Nanette Donohue called Brody “a wise mentor who’s just a bit more chic than most of us but who takes us under her wing nonetheless.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Nanette Donohue, review of The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of The Fifth Trimester.
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2016, review of The Fifth Trimester, p. 66.
ONLINE
Cut, https://www.thecut.com/ (May 5, 2017), Izzy Grinspan, “This New Book Attempts to Guide Moms Returning to Work,” review of The Fifth Trimester.
Fifth Trimester Web site, http://www.thefifthtrimester.com/ (August 21, 2017).
Jewish Boston, https://www.jewishboston.com/ (July 3, 2017), Kara Baskin, “Q&A With the Fifth Trimester’s Lauren Smith Brody.”*
Lauren is the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement and the author of The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby (Doubleday), a simultaneous #1 best-seller in the Amazon categories of Motherhood, Women & Business, and Cultural Anthropology. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, CNN.com, Forbes, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Glamour, Refinery29, and dozens more outlets for business leaders and mothers. Prior to launching T5T, Lauren had a 16-year career in magazine publishing, most recently as the longtime executive editor of Glamour magazine at Condé Nast, where she produced the Women of the Year awards, honoring luminaries like Dr. Maya Angelou and Hillary Clinton. As both an executive-level manager and a content expert, she led colleagues and 12 million monthly readers through career and life transitions with empathy and vital information. Raised in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.
Kara Baskin
July 3, 2017
Q&A With the Fifth Trimester’s Lauren Smith Brody
The former “Glamour” executive editor is on a mission to make it easier to balance career and family.
Lauren Smith Brody started her career as a high-powered magazine editor at “Glamour.” Then she had children. She continued working hard, but she also realized firsthand that women require support beyond pregnancy and the postpartum haze. They need a road map to returning to work while parenting, ranging from basic stuff like how to apply makeup when you haven’t slept in three days to negotiating flexible work arrangements with a boss.
Lauren Smith Brody started her career as a high-powered magazine editor at “Glamour.” Then she had children. She continued working hard, but she also realized firsthand that women require support beyond pregnancy and the postpartum haze. They need a road map to returning to work while parenting, ranging from basic stuff like how to apply makeup when you haven’t slept in three days to negotiating flexible work arrangements with a boss.
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Brody wasn’t shy about being honest about parenting at work. She’d leave meetings to pump. She’d talk about her kids and how hard it was to balance a big, fulfilling job with a big, fulfilling (but demanding) family life.
“Thankfully, I worked in a supportive environment with many women,” she says. “I wasn’t going to fake my way through it. There was a day a few months into coming back where I wasn’t really sleeping yet but I could see the light, and a young, single colleague who didn’t have kids came into my office to ask for help on a headline. In the middle of our conversation, she said, ‘I want to thank you for being so open about this motherhood stuff.’ At first, I was worried. Maybe I hadn’t been professional? Did I allude to not sleeping one too many times? But she said, ‘You know, you’ve shown me it’s incredibly hard, and you’re still getting it done.’ That was my epiphany: I wanted to be a workplace cultural leader. I could use my weaknesses for good!”
In her book, “The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby,” she interviewed hundreds of women from all walks of life about how to make it work. Some were well-off; some were struggling. Some had choices about when to go to work; others had to go back within a week or two (one waitress would feel her milk come in every time a baby cried at her restaurant). The book is chock-full of relatable, real advice. As for the “fifth trimester” title?
“It’s when the working mom is born,” Brody says.
Brody hopes to turn the book into a movement that challenges corporate culture to become more hospitable toward working parents, and offers mothers a resource for revolutionizing workplace culture themselves.
We talked to Brody about the book, the movement and what she’s learned so far.
First things first: How does being Jewish play into your work?
It wasn’t hard to legitimize! I’m Jewish, but the book isn’t necessarily meant just for Jewish readers. Yet Jews have led the way in so many of our cultural-shaping industries—arts, finance. There are more Jewish women in positions of executive leadership, industry-wide, then there are Jewish men, which is pretty fascinating. It’s hard because you want to make policy changes at your workplace, but I understand that for many women, this isn’t necessarily a moment of great ambition. Just understand that by being open and transparent, you are making cultural change. By setting an example, being open, leaving a meeting to go pump, you’re impacting culture, and for a Jewish reader, know that we’ve led the way! In terms of the percentage of Jewish women in the workplace and in leadership roles, we have an opportunity to make an impact.
