March 22, 2023 • 52 mins
How did the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company manage to balance her skyrocketing career and her growing family? In this refreshingly candid and thought-provoking episode from the archives, Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox Corporation, tells Carol why this is the wrong question for young parents to ask, and explains how and why work-life balance issues should be reframed and analyzed. She shares the lessons and perspectives that helped her stay true to herself and her parenting goals during her rise to the top and takes us on a deep dive into how parents should redefine their parenting goals and practices. Ursula begins by sharing a loving recounting of her single mother’s masterful parenting, explaining how her wise counsel and great instincts guided Ursula’s own parenting journey. Follow us at @GroundControlParenting and on groundcontrolparenting.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog and
now a podcast creative appearance raising black and brown children.
I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. In
this podcast series, I talk with some really interesting people
about the job and the joy of parenting. This week,
I'm bringing back a great guest from the archives, Ursula Burns,
the first black woman CEO to head a Fortune five
(00:27):
hundred company. Ursula joined me on the podcast a few
years ago, and her reflections and observations are just as
relevant and relatable today. We covered the waterfront in this conversation.
We talked about how she grew up all the valuable
lessons her mother taught her and how she passed them
on to her children, and then we take our deep
dive into the concept of work life balance. She had
(00:49):
a really interesting take on this, and she had some
really good advice for young people wondering how the professional
lives are going to play out when they have children.
There's so much good stuff in this conversation, and I'm
so glad you've joined us. I am so happy and
really honored to have Arthula Burns as my guest on
today's podcast. Many people know Ursula as the former CEO
(01:10):
of Xerox and the first black woman to be named
CEO of a fourteen five hundred company. Her memoir, Where
You Are Is Not Who You Are, will be out
in late spring. Her list of a business accomplishments since
she left the leadership of Xerox a few years ago
are really impressive. Indeed, I've known Ursla for many years.
In addition to all of these great accomplishments, I also
(01:32):
know her as a devoted mother to her now adult children,
a daughter, Melissa, son Malcolm, as someone who is deeply
invested in parenting, who's been influenced by the masterful parenting
of her mother, and who's brought these lessons to her
own children. And so I'm so excited that she's here
to talk with us about this today. Welcome to ground
Control Parenting. Ursula really really thrilled to be here. Well,
(01:54):
let's get started. So I know that parenting has been
really influential in your life, in your work, and in
your parenting. So let's just start. Let's back up and
start with little Ursula Burns, who grew up in New
York City, And can you tell me a little bit
about I mean, You've talked about her a lot, but
if you could tell me a little bit about your
amazing mom, Olga Raquel Burns, and how you were parented. Yeah,
(02:19):
my mother was. She was an immigrant from Panama who
came here with her husband, her then husband. I was
a middle child, My brother was the oldest and my
sister the youngest, and she was very, very quickly left
to parent the three of us alone. She was a
(02:40):
masterful parent. She surrounds her children. She surrounded her children.
He had very little flexibility to do anything. Playing is simple.
We grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
when the Lower East Side was not cool, when it
was actually dangerous, drug infested, gang infested. One of her
primary rules was that she had to know where we
(03:00):
were at old times, and we were highly controlled. She was.
She was very clear about what right and wrong looked like.
She was very vocal and physical if we were not
doing what was right all the time, very very focused
on education. And one of her she had all these
(03:22):
crazy sayings. One of her best sayings was the title
of my book, Interestingly enough is which is where you
are is not who you are. Because we grew up
in a disastrous place, and it was dirty. It was
just things that weren't that great. When you walked into
our house, it was an organized, clean place with um,
(03:45):
dignity and just love and and control. And so she
That's why I liked the word the ground control parenting
and like the title, because that was my mother in control.
But she was. She was very loving and extremely smart.
I'm unbelievably insightful. And you know you say this about
(04:07):
people say this about their parents all time. Yeah, but
my mother really well, she had these crazy sayings that
I live by today. I said. One of them is
where you are is not who you are. She would
always say to me, Max, my middle name is Maxine. Max.
The world doesn't happen to you. You have to happen
to the world. Which men don't sit back and wait
(04:27):
for things to kind of come to you. You You have
to kind of go there and get them. And she
would say another thing she said all the time was
you leave behind more than you take away. And that's
how you're going to be judged in your life. It's
not anything else. Not gonna be how much you have,
how much you got, how famous you are. It's going
to be whether or not you've left behind in the
(04:47):
world more than you take away. She was just one
of these really masterful women who were she was definitely
underestimated and definitely underutilized giving her capacity. And she died
very young. Yes, yes, a couple of questions. What was
her core of that? I mean, was it how she
was raised or was it her ability to come to
a new country? And I think I think it was
(05:09):
how I think it's a great question, by the way,
And it's interesting how much I learned about her mother
after she died, not before before she died. She didn't
spend a lot of time speaking about her childhood or
about my father or anything. I mean, she had no
bad words about anyone, but she did have a really
difficult upbring. She was raised by her mother, but her
(05:37):
father was not the person who my mother's mother was
married to. Ah. So, my mother's two older sisters, um Sita,
whose name is Ursula I'm named after her all the
Sita for short, and Melita mel mel were her two
older sisters who they were like, let's say, five to
(06:00):
eight years older than she was, maybe a little bit
older than that even and they at one point realized
my mother was not being cared for well. And so
when they were young, when they were I think fifteen
and seventeen, they they literally went to get my mother
and take her out of her home, out of her
(06:22):
mother's home, and brought her to the home of her father,
who was their father as well. And so she was
raised from the time she was let's say, about ten
years old, m for the rest of her life with
her father and her stepmother, you know, who was this
magical woman. So I think that what she what my
mother ended up having, was knowledge of what good looked
(06:43):
like and what bad looked like. She really zero in
on what good looked like and how she was treated
by her stepmother and her sisters and her and her father.
And it was from that point on in her life
it was a good life, even though it was a
poor life. She was, you know, my mother's black and Panama,
and just like the rest of the world, people of
(07:03):
dark skin were treated very, very poorly in Panama, and
so she was obviously she lived in the place that
was less than stellar, but she was raised with love
by her stepmother and her father, and her sisters and
brothers and all the people who who became her family.
It became her new family. I think she'd basically just
(07:26):
doubled down on that. She realized what good looked like,
and she realized what good didn't look like, and she said,
I'm going to do the good, which was very good
for us. Wow, that really is it really is a
testament to the only upside of having really traumatic childhood
is if you can get from it what you don't
want to do. Yeah, first of all, and secondly you
can change it. And clearly, as you said, she surrounded
(07:49):
you guys from day one with love. She knew what
parenting trauma could look like because she came with her
husband and her husband left, but she also knew how
that didn't matter. Ultimately, if you had people around you
who really loved you, that that's great. Exactly we were
that we were the true We would laugh about this,
my brother and my sister and I and we all had.
My brother and my sister have different trajectories than I had,
(08:11):
but all all great people at the end of the day.
They they're both amazingly strong people, my sister in particular,
but my mother. You know, we were, we were the
early examples of it takes a village because you know,
we grew up in a really tough neighborhood and Lower
East Side of New York City, and you know, we
lived in a really tough building or in a tough block,
(08:33):
et cetera. You know, it's basically poverty being raised in
poverty in the city that that at that time really
didn't have a lot of services for people who were
very poor. But the people on the block who were
all in the same situation, right that most of the
people on the block really cared for their children. And
(08:54):
so what we ended up doing was being raised by
the block, all of them on the block. So if
they saw me doing something wrong, you know, my mother
had given pretty clear instructions to all of them that
that they have a parent at that moment right inside
the hand, they would send us home you know, you
(09:14):
name it, and then called my mother and then we
would also get home and get punished as well. So
we literally had and she did the same thing with
the with the kids on the block that weren't her kids.
So it was it's unfortunate that today we don't really
have that type of community, that type of responsibility, broad
responsibility for each other is kind of breaking down a
(09:34):
little bit. One of the things that I think we're serving,
it's not, you know, particularly block and brown kids. It's
very difficult. You know, churches used to be important. Poor
parents all around you used to be important. But now
what's happening is that it's that is fracturing as well.
So even if you have a bad situation at home,
there's really not a strong connection to the church as
(09:56):
it used to be, or connection to community as it
used to be. You kind of suffering, suffer alone. And
fortunately I didn't have that as an outcome. We didn't. Yeah, yeah, no,
you're absolutely right. I mean, there are pockets of organizations
that are trying to make a difference. The Harlem Children's
don't clearly see the need for a community. But societally,
we've moved far away from my friend's child as my
(10:20):
child as well. Most unfortunately, Yes, it's unfortunately that's the case.
But that's that is the case, yes, And one of
the things that we have to do. One of the
things that mother Worries used to tell me was look
to you, to all of us, to look to your left,
look to your right. That's my brother and my sister.
And we had cousins who know my mother's sister's kids.
All of us were in the same things that These
(10:41):
are the people that you're going to know better than
anyone else, longer than anyone else in your life. So
you guys have to be responsible for each other. This
is another thing that has been that's fracturing a bit.
So my life is directly my joy, My life, my
(11:01):
comfort is directly connected to my sister's joy, life and comfort,
and my brother's joy in life and comfort and his
kids as well. So it's it's a very different environment
now that I see out there. We're sharing and suffering
together and having joy together is not something that happens
as much anymore. So, Oh, it's so true. So fast forward.
You now have children and you've got all these lessons
(11:24):
in your head. Now. Unfortunately, as you said, you lost
your mom when she was young and you were young,
and so she didn't get to stand by and watch
how you raised your children. But how did it work
for you? I mean, clearly, your kids are in a
different environment, different resources, different circumstances. I know your mom
(11:44):
worked hard and you worked hard. How are we able
to take those lessons and bring them forward? Yeah. One
of the things I say a lot and is that
I actually copied my mother's playbook for parenting. I have
no new thoughts. Even though I grew my kids are
growing up in an unbelievably different physical, financial, everything environment.
