The Hats We Wear

My Grandfather's Mining Helmet

Every Thanksgiving my husband’s family descends upon his grandparent’s house to enjoy turkey, dressing, and quality time with family. The tiny house is filled with aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins, some of whom I’m not sure I’ve ever met before.

Inevitably between the wishbone and pumpkin pie someone will ask, “Now, Kristen,what is it you do again?”

“I’m in public relations. I wear many hats.”

This cliche, while tired, seems to work well in this situation, because generally speaking, it does not lead to many follow up questions, except perhaps, “Can you pass the yams?”

I would hazard to guess that most PR pros have been guilty of using this cliché more than once. I would also guess that not once has a cousin replied with the logical follow up question “What kind of hats? Ten gallon? Fedora? Top? Berets?”

Of course, when we say we wear many hats, we mean it metaphorically. When arsons are coming out of left field, we sound the alarm, put on our firefighter hat, and start putting out fires. When our organization is under attack, we rally the troops, put on our combat helmet and prepare for battle. When we land that good news story on the front page, be honest ladies (and sometimes men), we put on the tiara and celebrate. And some days you just put on your ratty old ball cap and do the grunt work that nobody else wants to do because it has to get done.

We all have metaphorical hats that we swap off and on depending on the day, the hour, sometimes the minute.

However, in addition to all my metaphorical hats, I also keep one literal hat in my office that serves as my inspiration. The hat, or more accurately the mining helmet, belonged to my grandfather who worked in underground copper mines in Montana from the time he was 17 until he retired almost 50 years later. When my grandmother passed away two years ago I found the helmet in her attic.

It has been in my office ever since.

There are a few things you should know about both my grandfather and the helmet for you to understand why such an obscure object could serve as inspiration. My grandfather had an incredible work ethic. As you can imagine, winters in Montana are harsh and working in underground mines in those conditions is not easy. The shifts were long and the work was tedious. But my grandfather worked in difficult conditions for almost five decades to support his family. He was not one to complain, he was one to do his job.

It is hard to see from the picture, but there is a large crack down one side, which means that the helmet was used for its designed purpose. That means that at least once (and I suspect more than that) something substantial in size fell on my grandfather’s head causing the helmet to crack.

Something about this crack intrigues me. He didn’t get a new helmet. For whatever reason – sentimental or financial, he went back to work wearing the same helmet that had protected him from that accident. Perhaps it was his stubbornness that drove him back down into the mines wearing that same helmet with the crack down the side.

Perhaps it is that same stubbornness that drives us back into the field when we have taken a hit hard enough to rock us to our core. People often accuse me of being stubborn like it is a bad thing, and sometimes I suppose that it is. But sometimes I think a degree of stubbornness is required in a field that requires us to be firefighters, soldiers, advisers, janitors, counselors, and teachers.

People often ask about the helmet when they come into my office for the first time.

You have just read the long answer.

The short, but honest, answer I give is this; It reminds me that no matter how bad of a day I’m having, my job could always be worse. No one has to send a canary into my office first to see if I’m going to make it out alive today.

The Mommy Pull

Image by renny67 via Flickr

I always knew there would be some sort of challenge that came along with being a working mother. I am a pretty smart girl who pays attention to the world around me and it doesn’t take super powers of observation to see that mothers who work full time jobs have logistical and emotional challenges to come to terms with.

Even without my amazing powers of observation, I had personal experience to go by. My mother worked as a professor at a college and helped my father run the grocery store that we owned. She always said that she didn’t work full time when we were growing up, and it was true that she didn’t have a traditional Monday – Friday 8-5 schedule, but looking back I feel confident that when you take those two jobs and add to them the responsibilities that came along with being a preacher’s wife, she worked far more than 40 hours a week.

So when my husband and I were expecting our first child, I had what I thought was a pretty good grasp on what it would be like to be a working mom. We were blessed that the school district I work for was in the process of constructing a day care center for the exclusive use of our employees. The center was only about a mile away from my office and would be complete by the time our daughter was a year old. For her first year, we were blessed to find a retired couple who watched her during the day. They were like surrogate grandparents and loved and spoiled her as such. Although I missed her, I never had to worry about her care and therefore, my work (although somewhat disrupted by having to pump breastmilk several times a day), resumed a mostly normal schedule.

Once she entered daycare, we were quickly introduced to the challenges that arise when your beautiful and intelligent little child is introduced into a room with several other, slightly less beautiful and much more snotty children who seem to live to cough, sneeze, and yes, even vomit on your little prince or princess. And while your angel would never be responsible for bringing a virus into the center, he or she is certainly sent home at the first sign of fever, three bumps lined up together that might look like a rash, or two diapers that seem too loose to be safe.

And so a frantic phone call from the day care sends you out of your office to pick up your angel and take the baby home (or to the doctor’s office) until he is symptom free for at least 24 hours. If your children are like mine, it seems that that immune systems can sense when you have important meetings, tests, or pitches that you can’t reschedule. I can’t remember a time that our little darlings got sick where Richie and I didn’t have a thing on our calendar. That would be too easy.