How was your back-to-work transition?
I had a challenging transition, but I also understood that I had it easier than most. I was working in an industry largely made up of women who were approaching motherhood in myriad ways. Some were like me, upwardly mobile and trying to climb the masthead. Others were satisfied and maintained their positions. There was a woman above me who took a two-week maternity leave, and I remember thinking, ‘How could you?’ I had a 180 change of heart once I had kids. I began to understand that, although science shows that a longer paid maternity leave is better for most women, the truth is, the most important thing we can do, the most progressive thing, is to have agency and do what’s right for our own families. This was the right thing for her, so I learned to check my judgment at the door. The whole point of my book is to offer women options and as many avenues toward making their own options and having agency.
What would make returning to work easier for women?
All families need a federally supported, paid family leave. Men, women, adoptive parents, et cetera. Barring that, I think new parents need to realize that they come back from parental leave stronger in many ways than when they went away to have their babies. There’s this boot camp mentality. In terms of workplaces, there is so much logistical support possible. Three months leave is not enough. There’s this feeling of, ‘You took your three months! You should be raring to go!’ As managers, we have to internalize the idea that it’s not enough.
If you can support new parents in their first few months back, it will improve retention, recruitment and a workplace’s reputation. It’s all stuff that’s ultimately good for companies and, on a global scale, improves the bottom line. It’s a mind shift.
Can you offer some practical tips for just plain getting through the day?
Sleep is one of the most vital issues for new parents. It affects your physical and mental health, and it also affects your ability to keep your job. If you’re coming back emotionally frazzled, you’re petrified of saying or doing the wrong thing. Protect the quality of the little sleep you’re getting. Negotiate with your partner who gets sleep when.
Also, game your day! Wendy Troxel, who’s a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh and a social scientist with RAND Corporation, had this great piece of advice. There’s a slump everyone has at 2 p.m. If you have any control over your schedule, make phone calls or do a presentation then. This will flood your body with adrenaline and carry you through the rest of the day.
How does a woman’s self-image change after returning to work?
I fight against this idea of fake it until you make it. I tried to be very deliberate in finding diversity: socioeconomic, kinds of jobs, diversity of ambition. I talked to women who started out as ambitious and it temporarily or completely fell away; I talked to other women also who weren’t ambitious, then stuck with their work to pay for child care and really made it worthwhile. A lot of those women found new approaches to the work they were doing. A lot of women saw themselves differently than before, or thought their colleagues saw them differently. You have to will yourself to move forward and embrace it. You cannot move forward if you come back to work worrying about everything that happened while you were gone, or every favor everyone did for you while gone. Don’t feel indebted or worried they resent you. Realize that everyone you work with has something in his or her personal life that matters as much to them as your baby does to you. Ask after that person. Embrace everyone’s humanity. They bring that to work with them, and it’s OK.
How can mothers improve workplace policies, like flex time or telecommuting?
Think: How much can I push the envelope here? Think of the greater good by taking a narrow personal risk. Manage up. Take motherhood out of it and think of the company as a whole. How can you legitimately claim that a policy is not just good for you, it’s good for a company? Ask for something that’s good for everyone.
Brody, Lauren Smith: THE FIFTH TRIMESTER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Brody, Lauren Smith THE FIFTH TRIMESTER Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-385-54141-1
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Brody, Lauren Smith: THE FIFTH TRIMESTER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921701&it=r&asid=61889051de9dae4901301d4638a9c38a.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921701
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The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide
to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby
Nanette Donohue
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby.
By Lauren Smith Brody.
Apr. 2017.352p. Doubleday, $24.95 (9780385541411). 306.3.
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.--Nanette Donohue
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Donohue, Nanette. "The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success after Baby."
Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689427&it=r&asid=0de38231d5da5547a948a5ba1e324c4f.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689427
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8/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide
to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby
Lauren Smith Brody. Doubleday, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-54141-1
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby." Publishers Weekly, 5
Dec. 2016, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224915&it=r&asid=66e2bf7ae1877a3cc6716700ac0ae66d.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224915
This New Book Attempts to Guide Moms Returning to Work
By
Izzy Grinspan
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Lauren Smith Brody’s The Fifth Trimester.