(12:10):
My mother died when I was twenty five. She was
forty nine. She was going to be fifty the year
that she died. And we were poor from the time,
you know, from the beginning of time, and we even
when my mother passed away, I was working at Xerox,
but I was early in my career, so it was
twenty five, so I'd been working for three or four
years by then, right, So I didn't have a lot
(12:30):
of money, but I was definitely, you know, compared to
my mother, I was, I was rich. My kids never
saw that. You know. By the time my son was
born and my daughter was born, my son is my stepson.
By the time they were born, we were already flying
on private planes. But if you talk to them today,
one of the things that will be very that's very
(12:52):
clear and in some ways very odd, is that they
don't really get that privilege, that of privilege, because we
just didn't raise them that way. We we we really
sheltered them and even to this day, we sheltered them
from wealth and sheltered them from insane comfort. We could
(13:17):
not raise them like we were raised right right, you know,
we had literally nothing when we were raised. My brother
and christer and nine my kids obviously had stuff, but
their idea of you know, what they were entitled to
even to this day, is very very little. They're entitled
(13:40):
to very little. Son is adopting a little bit better
to the new realities of of having, you know, going
to going to college with no dad, and you know,
we just didn't have the option to do. My daughter
is very much like uh, you know, a little bit
of a mole in that, you know, she worries about
(14:02):
how much money she makes and she's very much separated
from wealth and privilege. My daughter, my son is a
little bit closer. He gets it a little bit more.
But we so going back to the to the fundamental question.
I raised my kids very much like I was raised.
My husband was the same way. I mean, his parents
were teachers in Bermuda. They were clearly not dirt poor,
(14:26):
but they were far, far far from wealthy. And both
of his parents, particularly his mother, was pretty intense and
intense parents as well, and so we kind of walk
into this relationship and have these children with a huge
amount of consistency and how we think raising them should
(14:48):
what kind of mole we should raise them and model,
and so we don't give them a lot, you know,
we just didn't give them a lot of flexibility. Same
here this idea that people had like cell phones and
they would you know, not know they get cards when
they we literally that is that just did not happen.
It just did not happen. We finally got my daughter
or cell phone. My husband insisted, because we would he
(15:11):
would be the one who would pick her up from
school after work or after his work because he was
a scientist, so he could actually have a lot more
flexibility at the end of the day and he would
have to kind of walk around the building to find
out where she was. He said to me, can we
just give her a phone so I could talk? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah,
so we got the kids, you know phones. My god,
my daughter must have been fifteen, fourteen, fifteen years old
(15:34):
before she got it looks like fifteen sixty before she
got anything. It looks like a phone, and all of
her friends had phones. But we didn't care. It wasn't
like we were trying to not. We weren't trying to
eliminate technology from them. It was it was more that
they didn't really need it. We didn't see a need
for it, so why would you give it to them.
(15:54):
Another thing was the computers in your room. It took
Thank god, we grew up a little bit earlier. I
think your kids are a little bit younger than mine.
Parents who were raising their children today, I think their
kids not having a computer or a cell phoneus, they
would be considered martians. We were when my kids were
growing up. Fortunately, was still at the earlier phase of this,
and we can have a really simple discussion that went,
(16:16):
we're just not giving you one. I mean, it's just
you just you know, you can't. We can't afford that.
You can't afford to have one, We can't afford to
have one, et cetera, et cetera. But nowadays, I think
it would be considered so odd if you didn't have
access to their fear kids. Yeah. I actually my kids
were just on the cust of My rule was no
no computer in the room, no laptop. We had. There
(16:39):
were computers, but they were in a open space and
everyone had to use them there. As they got into
older grades, high school and all, and laptops became sort
of the way you had to actually communicate with your
teachers through the laptop then. But when I understood that,
I allowed it, but it really did. It did demonstrate
to me a real change in what parents could do,
(17:00):
because if you could keep the computers out, then you
could monitor what they were exposed to. I mean, the
Internet is this this big open place where they can
see anything, and now with laptops everywhere, children just you can't.
You can't censor. I mean, I know it's a bad word,
but you can't. You can't filter what they can see.
(17:21):
So no, I'm think censorship for parents is a big
piece of what we do. When we absolutely censor, we
absolutely do not allow children to see certain Our children, you,
I mean, hopefully everybody's doing this, just see certain things
that they're all readily available to be seen. We incriminated
from their ability to see it, plain and simple until
(17:44):
they get older then they can. I mean, we want
what my mother wanted. She didn't say this, but what
my mother wanted. What I want is I want my
kids to be formed as much as possible by me
and my husband, not by open society. Not in television,
not by you know, the bad things that you read,
(18:05):
not by the news. We wanted them to be formed
by us. Now it turns out you can't do that totally, right,
Wait if you could, But we were. We were not
ashamed at all at all to censor, to eliminate, to
actually give them our point of view, and in some
cases no other. When they were younger, that was it.
(18:28):
It was my myself, my husband, my sister, my brother,
you know, their uncles and aunts from the father's side,
and you know, some very very good friends who were
you know, as they as they were both born in
Rochester and raised in Rochester. We have some really great
friends around us who had children who were similar ages.
Some of them had children were similar ages, and that
(18:49):
was the world. That was their world, that was their world.
That's who they saw, that's who we hung out with,
that's who they heard from, who they you know. They
then they went to school. But literally we had a
tight as tighter reigned as you can, and we put
out kids in schools, both my son and my daughter,
in relatively small schools. We had the flexibility to do that,
(19:09):
Thank goodness, because particularly my daughter, who was very articulate
and curious and a little bit um more grown up.
When she was younger, we put her in a very
small private school and its small private school because we
just she was ripe for anything we and we were like, nah,
(19:35):
you know, keep us, keep her really close to us
and and her brother and to her brother, which was,
you know, a big thing that we had to work
on as well, to make sure that these two kids
were really close to each other like my brother and
sister and I. Right now, two quick things on that.
First of all, what you just said is really really important,
and I'm personally to me certainly, and I would have
(19:56):
advocated her parents. My three children, who were very different people.
They're not. They're relatively close in age, but not stair
step share a bond that they will share for the
rest of their lives. And it saddens me when I
understand that children don't get along. I mean, and I
say this from experience. I had two older brothers, and
while I was close to all of them, we didn't
(20:17):
have a strong bond. Un grew as we got older,
but when we were younger, we could. We didn't have
a lot in common. It was really important to me
that no matter what my kids had in commons that
they knew that to what your mom said, these are
going to be the people that you're going to know
for all of your life, and you're going to really
want to have them ride or die with you. And
(20:37):
so depends on whether you have to depend on each other. Yeah,
you have to each other along and support and you know,
all the stuff that we know about and when we
were growing up. When I was growing up, it was natural.
I mean that's the way it happened. Nowadays it seems
to be luck I said, a lot different. And part
of it is that mobility has increased significantly. Um this,
(20:59):
you know, acts technology has made it such that your
world automatically becomes bigger, even if it's not necessarily a
real world, it's a huge and that enables you to
distance yourself from things that are close by. And when
I was growing up, it was not that easy. I mean,
(21:19):
it just wasn't that easy. And thank Goodness for it,
I think, yeah, absolutely. I also like what you said
about you and your husband being having your opinions really matter,
because I find sometimes parents want to give their children
more agency at a younger age to weigh in and
my goal for three kids was as they got older,
(21:40):
I wanted them all to be able to hear. In
the bat I would say this to them, I want
you all to be able to hear when you're about
to do something that's questionable, the sentence that says, my
mother would kill me if and then the line and
then fill in whatever you're about to do. Now. As
they got much older, I would say, look, you may
do it anyway, but I want you to know before
(22:01):
you do it that I would kill you if you did.
I want them. I wanted them to have a core
from which they had to decide to stray, as opposed
to this kind of amorphous everybody decide together what it
is that is supposed to be happening. So I'm definitely
on the same page with you respect with respect to that.
I don't know what happens if you don't do that, though, Carol,
(22:23):
I really don't know if you're trying to parent today,
how in the world. It's just hard for me to
imagine just how you can deal with all they deal,
all they get, all they get access to. Right, So,
as they get older, what you want to do is
exactly what you said. I say this to my son
because he was the most worldly and he was like
(22:45):
hanging out with Frank. My daughter was very close to home,
and then it switched right. But my son get him
out of the house, and we can't get him out
of the house now. I mean he does live alone.
But this I would say to my son all the time.
I said to him, sweetheart, you have to understand. The
worst thing that could happen to us as a family
is that you die or get really hurt. You have
(23:08):
to make sure you understand your responsibility to me and
your father and your sister is that that does not happen.
You can't be in a situation that you know because
at the time, we'll never grown up. One of the
things I always worried about was being in a car
with somebody who was drinking. I was saying, I don't
(23:28):
care where you are, I don't care what you're doing.
I don't care good, better and different. I promise you
if you call me and you tell me I am
in trouble and I don't want to talk to you
about this at all. I want you to forget this,
but I want you to pick me up. I promise
you I will forge. I will not ask you. I
promise you I will not ask you literally, I will
(23:49):
come and get you, but you cannot use I'm afraid
that I'm a disappointment all this stuff that comes into
people's minds because at the end of the day, after
the event and if it happen, is the event, nothing matters,
nothing of all that history. Would you really have a
responsibility to make sure that you take care of yourself,
that you don't put yourself in danger that you don't
(24:10):
you know? And the same thing about sex. I was
to tell them both. Make sure you understand when you
make a baby, you are tied to the parent forever
to the other parent, so be by the way you
are deferent time to the child. Tied to the other parents.
You cannot be a good parent without having some relationship
(24:33):
with the other parent. You just can't. Now particularly it's
there in the world. It doesn't have to be this
love being hang out together relationship and you can talk
about something, right. So my son, who's my stepson, who
who I raised from the time he was like, let's
say months old, we call his mother is alive and
(24:58):
we we we had like we don't hang out together.
But early on I had to make the decision with
my husband and with his mother Charlie, that what the
most important thing was Malcolm. That was it was not
how I felt, how Charlie felt, to how Lloyd felt.
