Structure Is Not The Same As Routine
What workplaces give us, and what motherhood asks us to build.
For many career-focused women, early motherhood is a time of two profound experiences happening at once.
The first is learning to mother, with all its beautiful and unknown pages. The second is learning how to be away from the workplace.
In my last essay, Mothering the Workaholic, I began to unpack an idea I’ve often reflected on in what happens when our workplace wounds follow us to motherhood and the work of mothering – which appeared to resonate with many readers.
I shared that while workplace skills can be incredibly valuable in mothering, there’s a fine line at which “unhealthy” workplace behaviours may creep in, pushing us to points of depletion. For example, working harder to receive recognition may have “worked” for you in the workplace, but probably won’t help with your three-month-old.
These work behaviours can be hard to shake, especially when you consider how many years we spend using the behaviours (often with reward) before we enter motherhood, at which time we’re then expected (often with little support) to understand intuitively a completely different kind of work.
Beyond these work behaviours, I think we collectively underrate the vast structural importance workplaces bring to our lives, and what happens to women when the workplace is taken away when mothering.
When I dig into my own experience and reflect on the experiences of others, one thing stands out – we underrate it, because I don’t think we fully understand it.
I don’t think we fully understand, or openly discuss, what the concept “structure” means in the context of work, and thus the lack of it in mothering.
More than that, I think we confuse and blur structure with routine – leaving many mothers to feel that they are individually responsible for fixing a void with activity strategies that barely touch the structural holes left.
Structure and routine are not the same thing.
Simply put, structure is the container, and routine is the behaviour that sits within it. Structure is the scaffolding – the bones – that provides relative order and, oftentimes, meaning to our lives.
It helps us understand identities and relational connections – that is, who I am in relation to X, and what is Y in relation to me? Structure is not simply a way to block activities into a routine in your day, as it is often used to describe.
Structure provides containment of which behaviours are accepted and which are not, and importantly, it often provides a sense of belonging to something. And unless you are an enlightened monk sitting in a temple, I’d argue that structure actually somewhat relies on others, and the external.
Routine is individual, structure is relational.
For many, workplaces provide the largest structural influence in our lives. Sure, depending on the country you live in, government structural influence may also be present, and depending on your beliefs, organised religion has a long history of providing structure in the lives of followers. But for the most part, what we do for work and where we work provide us with significant structure.
Workplaces provide titles to help “identify” you – while we protest that a job title defines who we are, it provides a signal to others about what you do with your time. Your job title is located within an informal or formal organisation chart – which acts as a relational guide of how we relate to others through what we do each day, and who makes what rules, or provides what direction.
Workplaces provide boundaries of when to work and when “not” to work – of which days of the week are for what purpose. They guide our behaviour with formal policies and procedures, and informal work cultures of what’s accepted and what’s not. Someone is assigned the authority to review your work performance and offer feedback loops for improvement and advancement. This person (should) pay attention to your contribution – to witness the value you add, and to rate its worth.
Which means someone is often accountable for your presence and contribution. This hierarchy, while often imperfect, means you are seldom left to fight for visibility by yourself. You are seen and known. You are accounted for. And the opposite of this is true too.
Workplaces also offer multi-layered belonging. Within the overarching belonging to the company itself, you will likely also have layers of belonging to departments and teams. You might wear a logo on your shirt, or see it on a coffee cup, and you know that everyone around you with that logo is working on the same mission as you are.
All of these attributes provide structure in our lives – and you don’t actually have to like what you do, or where you work, to still benefit from the structure it provides.
In contrast, as I point out regularly in my writing, motherhood offers the polar opposite structural experience.
Your title – mother – is not always valued or understood by society for the extent of what it truly entails. Only your infant child is watching you, and the feedback is often non-verbal. There are limited boundaries of when you are working and when you are not working – no calendar of work hours or breaks in a day to regulate over a quiet cup of coffee or simply just in your own thoughts at your own desk. Some Most days, you might even go over eight hours without seeing or speaking to another adult, which means no one is going to “check in” to see how you’re doing with your “work.”
For many women who were told to prioritise their career, and who moved away from family to do so, this may also be the first time they feel truly dependent on someone else for a lot of what they’ve been able to otherwise do, provide and pay for themselves.
This independence can sometimes mean we don’t invest in building a deep family structure before we become mothers. Which is entirely fixable, but very hard to do when you’re 95 days postpartum, the structural limbo has set in, and you realise that no matter how many routines you layer over routines, you’re still feeling at sea.
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Our structural relationship with work occurs for many reasons.
On the surface, we rely on these structures because they pay us – and generally that payment is necessary for comfortable survival. But beyond the surface of work/reward exchange is a tangled web of assigned meaning and aspiration that keeps us dependent on these faceless institutions. We’re taught to associate our identity and relation to others through our titles, and our life goals become intertwined with accumulative success and bigger paycheques. We may think a life goal is to own a bigger house, or to become more financially independent, but both of those, which appear as being non-work dependent, are deeply dependent on making money, which happens through more work.
When we enter motherhood – or embark on a non-traditional journey outside of workplaces – we too easily lose the structure it provides in our lives.
But perhaps more detrimentally, we’re not made aware of what we’ve actually lost, nor are we then supported to consciously add the structure back into our lives.
And because the work of mothering is not recognised as the valuable ‘work’ it is, we’re stripped of further opportunity to leverage what should be deeply ingrained as obvious structures of motherhood – given our role in society.