I spent a big chunk of 2013 working from an office bathroom. It was, as office bathrooms go, extremely well-appointed: a big single-stall room with some fancy candles, a bottle of high-class hand soap, and an armchair upholstered in a dachshund print. But it didn’t have any windows, and when you sat in the beautiful, expensive-feeling chair, as I did to pump breast milk twice a day, you were facing a toilet.
I’d returned to my job at a media start-up 12 weeks after having my first son, full of enthusiasm and nearly devoid of practical knowledge. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the woman who ran my local chapter of La Leche League said it was good to breastfeed for at least a year, so that was my entire plan: breastfeed, somehow, for at least a year. I wanted to be a working mom; aside from the obvious financial benefits, I believed that having a career was good for me and would be good for my family. I hadn’t factored in the hours I would spend managing my team by email while preventing them from emptying their bladders.
ADVERTISING
Lauren Smith Brody’s new guide to working motherhood, The Fifth Trimester, aims to help women avoid exactly this kind of situation. Brody was an executive editor at Glamour, and she takes a women’s-magazine approach to the difficult task of coming back to work, covering the frustrating realities of working-mom life in a chipper, big-sisterly voice.
There are chapters about everything from managing your boss’s expectations to managing your postpartum work wardrobe. And of course, there’s an entire chapter on pumping — a time-suck, a literal suck, and likely the most embarrassingly physical thing you’ll ever have to explain to your co-workers.
About that title: The wildly popular baby guru Harvey Karp says that, if pregnancy lasts three trimesters, newborns are basically living out the fourth. It’s not until they hit three months that they’re fully cooked, with the neurology in place to do things like smile and interact. Of course, three months is also the length of time many workplaces are required to hold your job when you’re out on maternity leave, according to the FMLA. So just when your baby gets fun, you’re probably returning to work. Brody’s argument is that for working moms, months three through six of a baby’s life constitute the fifth trimester of pregnancy, a time when you’re as raw as a newborn fresh out of the womb.
Her service-y approach is both the book’s blessing and its curse. Brody methodically breaks down all the potential pitfalls of working motherhood and then explains how to navigate them. Since I’m currently out on maternity leave No. 2, I figured I’d be an ideal test case for her advice. And at first, the book filled me with hope: Chapter one offers concrete advice on how to make peace with your child-care choices, something that still plagues me.
By chapter five, though, I’d become bogged down in despair. Do I really need to revamp my skin-care routine right now, when I’m barely sleeping? Brody’s Condé Nast background really comes through here: She interviews “some of the world’s leading dermatologists, style advisers, hair care experts, beauty editors, fashion industry bigwigs,” and more for postpartum fashion and beauty advice. Their tips come couched between disclaimers about how looking your best is really about feeling your most confident — because nothing builds confidence like a list of ways you’re probably failing.
This sense of whiplash is not the author’s fault. It’s just that our collective expectations for how to be a successful woman and a successful employee and a successful mother are crazy, so when you try to gather them all in one place, you wind up with a dizzying document. Challenging these demands ultimately means overhauling a system created without mothers in mind, which is why women end up making do. When you’re already pressed for time, it’s easier to pretend you’re fine with pumping in a bathroom — for a length of time that’s not forever — than to agitate for better workplace conditions on a national level.
Brody is aware of this problem, and she follows Sheryl Sandberg’s lead here. “Call it Leaning In, call it Not Opting Out,” she writes in the introduction, “but in order to achieve change — whether on a corporate policy level, or just at the water cooler — women have to stay in the game.”
But to avoid the backlash that Sandberg got for her whitest-of-the-white-collar approach, Brody also interviewed a ton of moms from different backgrounds. A chapter about women who own their businesses compares the experience of Manhattan real-estate scion Andrea Olshan and working-class single mom Sarah Serafin, who runs her own transcription company in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Sarah actually transcribed Andrea’s interview, which mentions multiple nannies and housekeepers. “It was interesting to listen to someone who had almost the complete opposite experience of my own,” she comments politely. (Chagrin falls, indeed.)
The book walks a fine line, trying to offer reasonable solutions to problems that are patently unreasonable. Sometimes, all Brody can do is acknowledge that it’s a broken system. Brooklyn psychiatrist Christin Drake tells her, “There is a real gap between the reality of motherhood and the public understanding of motherhood, and certainly the pretending in the workplace about what motherhood is really like. Being aware of that gap is really important.” For better and for worse, The Fifth Trimester will make you hyperaware of the gap.