So and the most important relationship is going to be
(25:21):
between Malcolm and me, Lissa. These two people are close
together in the age. They are brother and sister, and
they're raised in the same community, household. And fortunately, I mean,
if you talked to Malcolm today, he his friends can't
really get it. It's like, you know, she's your I said.
(25:41):
He says, yeah, it's my mom. And then when he
graduated from graduated from Tiao as an undergraduate, you know,
he was top of his class or some important thing
in his class room. He had to go up and
get an award. And then we the parents, took a
picture and to take a picture with him and it
with me and my husband and his mother Charlie. And
(26:02):
the question by his friends was wild, this seems to
be getting along this fine, And he was like, there
was no really getting along or not getting along because
we didn't. It's not like we had this bond where
we'd go vacation together, not at all. But we raised
my son with zero ambiguity about who was the most
(26:22):
important person in the room. And it was not the
three of us, it was him. And so he's I think,
and you know, so he's turned out to be one
of these dis gracious, disgracious, loving kids, almost almost too gentle,
you know, almost too okay, Mom, he's he's a great kid.
(26:43):
He's he really is. My daughter is as well. I'm
proud of them, even though at thirty one and twenty
eight this year, thirty one this year, they are old,
they're older, they're grown up, but you know, you still
look at them like that. You know, I'm still worry
like they could Oh my goodness. You know, I say
to all these parents of these little babies, and they're
(27:04):
so focused on, you know, what their future is. It's like,
let me tell you, when they get to be in
their twenties and thirties, the parenting stress changes, but it
does not go away. And in some ways it's so
much harder because you don't have direct control and you
remember precisely where you were at that age. Now, who
(27:25):
remembers when they were two, but you really remember, I remember.
Your frame of reference is going to be much much sharper.
We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back to
the show. I love this conversation. I have one other
quick section if you've got time to ask you about it. Okay,
So I'm going to shift from your parenting to a
(27:48):
question that I know you get asked all the time,
but I'm going to try to put a different spin
on it. I'm gonna call it the balance question, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna qualify this so I know, and
I've heard you say in interviews that wherever you go,
women ask you how do you balance at all? And
then just recently I heard you talk about it's not
work and children, it's a life balance. So I've also
(28:10):
heard you say very correctly that men don't ask that question,
and they don't get asked that question. So the first
thing I want to ask you is about the question itself.
Do you feel like on some level that it's not
and if talking about questioning a woman's CEO or women
(28:31):
that's very prominent in business, do you think on any
level it's not an appropriate question because men don't get
asked it. I mean, I'm sure you're not offended by it,
but should that be taken out of the equation or
should everybody get asked it because it's an important part
of life. I think it's a mixture of the two
things that you just suggested things. One is that it
(28:55):
is it is annoying to a certain extent to be asked.
It's a little annoying to me to be asked by
women in particular and women in college, because I say
this whenever. And this is not not older women, Because
older women I get right, because history was different, life
was different by then. But I thought the colleges and
speak all the time, all the time. And one of
(29:18):
the things that's really funny is that the women in
the room, this is NBA students, law school students are
a gradual and they are dating people in their circles.
And they asked me the question, and I say, you
are defining your life as you go forward, and you
have fallen it. You have accepted a situation that you
(29:44):
don't have to accept. I mean, it was very natural
before when women stayed home, that they stayed home. But
now you are training to be one of you know,
a mover and a shaker in the world, and you
haven't had this conversation with your potential spouse where you say,
what are we gonna do? Well, you know I have
(30:04):
my law degree, you have your law degree, or were
your business degree? What are we gonna do when we
have with children? The assumption you walk into a relationship
of peers, right, this peer you walk in and he
walks in with this assumption that, of course, when that happens,
it's going to be you or you are at least
you walk in with it. And I say, the issue
(30:25):
I have is that if you feel comfortable enough asking
me this question, why the hell are you not comfortable
asking your husband, your potential husband, this question. So that's
one thing I just keep saying, falling into line when
there is really no line. It's kind of clay to
me make a new line this one. I mean, we're
marrying this twenty something year old person who's very well
(30:48):
trained like you are. You didn't get trained. I'm assuming
you're not training because you want to stay home. If
you want to stay home, I'm all for it, I
really am all. I think it's a great As I
said all the time, I mean, we need mothers and fathers,
so if they want to and we need them as
much as possible in participating in its life. So I don't.
(31:08):
So that's one one is that I want women to
actually not continue to fold into line. If they're not
comfortable doing that, they have a man who's or a partner,
it could be not even a man who they have
to have this conversation with. And if they can't have
it with them and the person's not open, you learn
something about it. That's the first. The second is the
(31:31):
second part of the discussion is that everyone today, as
even me, like so, when I was my husband was
a child and I was a child, the model was
our parents stayed at home, and when we came into
my mother stayed at home. The mother stayed at home.
(31:52):
When we came into the work world, it was more
accepted and actually expected that it was a good stay.
I mean it was more than accepted. It was of
course that would happen. That's changing that. That's why I
say that the women today ask the question. I mean,
you have the discussion yourselves, ask it to your employer,
talk to your future spouse of what what the hell
is going on right in the middle is I think
(32:12):
that we we over emphasize this idea that you have
to be in every single aspect of your kid's life
every moment. And this is so even my mother, who
could My mother could not be at home all the time.
She had to work. So, um, this idea of balance
(32:35):
between work and life. People ask me to question, I said, what,
I don't understand work and life balance. Isn't work part
of life life? I mean this like child's wearing is
part of life, is all part of life. So we
have to figure out a way to balance it all.
We we can't have this thing as like this new
this additional burden or our life. It's this other aspect
(32:57):
of our life that we're trying to fit in. It's
all of our life, and we have to kind of
figure out a way to make it play and make
it play well. And we over I think we over
index on models that don't really apply to us, and
particularly black and brown women. I tell you what, particularly
everybody who I grew up with, every woman had to
work because they had no choice. So they had to
(33:18):
figure out a way to have a family life or
work life or this life of that life, caring life.
So that's the same part. The third part of it
is I do believe that we owe it to men
to allow them to do what we are expecting women
(33:38):
to do, so we allow men to do what we
expect women to do. We expect women to come into
work and say, I'm thinking about having a child. How
are we going to change my work day? My work?
But we absolutely have to have men do the same thing.
How crazy is it that we continuously remove from our
(34:00):
children's life, very formative ages of their lives for massive
blocks of time. These men they go, they go work.
They I mean they literally in the past they would
go eight and come back at seven at night. I
don't think it's a good balance of parenting have the
woman be the or the man who the single part
be the only model. Right. My mother had to do it,
(34:22):
and she had to fill it in with all kinds
of makeshift uncles, you know whatever, all herself being both parents.
I think if you have the benefit of having both around,
we owe it to the men to give them the
ability to be significantly more engaged, ability and permission to
be significantly more engaged and say no, I'm gonna stay home. Right,
(34:45):
And we still we women still expect that that. Men
obviously look at other men and say, what the hell
are you doing? You're not watched or you're not, and
the answers, no, no no, I'm gonna stay home, I'm gonna
raise the kids for nine months or year because I
you know, whatever. Whatever. So I think that this whole
model has to change, and I think the women who
(35:06):
are the victor, who are quote unquote often the victims
of the model, have to in many ways lead the transition.
They have to start saying, wait a minute, guys, you know,
I just think we need to do. I need a
different model, need a different model, work, I need a
different model, dank k, I need a different model. We
need to figure out a different model to give with flexibility.
(35:28):
So I agree one hundred percent. What I hear you
saying as well, which I also agree with, is that culturally,
women have to get to the point where they're not
subconsciously going with this flow is huge no matter how
well educated you are, how many graduate degrees you have
in you in in many people's DNA is of thinking
(35:49):
of the way things are supposed to be. What you
can't do is figure out how you fit into that way.
But you figured this is a way, and so in
order to shift the in order to do exactly what
you said, which is so important to to sort of
try to level out how parenting works, because to your point,
father's parents, partners to people with different perspectives are needed.
(36:13):
Absolutely a tag team and they're needed. But there is
this expectation, no matter how smart everyone is, that that
that there is a way and you're breaking that way,
and and and culturally and societally, when you break that way,
there's there everybody's pauses, including the people themselves. So you're right,
(36:36):
these young people have to talk to their partners, but
they also have to talk to themselves because really, for
all of the bravery, and I'm not trying to make
live this at all, but really, the paths that women
are forging and are able to forge, now this part
is kind of they're they're they're forging ahead in industry.
(36:57):
And it's funny because you know, just as an asside you,
the current women who are black CEOs, Ros Brewer, the
Sanda Duckett and other CEOs are women of color, Sonya Saigal,
and Andrew Neuri all you had children. I mean, you
guys all manage to have children. It's not as if
(37:17):
there is a role model of the single woman who
is really breaking through the ceiling. So it exists, and
each of you figured it out. But undoubtedly each of
you figured it out in a way that was what
took some doing and took some sort of thinking differently.
So that part for young women. I hope they're all
(37:40):
they're all naturally thinking a little differently because of the
world is different. But I wonder, and I worry a little.
I mean, certainly, you know my daughter's thinking differently. She's
sort of not in the mindset of the way my
household is set up is not the way her households
going to be set up. I know that's clear, But
I do think we don't tell to your point exactly,
don't tell young women it's it's not like it's a
(38:01):
breaking the fairy tale. It's like it's not even a
You have so much opportunity to figure it out, but
you have to acknowledge that. You know it's important. And
I've heard you do this before, talk about sort of
the heights that you have reached, what you give up.
Everything is a balance, Everything is a balance. Every choice
you make is a choice, if you know what I mean, right, No,
(38:23):
obviously you're not doing the thing that you chose not
to do. But wait, sometimes the thing you chose not
to do is what you want to do. This is
not perfection the people I would I say this, and
in the book you'll read it where people will say,
my god, you guys, have you look at you and
look at your two kids, look at the perfect life.
I said, if you were a fly on the wall
in my house on any given day over the years
(38:46):
that we were living together, my husband and I were
the children you would say, the craziest goddamn family I
have ever been engaged with, because we did exactly what
everybody else did. Scrambled you know, um fall over the
listen to that who's taken up a garbage We didn't name.