It takes time to build structure, and this is where I think the paths for mothers diverge.
If you go back to paid work within weeks or months of birth, you haven’t had time to breathe, let alone necessarily understand what it’s been like to be without the structure your work offers in your life and how to build it into this new role. It feels weird to not be in a work routine sure, but you haven’t necessarily left the structure of what you existed in before motherhood. You might feel different (because you are), but the structure is waiting for your return.
But extended time off, or unclear return plans, makes the structural absence hard to avoid. It can leave you feeling as if you’re floating from activity to activity, unsure of your place in the external world, but clear as hell of the importance of your role to your child. This is especially difficult for women who weren’t given, or haven’t invested, in the social structures outside of the workplace.
I often think about the “stereotypes” created of mothers who become deeply involved in school activities or philanthropic causes – a stereotype I used to, embarrassingly, think almost tragically of.
My naive mind would think, “Can’t you just go back to work?” What I now realise, whether done so knowingly or not, is that these activities are examples of creating structure back into your life. Awful really, to think that any attempt mothers have made to regain a parachute in freefall have often been mocked and belittled by members of society who fight hard to maintain a gendered status quo of what an ideal worker is.
So, what can be done about it?
Are mothers destined to be in structural limbo the minute the baby takes their first cry? Or are our only choices to go back to a workplace ASAP or join a church?
I don’t think so. I think this is a prime example of where knowledge is oftentimes more than half of the answer. But I do think creativity and deliberateness are necessary for the remainder.
Knowledge of what is being taken away allows us to understand what we want to add back in, or what we’re actually comfortable letting go of altogether. Without the knowledge, we don’t know what is missing.
If you look back up to the list of ways workplaces provide structure, how would you replace them in motherhood? What role can strengthening the importance of your family and your community play in this?
Does your family have strong values? Shared goals? Clear roles? A vision of the life you want to both live and create?
This isn’t about “corporatising” motherhood, but rather looking to existing familiar structures to see where the voids are.
Importantly, what parts can you reclaim within yourself? Yes, structure is relational, but beyond your routine each day, can you find a room or a wall to govern yourself? A structural beam of your life that remains steady regardless of the external institutions you relate to.
Lane Scott’s “The Mother’s Gauntlet” describes this tension and required self-governing learning so well. Highly recommend reading.
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Routine is important. If we accept that structure and routine are not the same thing, then we can recognise the separate importance each plays.
We can also likely find a lot more joy in a routine when we accept its role for what it is – behaviours and activities in our day – and not a structural influence of how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.
Beyond motherhood, our relationship to work and workplaces is changing. For years now, I’ve often said that what worries me most about “AI taking our jobs” is what it’ll mean for our sense of structural stability when we’re told we’re no longer needed to work. While I don’t think that will be true for a very long time – there’s no loss, and in fact, only much to gain, in examining the deep structural influence workplaces and work currently have on our lives now.
In this sense, mothers can be the “early adopters” of this change. Mothers have an opportunity to rise above workplace structural dependency and provide influence on how we can create this within ourselves, our families and our community.
I’ll be the first to say loudly that it’s not an easy thing to do – especially, as I keep mentioning, for women like me who were pushed to be career-obsessed, don’t live near family and don’t have religious structures to otherwise rely on (I seriously wish I did!). It’s not to say it’s easy for women who do live near family or are religious, but as I mentioned last week, there is generally a muscle memory for structure outside of work that already exists.
While I have always been someone very aware of my relationship to work, and my dependency on workplace structure, the process of uncoupling from this in motherhood has been a rollercoaster (though admittedly, not helped by moving multiple times).
As a contender for one of the world’s most impatient people… it takes time. And it requires, to an extent, discomfort – as most growth does. I believe this is why, for many women, motherhood becomes a spiritual-esque experience – not simply from the act of creating life, but from the ways it forces us to pull apart our own identities and dependencies – our understanding of attachment. Which, at its core, is what most spiritual journeys contend with.
When I am at sea, I know I need to reflect on where the structure is in my life. I have made this especially difficult for myself at present, as not only did I leave my workplace (tech/venture capital) on maternity leave, but I then embarked on a path that is deeply in the mind, which means I can find myself pulling into a cocoon of ideation and analysis, and forget how important it is to be in the world.
As I’ve written above, often the knowledge of this absence is enough to reorient me – as does the importance of recognising the difference between routine and structure.
A small example for me is this: routine is getting a coffee each morning, whereas structure is going to the same cafe as often as you can, introducing yourself and knowing their names too, and in doing so, forming a small sense of being seen each day.
I’d love to know, how do you create structure in your life outside of the workplace?
With care,
Kiya
Thank you for reading 🤍
If we haven’t met: I’m Kiya – mother, writer, researcher and thinker of how we build better systems to support mothers. After leaving the tech/VC industry on maternity leave, I now spend my time writing on motherhood and work, completing a PhD on how to better support mothers returning to paid work, and doing my favourite work – mothering a toddler.
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I have such appreciation for this piece for so many reasons. Perhaps the top reason is that you are unafraid to take a heady idea and let it stretch and grow wings. You don’t hide behind gifs or other things that break up the reading, which shows such a confidence in your own voice, but also in your readers. I’ll be thinking about the difference between structure and routine for awhile now.
As always - you pick apart things I’d never even considered! X