As the children get older and stop chewing on each other’s toys, you seem to finally start catching a break, except that, in one crazy moment, usually after your child has gone to bed and your husband had given you two glasses of wine, you decide it’s time to start trying to have another baby. And alas, it begins again. And now, you have two small bundles of germs just tempting you to bring them outside of the house so that they can catch the latest virus and then immediately pass it along to their sibling. What used to keep you out of work for 2 days now keeps you out for an entire week in a sequence that goes something like this. Child one is sick on Monday and Tuesday. You take both children to school on Wednesday, but get a call at 10:14 a.m. telling you that child 2 has a fever and you will need to pick her up. You are now home with child two all day Wednesday and Thursday. By Friday, both children are feeling better and can go to school, but you have the fever, cough, and are vomiting, just for good measure.

Friday is the day you are supposed to have the client meeting that was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but that you changed because your baby was sick and your husband could cover Monday and Wednesday, but not Tuesday. So now you have the choice of taking two times the recommended dosage of Dayquil and pressing through the meeting with your client and hoping they don’t get close enough to smell the “sick” on you. Or you can trust your assistant with the meeting even though she has only been working for you for six months, and during that time, you have been out of the office with sick children at least seven times. Or, you can call the client, explain that you have caught the bug from your child, hoping that they have children and will understand and reschedule for next week instead of calling your competitor.

This is the part of being a working mom I did not anticipate. I didn’t anticipate the guilt I would feel for my children because I wasn’t spending enough time with them, especially if they are sick, and the guilt I would feel if I did spend time with my children because then I wasn’t spending enough time in the office.

I also didn’t anticipate being so tired at the end of the day that I would give in and let my kids watch a movie (okay two movies) because I was just too wiped out to get on the floor and play with My Little Ponies. I wasn’t going to be one of those moms, until I found out what it was like to actually be a mom.

When my four (and a half) year old hugs me at the end of the day and tells me that I’m the best mommy she’s ever had, I consider myself lucky that I am the only mommy she has ever had. I sometimes wonder if she had a mommy who could give her more undivided attention if she would love that mommy more.

But mostly, I consider myself lucky. I am pulled in many directions, but right now, it is still working. I attribute our families success to incredible family support, starting most importantly with my husband. We also have support from my in-laws and my brother and his family. Without this support structure, I don’t know how I could stand as a working mom. Sometimes I wonder how I stand even with the support.

Being a working mom must be kind of like salt water taffy. Although you start out as something small, you are pulled and stretched in every direction. It doesn’t look possible that you could stretch so far without breaking, but you do. And the end result is something very sweet and full of flavor and because it’s been stretched, there is a lot to go around.

A Whole New World

Journey to the Center of the Earth

When I was five my brother and I decided to try to dig our way to China. We were smart kids so we realized that in order to make it to China, we would first have to break ground in the front yard next to the tether ball poll then dig down through the top layer of soil, then the clay, and then through the center of the Earth, which we knew was filled with molten lava, large man eating lizards, mountains erupting with flames, and many other untold dangers that no sane human (much less a five and seven year old) would subject themselves to. This world, inside the center of the Earth, was different than the safe and comfortable world that my brother and I lived in every day and we knew that we would have to prepare ourselves if we were going to survive. So with our shovels in our hand we did what any competent explorer would do when faced with this type of peril – we wrapped ourselves in tinfoil.

In today’s constantly changing communication’s culture, I find myself in a similar situation, only instead of navigating through lava and lizards I am trying to make my way through Twitter and Facebook. This time my ultimate destination is not China, it is a successful communication strategy. Instead of digging through the center of the Earth I have to dig through the world of social media, which for me is just as strange and unfamiliar.

In a somewhat different twist, numerous explorers before me have successfully navigated through this unfamiliar territory, which should probably make me feel better, but for some reason only serves to make me more nervous. It’s as if I’m looking at people standing on the edge of a volcano and saying, “Come on in, the lava’s fine.” In theory I understand that talking to people who have gone there before me and successfully come out on the other side should make me feel more secure. A trail has been blazed; I’m not in it alone; It can be done; blah, blah, blah. Instead I feel overwhelmed and under equipped. I feel like I have showed up at a black tie party wearing Daisy Dukes and a tube top.

It is not that I don’t want to change or that I don’t believe that the change is necessary. It is not that I fear change. In fact, I have thought about it a lot over recent months and I have a hard time describing my feelings. This is particularly difficult since I am married to a self proclaimed social media evangelist who works in the same profession as I do (@vedo). Over the past 18 months he has embraced the social media movement, not only in his job, but he has started consulting to help others learn how to effectively use the tools in their organizations. As he has been moving forward, I have been standing still.

I have blamed the resistance on my lack of time, on my new baby (while I resisted, my husband posted the information all over his Twitter and Facebook accounts), on health issues, and trouble at work. But I have come to realize that I was just not ready to start digging because I knew that if I did it would require me to face some fire that I was not yet ready to face. But the truth is, this new world is a reality for all of us, whether we are professional communicators targeting a specific audience or grandparents trying to stay in touch.

Most of you have already braved this new frontier, but in case there are any of you hanging on with shovels in hand I say –

Bring on the tinfoil.