We didn't have this perfect um place. It wasn't. It wasn't.
(39:10):
Every choice we made was perfect, and it made our
lives easier. No, we screwed up a whole bunch of stuff.
We made choices and and we live. We lived purposefully,
probably because we didn't know how to not do it.
We lived a very ordinary life. We lived a very
ordinary life. Obviously it's mixed in with flying around on
planes and going up, but but we live. I tell you,
(39:32):
walk into our house, people like we know you guys,
I literally when I became CEO, people would say to
me there was seeing in Wegmans or wherever, you know,
the food store and everything shop. I would say, if
we want to eat, we shop. I don't understand the
other thing. You know, you clean your own house, Yeah,
I clean my own house. Yes, I shop. You know,
(39:53):
after a while, you get somebody to help you clean
the house once every two weeks or something like that.
But I clean the house, We do our lowe lawn.
We shop. And the reason why it was not only
because we wanted to teach our kids. That wasn't the
primary example the thing that we were focused on. We
were focused more on the fact that it was part
of our normal life. If you know, that's the way
the way we were raised. I want to say one
(40:13):
other thing about what you said. That's really important about
defining and about looking looking behind, looking past, and picking
up those those activities. The world was defined by white men.
Everywhere in the world it was defined. But it's called supremacy.
White men defined the world even in a lot of
(40:35):
African nations, Asian, you name it. Men defined the world
definitely the Western culture. White men did it. They did
it to their benefit. I'm not saying at the time
that they said about what I want to do is,
you know, subjugate these people. But at the end of
the day, that's what they did. They subjugated women, and
(40:56):
they absolutely subjugated and mistreated blacks and anybody who didn't
look like them. That model of the world is what
we live in. That's what we live in. So what
we're trying to do now, and I say this whole
time we're trying. We're trying to say, you have to
have to redefine everything. Not everything has to be thrown out,
(41:19):
but we have to look at every single thing and say,
how in the world is it that if you want
to go to MIT or Harvard or XYZ, that we
have to take these tests that the white guy defined.
He defined he and white defined what greatness looks like.
And they did that to the exclusion, acted with the
(41:41):
exclusion of anybody else participating. Literally, So I say, even
family structures the way that it's defined today. The man
goes out, we say that he's definitive, he's he can
make decisions, he's a strong business leader, you know, aggressive,
all of these things that are that it's a model
that we the reason why we think it is a
(42:02):
good model is because the only model we've seen, the
only model we've seen. The reason why we think it's
a good model that women stay home and literally depend
on their husbands to deliver money, to deliver freedoms, is
because it's the only model we've seen. By the way,
that model can work. But there are other models that
(42:22):
can work as well. And you know what I'm saying
is that I don't think it's a bad thing that
you decide to stay home, But I'm just saying you
have to decide to do it. It has to be
your decision, particularly if you pursue education in some of
the most needed fields in the world, in law, in education,
(42:46):
and engineering. You to actually do that and then say, well,
my husband doesn't want me to work, it sounds a
little bit odd today. So I just think I'm not
judging that. I'm not saying that staying home is bad.
I just want to make sure that we do it right.
The little coda I would add, though, is that one
(43:08):
of the reasons you stay home is if they're children,
that somebody's gotta right, we's got to raise the children.
Saying I'm not in the book, I say this, I
was not willing to outsource our parenting, so we literally
went crazy. And when it got to the point where
we could not fit this in anymore, my husband left
(43:29):
the twentieths old and nine. He retired because we got
it got to the point that the kids were moving
around too much. It was it was just crazy, right,
and so we just they were in all kinds of
stuff and we just didn't want to have someone there
who did all that stuff for us. So we had
to make a set of choices, and we sat down
(43:50):
and talked about it. At that point, it was kind
of hard for me to say I would I would stop.
I was gonna you know, I'm in the middle of
my career. My husband was ending his career even in
the beginning, in the beginning of his career when we
started to have kids, in the middle of his career
when we start to have kids. He was a scientist,
so he had a lot of flexibility. He could leave
the lab, you know, he didn't travel anywhere near as
(44:12):
much as I traveled, so we were able to have
in our house a parent almost all the time. By
the way, you realize as well, how bad a parent
you can be, and how you know because we're dealing
with stuff with our kids that both of our both
myself and my husband did to them. Right, We'll trying
to trying to fix it, we're trying to undo it.
(44:34):
But I prefer that we do it, not somebody else
does it. Yeah. Yeah, So when you when you start
to try to have these conversations, it can't it is
the model needs to be changed. But it's also the
recognition that somebody's got to do it. I mean, and
actually that is part of the reason why I do
this work in this podcast, because the it that has
to be done is important and it can't be It's
(44:59):
probably the mos It's important thing. It really is. I
know that it is. I say this a lot. The
one thing that will destroy you personally and your world
order is a child that is intrust that as you know,
a child that's on drugs, a child that's in the
system of some jail. I have friends, and I you know,
(45:23):
that doesn't mean you're a band parent. Some of it
just happens. But I tell you, I have friends, and
you can see just how tormented their life is. So
the most important thing you can do is make sure
that these kids are set up to be good adults. Absolutely,
because if you don't do this, your life has changed
(45:43):
forever for the bad, not for the clear. You are
only as happy as your unhappy as child. And so
if you write, I mean so we should all look
at it as parents. It's like a defense mechanism. Make
sure they're okay, so that you can actually be technically okay.
You can relax because I tell you I have friends,
executive friends. You know, it's just so hard. Yeah, if
(46:07):
they've tried, they've done everything. You know, the kids have
gotten in some bad situations and it's just their lives
are wrapped around either fixing it, which in many ways
is probably a good effort, but in a lot of
ways just saying it's not fixable, yeah, and basically having
the distance yourself. Yeah, you see yourself. There's no way,
(46:29):
there's no way that can be a good outcome. No, no,
So for all the young I'm going to make sure
that young people hear this because all the young people
need to know that there's a lot of a lot
of analysis in there. I mean, it's on the one hand,
the fairy tale of love, marriage, and children is one
that is time immemorial. But on the other hand. There's
the model is. The model is changing and we just
(46:50):
have to figure out how how it gets changed. Ursula.
I so appreciate this conversation. I could go on forever,
but I'm going to wrap it up here. I want
to thank you so much. It's been a great conversation
and I always love to chat with you, and I
know our listeners really appreciate hearing it as well. Now,
one thing that I would like you to do before
(47:11):
we go it is to play my bonus realm, where
I'm going to ask you first your favorite poem, and
then secondly ask there are any children's books that you
remember either reading yourself or reading to your kids. Oh yeah, yeah,
I'm going to add one that's a favorite movie. Okay,
let's show on TV because we don't really watch about
the TV. But my favorite poem, interestingly enough, is a
(47:36):
poem that I received very recently. I don't love the
name of it and all about I received it after
my husband died, and it was a poem I quoted
the last line of it in Vernon's Vernon's You Know
it was a poem that basically remind did me. It
reminds me of the reason why I'm feeling so bad
(47:58):
is because I had they to love so much and
be welked by someone's a great Irish problem and a
Jewish problem. Sorry, I'll send it so that she was
just an amazing thing isn't very sad, and it makes
me cry whenever I read it. But it's one of
these things that when you think about it, you go,
I gotta you know, you feel so terribly, you feel
(48:18):
so like the world is lost because you were blessed
with a relationship that had that much of an impact
on you, even impact on you. But before that, I
didn't have a favorite poem. My favorite saying is where
you are is not who you are. And remember that
when you're rich, in famous all the time. And she
(48:39):
the context is that when you look around the world,
And we saw for the last four years before our
new president, the ramifications of not understanding this. We saw
a person who could look at another person and look
at look at another person and buy visuals and difference
can define in his own mind whether this person was worthy.
(49:01):
And you know you you, you know, I make a
lot of money, I'm powerful, I'm so I'm better than you.
Is something that is so abhorrent to me, it is
so horrible because my mother, who I think was masterful,
I mean just masterful, had would fit on nobody's scale.
(49:23):
Donald Trump would have thrown her ound sent her back.
And she's produced three value and scores more. Added children
fundamentally to the Wall favorite movie, and we watched over
and over again from the time my kids were tiny
till the time they were older, The Godfather. So my
(49:47):
two and three year old daughter and six and seven
year old son knows most of the The Guts, very
violent movie. I mean, that is my husband's favorite movie.
And yes, our children watched it from a very very
early age, so we love that. And the favorite show,
our favorite show in the world's Jeopardy, and we still
(50:07):
we've watched Jeopardy from the time that the kids were
we and to this day at seven or seven thirty,
depending on you know what part of the United States
shore and we watched Jeopardy. And then books. When my
kids were growing up, I read them most of the
books that I was reading, so the way that we
did this, and then when they started to read themselves,
we gave them two books. But when I was growing up,
(50:29):
my mother used to do this to me as well,
she would read the newspaper. So we didn't have children's books.
You just read whatever. So I just read regular books
to them and then when they got to the point
where they could start kind of feeling around. My daughter
liked Good Night Moon and The Hungry Caterpillar. Those were
her favorite books. My son, interestingly, usk was dyslexic, very
(50:52):
very reading, dyslexic, brilliant mathematician and now can do both
fairly well because he was trained well and so when
he was a kid, he we would read to him
almost exclusively because he was really not very good at reading,
and we would my husband would always read him in
the newspaper, always do paper. He's deflectic as well. I
(51:12):
never saw my husband read a book, reading long enough
a book. I don't think I've ever seen him read
a book. My husband brilliant, you know, eighty five patents
math science, but he was not a big reader. And
my son at the end has tuned out to be
a reasonable reader as well, but not you know, you
had to do all kinds of things to get through school.
(51:33):
That is such a good tip, though, when I've never
heard that. If you're if you've been reading as a parent,
and you have a little one read your book to them.
My mother used to do that, so he's read him
whatever we were reading. Thank you so much, I'm gonna
let you go. I really appreciate your time. I hope
everyone listening enjoyed this conversation and that you'll come back
(51:53):
for more. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen
to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more parenting info
and advice, please check out the Ground Control Parenting blog
at ground control Parenting dot com. You can also find
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on LinkedIn under Carol Sutton Lewis. The Ground Control Parenting
(52:14):
with Carol Sutton Lewis podcast is a part of the
Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartMedia. Until the
next time, take care and thanks for listening.
Hello, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog and
now a podcast creative appearance raising black and brown children.
I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. In
this podcast series, I talk with some really interesting people
about the job and the joy of parenting. This week,
I'm bringing back a great guest from the archives, Ursula Burns,
the first black woman CEO to head a Fortune five
(00:27):
hundred company. Ursula joined me on the podcast a few
years ago, and her reflections and observations are just as
relevant and relatable today. We covered the waterfront in this conversation.
We talked about how she grew up all the valuable
lessons her mother taught her and how she passed them
on to her children, and then we take our deep
dive into the concept of work life balance. She had
(00:49):
a really interesting take on this, and she had some
really good advice for young people wondering how the professional
lives are going to play out when they have children.
There's so much good stuff in this conversation, and I'm
so glad you've joined us. I am so happy and
really honored to have Arthula Burns as my guest on
today's podcast. Many people know Ursula as the former CEO
(01:10):
of Xerox and the first black woman to be named
CEO of a fourteen five hundred company. Her memoir, Where
You Are Is Not Who You Are, will be out
in late spring. Her list of a business accomplishments since
she left the leadership of Xerox a few years ago
are really impressive. Indeed, I've known Ursla for many years.
In addition to all of these great accomplishments, I also
(01:32):
know her as a devoted mother to her now adult children,
a daughter, Melissa, son Malcolm, as someone who is deeply
invested in parenting, who's been influenced by the masterful parenting
of her mother, and who's brought these lessons to her
own children. And so I'm so excited that she's here
to talk with us about this today. Welcome to ground
Control Parenting. Ursula really really thrilled to be here. Well,
(01:54):
let's get started. So I know that parenting has been
really influential in your life, in your work, and in
your parenting. So let's just start. Let's back up and
start with little Ursula Burns, who grew up in New
York City, And can you tell me a little bit
about I mean, You've talked about her a lot, but
if you could tell me a little bit about your
amazing mom, Olga Raquel Burns, and how you were parented. Yeah,
(02:19):
my mother was. She was an immigrant from Panama who
came here with her husband, her then husband. I was
a middle child, My brother was the oldest and my
sister the youngest, and she was very, very quickly left
to parent the three of us alone. She was a
(02:40):
masterful parent. She surrounds her children. She surrounded her children.
He had very little flexibility to do anything. Playing is simple.
We grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
when the Lower East Side was not cool, when it
was actually dangerous, drug infested, gang infested. One of her
primary rules was that she had to know where we
(03:00):
were at old times, and we were highly controlled. She was.
She was very clear about what right and wrong looked like.
She was very vocal and physical if we were not
doing what was right all the time, very very focused
on education. And one of her she had all these
(03:22):
crazy sayings. One of her best sayings was the title
of my book, Interestingly enough is which is where you
are is not who you are. Because we grew up
in a disastrous place, and it was dirty. It was
just things that weren't that great. When you walked into
our house, it was an organized, clean place with um,
(03:45):
dignity and just love and and control. And so she
That's why I liked the word the ground control parenting
and like the title, because that was my mother in control.
But she was. She was very loving and extremely smart.
I'm unbelievably insightful. And you know you say this about
(04:07):
people say this about their parents all time. Yeah, but
my mother really well, she had these crazy sayings that
I live by today. I said. One of them is
where you are is not who you are. She would
always say to me, Max, my middle name is Maxine. Max.
The world doesn't happen to you. You have to happen
to the world. Which men don't sit back and wait
(04:27):
for things to kind of come to you. You You have
to kind of go there and get them. And she
would say another thing she said all the time was
you leave behind more than you take away. And that's
how you're going to be judged in your life. It's
not anything else. Not gonna be how much you have,
how much you got, how famous you are. It's going
to be whether or not you've left behind in the
(04:47):
world more than you take away. She was just one
of these really masterful women who were she was definitely
underestimated and definitely underutilized giving her capacity. And she died
very young. Yes, yes, a couple of questions. What was
her core of that? I mean, was it how she
was raised or was it her ability to come to
a new country? And I think I think it was
(05:09):
how I think it's a great question, by the way,
And it's interesting how much I learned about her mother
after she died, not before before she died. She didn't
spend a lot of time speaking about her childhood or
about my father or anything. I mean, she had no
bad words about anyone, but she did have a really
difficult upbring. She was raised by her mother, but her
(05:37):
father was not the person who my mother's mother was
married to. Ah. So, my mother's two older sisters, um Sita,
whose name is Ursula I'm named after her all the
Sita for short, and Melita mel mel were her two
older sisters who they were like, let's say, five to
(06:00):
eight years older than she was, maybe a little bit
older than that even and they at one point realized
my mother was not being cared for well. And so
when they were young, when they were I think fifteen
and seventeen, they they literally went to get my mother
and take her out of her home, out of her
(06:22):
mother's home, and brought her to the home of her father,
who was their father as well. And so she was
raised from the time she was let's say, about ten
years old, m for the rest of her life with
her father and her stepmother, you know, who was this
magical woman. So I think that what she what my
mother ended up having, was knowledge of what good looked
(06:43):
like and what bad looked like. She really zero in
on what good looked like and how she was treated
by her stepmother and her sisters and her and her father.
And it was from that point on in her life
it was a good life, even though it was a
poor life. She was, you know, my mother's black and Panama,
and just like the rest of the world, people of
(07:03):
dark skin were treated very, very poorly in Panama, and
so she was obviously she lived in the place that
was less than stellar, but she was raised with love
by her stepmother and her father, and her sisters and
brothers and all the people who who became her family.
It became her new family. I think she'd basically just
(07:26):
doubled down on that. She realized what good looked like,
and she realized what good didn't look like, and she said,
I'm going to do the good, which was very good
for us. Wow, that really is it really is a
testament to the only upside of having really traumatic childhood
is if you can get from it what you don't
want to do. Yeah, first of all, and secondly you
can change it. And clearly, as you said, she surrounded
(07:49):
you guys from day one with love. She knew what
parenting trauma could look like because she came with her
husband and her husband left, but she also knew how
that didn't matter. Ultimately, if you had people around you
who really loved you, that that's great. Exactly we were
that we were the true We would laugh about this,
my brother and my sister and I and we all had.
My brother and my sister have different trajectories than I had,
(08:11):
but all all great people at the end of the day.
They they're both amazingly strong people, my sister in particular,
but my mother. You know, we were, we were the
early examples of it takes a village because you know,
we grew up in a really tough neighborhood and Lower
East Side of New York City, and you know, we
lived in a really tough building or in a tough block,
(08:33):
et cetera. You know, it's basically poverty being raised in
poverty in the city that that at that time really
didn't have a lot of services for people who were
very poor. But the people on the block who were
all in the same situation, right that most of the
people on the block really cared for their children. And
(08:54):
so what we ended up doing was being raised by
the block, all of them on the block. So if
they saw me doing something wrong, you know, my mother
had given pretty clear instructions to all of them that
that they have a parent at that moment right inside
the hand, they would send us home you know, you
(09:14):
name it, and then called my mother and then we
would also get home and get punished as well. So
we literally had and she did the same thing with
the with the kids on the block that weren't her kids.
So it was it's unfortunate that today we don't really
have that type of community, that type of responsibility, broad
responsibility for each other is kind of breaking down a
(09:34):
little bit. One of the things that I think we're serving,
it's not, you know, particularly block and brown kids. It's
very difficult. You know, churches used to be important. Poor
parents all around you used to be important. But now
what's happening is that it's that is fracturing as well.
So even if you have a bad situation at home,
there's really not a strong connection to the church as
(09:56):
it used to be, or connection to community as it
used to be. You kind of suffering, suffer alone. And
fortunately I didn't have that as an outcome. We didn't. Yeah, yeah, no,
you're absolutely right. I mean, there are pockets of organizations
that are trying to make a difference. The Harlem Children's
don't clearly see the need for a community. But societally,
we've moved far away from my friend's child as my
(10:20):
child as well. Most unfortunately, Yes, it's unfortunately that's the case.
But that's that is the case, yes, And one of
the things that we have to do. One of the
things that mother Worries used to tell me was look
to you, to all of us, to look to your left,
look to your right. That's my brother and my sister.
And we had cousins who know my mother's sister's kids.
All of us were in the same things that These
(10:41):
are the people that you're going to know better than
anyone else, longer than anyone else in your life. So
you guys have to be responsible for each other. This
is another thing that has been that's fracturing a bit.
So my life is directly my joy, My life, my
(11:01):
comfort is directly connected to my sister's joy, life and comfort,
and my brother's joy in life and comfort and his
kids as well. So it's it's a very different environment
now that I see out there. We're sharing and suffering
together and having joy together is not something that happens
as much anymore. So, Oh, it's so true. So fast forward.
You now have children and you've got all these lessons
(11:24):
in your head. Now. Unfortunately, as you said, you lost
your mom when she was young and you were young,
and so she didn't get to stand by and watch
how you raised your children. But how did it work
for you? I mean, clearly, your kids are in a
different environment, different resources, different circumstances. I know your mom
(11:44):
worked hard and you worked hard. How are we able
to take those lessons and bring them forward? Yeah. One
of the things I say a lot and is that
I actually copied my mother's playbook for parenting. I have
no new thoughts. Even though I grew my kids are
growing up in an unbelievably different physical, financial, everything environment.
(12:10):
My mother died when I was twenty five. She was
forty nine. She was going to be fifty the year
that she died. And we were poor from the time,
you know, from the beginning of time, and we even
when my mother passed away, I was working at Xerox,
but I was early in my career, so it was
twenty five, so I'd been working for three or four
years by then, right, So I didn't have a lot
(12:30):
of money, but I was definitely, you know, compared to
my mother, I was, I was rich. My kids never
saw that. You know. By the time my son was
born and my daughter was born, my son is my stepson.
By the time they were born, we were already flying
on private planes. But if you talk to them today,
one of the things that will be very that's very
(12:52):
clear and in some ways very odd, is that they
don't really get that privilege, that of privilege, because we
just didn't raise them that way. We we we really
sheltered them and even to this day, we sheltered them
from wealth and sheltered them from insane comfort. We could
(13:17):
not raise them like we were raised right right, you know,
we had literally nothing when we were raised. My brother
and christer and nine my kids obviously had stuff, but
their idea of you know, what they were entitled to
even to this day, is very very little. They're entitled
(13:40):
to very little. Son is adopting a little bit better
to the new realities of of having, you know, going
to going to college with no dad, and you know,
we just didn't have the option to do. My daughter
is very much like uh, you know, a little bit
of a mole in that, you know, she worries about
(14:02):
how much money she makes and she's very much separated
from wealth and privilege. My daughter, my son is a
little bit closer. He gets it a little bit more.
But we so going back to the to the fundamental question.
I raised my kids very much like I was raised.
My husband was the same way. I mean, his parents
were teachers in Bermuda. They were clearly not dirt poor,
(14:26):
but they were far, far far from wealthy. And both
of his parents, particularly his mother, was pretty intense and
intense parents as well, and so we kind of walk
into this relationship and have these children with a huge
amount of consistency and how we think raising them should
(14:48):
what kind of mole we should raise them and model,
and so we don't give them a lot, you know,
we just didn't give them a lot of flexibility. Same
here this idea that people had like cell phones and
they would you know, not know they get cards when
they we literally that is that just did not happen.
It just did not happen. We finally got my daughter
or cell phone. My husband insisted, because we would he
(15:11):
would be the one who would pick her up from
school after work or after his work because he was
a scientist, so he could actually have a lot more
flexibility at the end of the day and he would
have to kind of walk around the building to find
out where she was. He said to me, can we
just give her a phone so I could talk? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah,
so we got the kids, you know phones. My god,
my daughter must have been fifteen, fourteen, fifteen years old
(15:34):
before she got it looks like fifteen sixty before she
got anything. It looks like a phone, and all of
her friends had phones. But we didn't care. It wasn't
like we were trying to not. We weren't trying to
eliminate technology from them. It was it was more that
they didn't really need it. We didn't see a need
for it, so why would you give it to them.
(15:54):
Another thing was the computers in your room. It took
Thank god, we grew up a little bit earlier. I
think your kids are a little bit younger than mine.
Parents who were raising their children today, I think their
kids not having a computer or a cell phoneus, they
would be considered martians. We were when my kids were
growing up. Fortunately, was still at the earlier phase of this,
and we can have a really simple discussion that went,
(16:16):
we're just not giving you one. I mean, it's just
you just you know, you can't. We can't afford that.
You can't afford to have one, We can't afford to
have one, et cetera, et cetera. But nowadays, I think
it would be considered so odd if you didn't have
access to their fear kids. Yeah. I actually my kids
were just on the cust of My rule was no
no computer in the room, no laptop. We had. There
(16:39):
were computers, but they were in a open space and
everyone had to use them there. As they got into
older grades, high school and all, and laptops became sort
of the way you had to actually communicate with your
teachers through the laptop then. But when I understood that,
I allowed it, but it really did. It did demonstrate
to me a real change in what parents could do,
(17:00):
because if you could keep the computers out, then you
could monitor what they were exposed to. I mean, the
Internet is this this big open place where they can
see anything, and now with laptops everywhere, children just you can't.
You can't censor. I mean, I know it's a bad word,
but you can't. You can't filter what they can see.
(17:21):
So no, I'm think censorship for parents is a big
piece of what we do. When we absolutely censor, we
absolutely do not allow children to see certain Our children, you,
I mean, hopefully everybody's doing this, just see certain things
that they're all readily available to be seen. We incriminated
from their ability to see it, plain and simple until
(17:44):
they get older then they can. I mean, we want
what my mother wanted. She didn't say this, but what
my mother wanted. What I want is I want my
kids to be formed as much as possible by me
and my husband, not by open society. Not in television,
not by you know, the bad things that you read,
(18:05):
not by the news. We wanted them to be formed
by us. Now it turns out you can't do that totally, right,
Wait if you could, But we were. We were not
ashamed at all at all to censor, to eliminate, to
actually give them our point of view, and in some
cases no other. When they were younger, that was it.
(18:28):
It was my myself, my husband, my sister, my brother,
you know, their uncles and aunts from the father's side,
and you know, some very very good friends who were
you know, as they as they were both born in
Rochester and raised in Rochester. We have some really great
friends around us who had children who were similar ages.
Some of them had children were similar ages, and that
(18:49):
was the world. That was their world, that was their world.
That's who they saw, that's who we hung out with,
that's who they heard from, who they you know. They
then they went to school. But literally we had a
tight as tighter reigned as you can, and we put
out kids in schools, both my son and my daughter,
in relatively small schools. We had the flexibility to do that,
(19:09):
Thank goodness, because particularly my daughter, who was very articulate
and curious and a little bit um more grown up.
When she was younger, we put her in a very
small private school and its small private school because we
just she was ripe for anything we and we were like, nah,
(19:35):
you know, keep us, keep her really close to us
and and her brother and to her brother, which was,
you know, a big thing that we had to work
on as well, to make sure that these two kids
were really close to each other like my brother and
sister and I. Right now, two quick things on that.
First of all, what you just said is really really important,
and I'm personally to me certainly, and I would have
(19:56):
advocated her parents. My three children, who were very different people.
They're not. They're relatively close in age, but not stair
step share a bond that they will share for the
rest of their lives. And it saddens me when I
understand that children don't get along. I mean, and I
say this from experience. I had two older brothers, and
while I was close to all of them, we didn't
(20:17):
have a strong bond. Un grew as we got older,
but when we were younger, we could. We didn't have
a lot in common. It was really important to me
that no matter what my kids had in commons that
they knew that to what your mom said, these are
going to be the people that you're going to know
for all of your life, and you're going to really
want to have them ride or die with you. And
(20:37):
so depends on whether you have to depend on each other. Yeah,
you have to each other along and support and you know,
all the stuff that we know about and when we
were growing up. When I was growing up, it was natural.
I mean that's the way it happened. Nowadays it seems
to be luck I said, a lot different. And part
of it is that mobility has increased significantly. Um this,
(20:59):
you know, acts technology has made it such that your
world automatically becomes bigger, even if it's not necessarily a
real world, it's a huge and that enables you to
distance yourself from things that are close by. And when
I was growing up, it was not that easy. I mean,
(21:19):
it just wasn't that easy. And thank Goodness for it,
I think, yeah, absolutely. I also like what you said
about you and your husband being having your opinions really matter,
because I find sometimes parents want to give their children
more agency at a younger age to weigh in and
my goal for three kids was as they got older,
(21:40):
I wanted them all to be able to hear. In
the bat I would say this to them, I want
you all to be able to hear when you're about
to do something that's questionable, the sentence that says, my
mother would kill me if and then the line and
then fill in whatever you're about to do. Now. As
they got much older, I would say, look, you may
do it anyway, but I want you to know before
(22:01):
you do it that I would kill you if you did.
I want them. I wanted them to have a core
from which they had to decide to stray, as opposed
to this kind of amorphous everybody decide together what it
is that is supposed to be happening. So I'm definitely
on the same page with you respect with respect to that.
I don't know what happens if you don't do that, though, Carol,
(22:23):
I really don't know if you're trying to parent today,
how in the world. It's just hard for me to
imagine just how you can deal with all they deal,
all they get, all they get access to. Right, So,
as they get older, what you want to do is
exactly what you said. I say this to my son
because he was the most worldly and he was like
(22:45):
hanging out with Frank. My daughter was very close to home,
and then it switched right. But my son get him
out of the house, and we can't get him out
of the house now. I mean he does live alone.
But this I would say to my son all the time.
I said to him, sweetheart, you have to understand. The
worst thing that could happen to us as a family
is that you die or get really hurt. You have
(23:08):
to make sure you understand your responsibility to me and
your father and your sister is that that does not happen.
You can't be in a situation that you know because
at the time, we'll never grown up. One of the
things I always worried about was being in a car
with somebody who was drinking. I was saying, I don't
(23:28):
care where you are, I don't care what you're doing.
I don't care good, better and different. I promise you
if you call me and you tell me I am
in trouble and I don't want to talk to you
about this at all. I want you to forget this,
but I want you to pick me up. I promise
you I will forge. I will not ask you. I
promise you I will not ask you literally, I will
(23:49):
come and get you, but you cannot use I'm afraid
that I'm a disappointment all this stuff that comes into
people's minds because at the end of the day, after
the event and if it happen, is the event, nothing matters,
nothing of all that history. Would you really have a
responsibility to make sure that you take care of yourself,
that you don't put yourself in danger that you don't
(24:10):
you know? And the same thing about sex. I was
to tell them both. Make sure you understand when you
make a baby, you are tied to the parent forever
to the other parent, so be by the way you
are deferent time to the child. Tied to the other parents.
You cannot be a good parent without having some relationship
(24:33):
with the other parent. You just can't. Now particularly it's
there in the world. It doesn't have to be this
love being hang out together relationship and you can talk
about something, right. So my son, who's my stepson, who
who I raised from the time he was like, let's
say months old, we call his mother is alive and
(24:58):
we we we had like we don't hang out together.
But early on I had to make the decision with
my husband and with his mother Charlie, that what the
most important thing was Malcolm. That was it was not
how I felt, how Charlie felt, to how Lloyd felt.
So and the most important relationship is going to be
(25:21):
between Malcolm and me, Lissa. These two people are close
together in the age. They are brother and sister, and
they're raised in the same community, household. And fortunately, I mean,
if you talked to Malcolm today, he his friends can't
really get it. It's like, you know, she's your I said.
(25:41):
He says, yeah, it's my mom. And then when he
graduated from graduated from Tiao as an undergraduate, you know,
he was top of his class or some important thing
in his class room. He had to go up and
get an award. And then we the parents, took a
picture and to take a picture with him and it
with me and my husband and his mother Charlie. And
(26:02):
the question by his friends was wild, this seems to
be getting along this fine, And he was like, there
was no really getting along or not getting along because
we didn't. It's not like we had this bond where
we'd go vacation together, not at all. But we raised
my son with zero ambiguity about who was the most
(26:22):
important person in the room. And it was not the
three of us, it was him. And so he's I think,
and you know, so he's turned out to be one
of these dis gracious, disgracious, loving kids, almost almost too gentle,
you know, almost too okay, Mom, he's he's a great kid.
(26:43):
He's he really is. My daughter is as well. I'm
proud of them, even though at thirty one and twenty
eight this year, thirty one this year, they are old,
they're older, they're grown up, but you know, you still
look at them like that. You know, I'm still worry
like they could Oh my goodness. You know, I say
to all these parents of these little babies, and they're
(27:04):
so focused on, you know, what their future is. It's like,
let me tell you, when they get to be in
their twenties and thirties, the parenting stress changes, but it
does not go away. And in some ways it's so
much harder because you don't have direct control and you
remember precisely where you were at that age. Now, who
(27:25):
remembers when they were two, but you really remember, I remember.
Your frame of reference is going to be much much sharper.
We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back to
the show. I love this conversation. I have one other
quick section if you've got time to ask you about it. Okay,
So I'm going to shift from your parenting to a
(27:48):
question that I know you get asked all the time,
but I'm going to try to put a different spin
on it. I'm gonna call it the balance question, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna qualify this so I know, and
I've heard you say in interviews that wherever you go,
women ask you how do you balance at all? And
then just recently I heard you talk about it's not
work and children, it's a life balance. So I've also
(28:10):
heard you say very correctly that men don't ask that question,
and they don't get asked that question. So the first
thing I want to ask you is about the question itself.
Do you feel like on some level that it's not
and if talking about questioning a woman's CEO or women
(28:31):
that's very prominent in business, do you think on any
level it's not an appropriate question because men don't get
asked it. I mean, I'm sure you're not offended by it,
but should that be taken out of the equation or
should everybody get asked it because it's an important part
of life. I think it's a mixture of the two
things that you just suggested things. One is that it
(28:55):
is it is annoying to a certain extent to be asked.
It's a little annoying to me to be asked by
women in particular and women in college, because I say
this whenever. And this is not not older women, Because
older women I get right, because history was different, life
was different by then. But I thought the colleges and
speak all the time, all the time. And one of
(29:18):
the things that's really funny is that the women in
the room, this is NBA students, law school students are
a gradual and they are dating people in their circles.
And they asked me the question, and I say, you
are defining your life as you go forward, and you
have fallen it. You have accepted a situation that you
(29:44):
don't have to accept. I mean, it was very natural
before when women stayed home, that they stayed home. But
now you are training to be one of you know,
a mover and a shaker in the world, and you
haven't had this conversation with your potential spouse where you say,
what are we gonna do? Well, you know I have
(30:04):
my law degree, you have your law degree, or were
your business degree? What are we gonna do when we
have with children? The assumption you walk into a relationship
of peers, right, this peer you walk in and he
walks in with this assumption that, of course, when that happens,
it's going to be you or you are at least
you walk in with it. And I say, the issue
(30:25):
I have is that if you feel comfortable enough asking
me this question, why the hell are you not comfortable
asking your husband, your potential husband, this question. So that's
one thing I just keep saying, falling into line when
there is really no line. It's kind of clay to
me make a new line this one. I mean, we're
marrying this twenty something year old person who's very well
(30:48):
trained like you are. You didn't get trained. I'm assuming
you're not training because you want to stay home. If
you want to stay home, I'm all for it, I
really am all. I think it's a great As I
said all the time, I mean, we need mothers and fathers,
so if they want to and we need them as
much as possible in participating in its life. So I don't.
(31:08):
So that's one one is that I want women to
actually not continue to fold into line. If they're not
comfortable doing that, they have a man who's or a partner,
it could be not even a man who they have
to have this conversation with. And if they can't have
it with them and the person's not open, you learn
something about it. That's the first. The second is the
(31:31):
second part of the discussion is that everyone today, as
even me, like so, when I was my husband was
a child and I was a child, the model was
our parents stayed at home, and when we came into
my mother stayed at home. The mother stayed at home.
(31:52):
When we came into the work world, it was more
accepted and actually expected that it was a good stay.
I mean it was more than accepted. It was of
course that would happen. That's changing that. That's why I
say that the women today ask the question. I mean,
you have the discussion yourselves, ask it to your employer,
talk to your future spouse of what what the hell
is going on right in the middle is I think
(32:12):
that we we over emphasize this idea that you have
to be in every single aspect of your kid's life
every moment. And this is so even my mother, who
could My mother could not be at home all the time.
She had to work. So, um, this idea of balance
(32:35):
between work and life. People ask me to question, I said, what,
I don't understand work and life balance. Isn't work part
of life life? I mean this like child's wearing is
part of life, is all part of life. So we
have to figure out a way to balance it all.
We we can't have this thing as like this new
this additional burden or our life. It's this other aspect
(32:57):
of our life that we're trying to fit in. It's
all of our life, and we have to kind of
figure out a way to make it play and make
it play well. And we over I think we over
index on models that don't really apply to us, and
particularly black and brown women. I tell you what, particularly
everybody who I grew up with, every woman had to
work because they had no choice. So they had to
(33:18):
figure out a way to have a family life or
work life or this life of that life, caring life.
So that's the same part. The third part of it
is I do believe that we owe it to men
to allow them to do what we are expecting women
(33:38):
to do, so we allow men to do what we
expect women to do. We expect women to come into
work and say, I'm thinking about having a child. How
are we going to change my work day? My work?
But we absolutely have to have men do the same thing.
How crazy is it that we continuously remove from our
(34:00):
children's life, very formative ages of their lives for massive
blocks of time. These men they go, they go work.
They I mean they literally in the past they would
go eight and come back at seven at night. I
don't think it's a good balance of parenting have the
woman be the or the man who the single part
be the only model. Right. My mother had to do it,
(34:22):
and she had to fill it in with all kinds
of makeshift uncles, you know whatever, all herself being both parents.
I think if you have the benefit of having both around,
we owe it to the men to give them the
ability to be significantly more engaged, ability and permission to
be significantly more engaged and say no, I'm gonna stay home. Right,
(34:45):
And we still we women still expect that that. Men
obviously look at other men and say, what the hell
are you doing? You're not watched or you're not, and
the answers, no, no no, I'm gonna stay home, I'm gonna
raise the kids for nine months or year because I
you know, whatever. Whatever. So I think that this whole
model has to change, and I think the women who
(35:06):
are the victor, who are quote unquote often the victims
of the model, have to in many ways lead the transition.
They have to start saying, wait a minute, guys, you know,
I just think we need to do. I need a
different model, need a different model, work, I need a
different model, dank k, I need a different model. We
need to figure out a different model to give with flexibility.
(35:28):
So I agree one hundred percent. What I hear you
saying as well, which I also agree with, is that culturally,
women have to get to the point where they're not
subconsciously going with this flow is huge no matter how
well educated you are, how many graduate degrees you have
in you in in many people's DNA is of thinking
(35:49):
of the way things are supposed to be. What you
can't do is figure out how you fit into that way.
But you figured this is a way, and so in
order to shift the in order to do exactly what
you said, which is so important to to sort of
try to level out how parenting works, because to your point,
father's parents, partners to people with different perspectives are needed.
(36:13):
Absolutely a tag team and they're needed. But there is
this expectation, no matter how smart everyone is, that that
that there is a way and you're breaking that way,
and and and culturally and societally, when you break that way,
there's there everybody's pauses, including the people themselves. So you're right,
(36:36):
these young people have to talk to their partners, but
they also have to talk to themselves because really, for
all of the bravery, and I'm not trying to make
live this at all, but really, the paths that women
are forging and are able to forge, now this part
is kind of they're they're they're forging ahead in industry.
(36:57):
And it's funny because you know, just as an asside you,
the current women who are black CEOs, Ros Brewer, the
Sanda Duckett and other CEOs are women of color, Sonya Saigal,
and Andrew Neuri all you had children. I mean, you
guys all manage to have children. It's not as if
(37:17):
there is a role model of the single woman who
is really breaking through the ceiling. So it exists, and
each of you figured it out. But undoubtedly each of
you figured it out in a way that was what
took some doing and took some sort of thinking differently.
So that part for young women. I hope they're all
(37:40):
they're all naturally thinking a little differently because of the
world is different. But I wonder, and I worry a little.
I mean, certainly, you know my daughter's thinking differently. She's
sort of not in the mindset of the way my
household is set up is not the way her households
going to be set up. I know that's clear, But
I do think we don't tell to your point exactly,
don't tell young women it's it's not like it's a
(38:01):
breaking the fairy tale. It's like it's not even a
You have so much opportunity to figure it out, but
you have to acknowledge that. You know it's important. And
I've heard you do this before, talk about sort of
the heights that you have reached, what you give up.
Everything is a balance, Everything is a balance. Every choice
you make is a choice, if you know what I mean, right, No,
(38:23):
obviously you're not doing the thing that you chose not
to do. But wait, sometimes the thing you chose not
to do is what you want to do. This is
not perfection the people I would I say this, and
in the book you'll read it where people will say,
my god, you guys, have you look at you and
look at your two kids, look at the perfect life.
I said, if you were a fly on the wall
in my house on any given day over the years
(38:46):
that we were living together, my husband and I were
the children you would say, the craziest goddamn family I
have ever been engaged with, because we did exactly what
everybody else did. Scrambled you know, um fall over the
listen to that who's taken up a garbage We didn't name.
We didn't have this perfect um place. It wasn't. It wasn't.
(39:10):
Every choice we made was perfect, and it made our
lives easier. No, we screwed up a whole bunch of stuff.
We made choices and and we live. We lived purposefully,
probably because we didn't know how to not do it.
We lived a very ordinary life. We lived a very
ordinary life. Obviously it's mixed in with flying around on
planes and going up, but but we live. I tell you,
(39:32):
walk into our house, people like we know you guys,
I literally when I became CEO, people would say to
me there was seeing in Wegmans or wherever, you know,
the food store and everything shop. I would say, if
we want to eat, we shop. I don't understand the
other thing. You know, you clean your own house, Yeah,
I clean my own house. Yes, I shop. You know,
(39:53):
after a while, you get somebody to help you clean
the house once every two weeks or something like that.
But I clean the house, We do our lowe lawn.
We shop. And the reason why it was not only
because we wanted to teach our kids. That wasn't the
primary example the thing that we were focused on. We
were focused more on the fact that it was part
of our normal life. If you know, that's the way
the way we were raised. I want to say one
(40:13):
other thing about what you said. That's really important about
defining and about looking looking behind, looking past, and picking
up those those activities. The world was defined by white men.
Everywhere in the world it was defined. But it's called supremacy.
White men defined the world even in a lot of
(40:35):
African nations, Asian, you name it. Men defined the world
definitely the Western culture. White men did it. They did
it to their benefit. I'm not saying at the time
that they said about what I want to do is,
you know, subjugate these people. But at the end of
the day, that's what they did. They subjugated women, and
(40:56):
they absolutely subjugated and mistreated blacks and anybody who didn't
look like them. That model of the world is what
we live in. That's what we live in. So what
we're trying to do now, and I say this whole
time we're trying. We're trying to say, you have to
have to redefine everything. Not everything has to be thrown out,
(41:19):
but we have to look at every single thing and say,
how in the world is it that if you want
to go to MIT or Harvard or XYZ, that we
have to take these tests that the white guy defined.
He defined he and white defined what greatness looks like.
And they did that to the exclusion, acted with the
(41:41):
exclusion of anybody else participating. Literally, So I say, even
family structures the way that it's defined today. The man
goes out, we say that he's definitive, he's he can
make decisions, he's a strong business leader, you know, aggressive,
all of these things that are that it's a model
that we the reason why we think it is a
(42:02):
good model is because the only model we've seen, the
only model we've seen. The reason why we think it's
a good model that women stay home and literally depend
on their husbands to deliver money, to deliver freedoms, is
because it's the only model we've seen. By the way,
that model can work. But there are other models that
(42:22):
can work as well. And you know what I'm saying
is that I don't think it's a bad thing that
you decide to stay home, But I'm just saying you
have to decide to do it. It has to be
your decision, particularly if you pursue education in some of
the most needed fields in the world, in law, in education,
(42:46):
and engineering. You to actually do that and then say, well,
my husband doesn't want me to work, it sounds a
little bit odd today. So I just think I'm not
judging that. I'm not saying that staying home is bad.
I just want to make sure that we do it right.
The little coda I would add, though, is that one
(43:08):
of the reasons you stay home is if they're children,
that somebody's gotta right, we's got to raise the children.
Saying I'm not in the book, I say this, I
was not willing to outsource our parenting, so we literally
went crazy. And when it got to the point where
we could not fit this in anymore, my husband left
(43:29):
the twentieths old and nine. He retired because we got
it got to the point that the kids were moving
around too much. It was it was just crazy, right,
and so we just they were in all kinds of
stuff and we just didn't want to have someone there
who did all that stuff for us. So we had
to make a set of choices, and we sat down
(43:50):
and talked about it. At that point, it was kind
of hard for me to say I would I would stop.
I was gonna you know, I'm in the middle of
my career. My husband was ending his career even in
the beginning, in the beginning of his career when we
started to have kids, in the middle of his career
when we start to have kids. He was a scientist,
so he had a lot of flexibility. He could leave
the lab, you know, he didn't travel anywhere near as
(44:12):
much as I traveled, so we were able to have
in our house a parent almost all the time. By
the way, you realize as well, how bad a parent
you can be, and how you know because we're dealing
with stuff with our kids that both of our both
myself and my husband did to them. Right, We'll trying
to trying to fix it, we're trying to undo it.
(44:34):
But I prefer that we do it, not somebody else
does it. Yeah. Yeah, So when you when you start
to try to have these conversations, it can't it is
the model needs to be changed. But it's also the
recognition that somebody's got to do it. I mean, and
actually that is part of the reason why I do
this work in this podcast, because the it that has
to be done is important and it can't be It's
(44:59):
probably the mos It's important thing. It really is. I
know that it is. I say this a lot. The
one thing that will destroy you personally and your world
order is a child that is intrust that as you know,
a child that's on drugs, a child that's in the
system of some jail. I have friends, and I you know,
(45:23):
that doesn't mean you're a band parent. Some of it
just happens. But I tell you, I have friends, and
you can see just how tormented their life is. So
the most important thing you can do is make sure
that these kids are set up to be good adults. Absolutely,
because if you don't do this, your life has changed
(45:43):
forever for the bad, not for the clear. You are
only as happy as your unhappy as child. And so
if you write, I mean so we should all look
at it as parents. It's like a defense mechanism. Make
sure they're okay, so that you can actually be technically okay.
You can relax because I tell you I have friends,
executive friends. You know, it's just so hard. Yeah, if
(46:07):
they've tried, they've done everything. You know, the kids have
gotten in some bad situations and it's just their lives
are wrapped around either fixing it, which in many ways
is probably a good effort, but in a lot of
ways just saying it's not fixable, yeah, and basically having
the distance yourself. Yeah, you see yourself. There's no way,
(46:29):
there's no way that can be a good outcome. No, no,
So for all the young I'm going to make sure
that young people hear this because all the young people
need to know that there's a lot of a lot
of analysis in there. I mean, it's on the one hand,
the fairy tale of love, marriage, and children is one
that is time immemorial. But on the other hand. There's
the model is. The model is changing and we just
(46:50):
have to figure out how how it gets changed. Ursula.
I so appreciate this conversation. I could go on forever,
but I'm going to wrap it up here. I want
to thank you so much. It's been a great conversation
and I always love to chat with you, and I
know our listeners really appreciate hearing it as well. Now,
one thing that I would like you to do before
(47:11):
we go it is to play my bonus realm, where
I'm going to ask you first your favorite poem, and
then secondly ask there are any children's books that you
remember either reading yourself or reading to your kids. Oh yeah, yeah,
I'm going to add one that's a favorite movie. Okay,
let's show on TV because we don't really watch about
the TV. But my favorite poem, interestingly enough, is a
(47:36):
poem that I received very recently. I don't love the
name of it and all about I received it after
my husband died, and it was a poem I quoted
the last line of it in Vernon's Vernon's You Know
it was a poem that basically remind did me. It
reminds me of the reason why I'm feeling so bad
(47:58):
is because I had they to love so much and
be welked by someone's a great Irish problem and a
Jewish problem. Sorry, I'll send it so that she was
just an amazing thing isn't very sad, and it makes
me cry whenever I read it. But it's one of
these things that when you think about it, you go,
I gotta you know, you feel so terribly, you feel
(48:18):
so like the world is lost because you were blessed
with a relationship that had that much of an impact
on you, even impact on you. But before that, I
didn't have a favorite poem. My favorite saying is where
you are is not who you are. And remember that
when you're rich, in famous all the time. And she
(48:39):
the context is that when you look around the world,
And we saw for the last four years before our
new president, the ramifications of not understanding this. We saw
a person who could look at another person and look
at look at another person and buy visuals and difference
can define in his own mind whether this person was worthy.
(49:01):
And you know you you, you know, I make a
lot of money, I'm powerful, I'm so I'm better than you.
Is something that is so abhorrent to me, it is
so horrible because my mother, who I think was masterful,
I mean just masterful, had would fit on nobody's scale.
(49:23):
Donald Trump would have thrown her ound sent her back.
And she's produced three value and scores more. Added children
fundamentally to the Wall favorite movie, and we watched over
and over again from the time my kids were tiny
till the time they were older, The Godfather. So my
(49:47):
two and three year old daughter and six and seven
year old son knows most of the The Guts, very
violent movie. I mean, that is my husband's favorite movie.
And yes, our children watched it from a very very
early age, so we love that. And the favorite show,
our favorite show in the world's Jeopardy, and we still
(50:07):
we've watched Jeopardy from the time that the kids were
we and to this day at seven or seven thirty,
depending on you know what part of the United States
shore and we watched Jeopardy. And then books. When my
kids were growing up, I read them most of the
books that I was reading, so the way that we
did this, and then when they started to read themselves,
we gave them two books. But when I was growing up,
(50:29):
my mother used to do this to me as well,
she would read the newspaper. So we didn't have children's books.
You just read whatever. So I just read regular books
to them and then when they got to the point
where they could start kind of feeling around. My daughter
liked Good Night Moon and The Hungry Caterpillar. Those were
her favorite books. My son, interestingly, usk was dyslexic, very
(50:52):
very reading, dyslexic, brilliant mathematician and now can do both
fairly well because he was trained well and so when
he was a kid, he we would read to him
almost exclusively because he was really not very good at reading,
and we would my husband would always read him in
the newspaper, always do paper. He's deflectic as well. I
(51:12):
never saw my husband read a book, reading long enough
a book. I don't think I've ever seen him read
a book. My husband brilliant, you know, eighty five patents
math science, but he was not a big reader. And
my son at the end has tuned out to be
a reasonable reader as well, but not you know, you
had to do all kinds of things to get through school.
(51:33):
That is such a good tip, though, when I've never
heard that. If you're if you've been reading as a parent,
and you have a little one read your book to them.
My mother used to do that, so he's read him
whatever we were reading. Thank you so much, I'm gonna
let you go. I really appreciate your time. I hope
everyone listening enjoyed this conversation and that you'll come back
(51:53):
for more. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen
to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more parenting info
and advice, please check out the Ground Control Parenting blog
at ground control Parenting dot com. You can also find
us on Instagram and Facebook at ground Control Parenting and
on LinkedIn under Carol Sutton Lewis. The Ground Control Parenting
(52:14):
with Carol Sutton Lewis podcast is a part of the
Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartMedia. Until the
next time, take care and thanks for listening.
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