Candid Convo: Neha Ruch: Navigating Professional and Personal Identity As a Mother

still a lot of unpacking to do around pivoting. So as we're continuing to build this platform and community through new episodes, I wanted to also bring you more stories, unfiltered and honest. So I'll be sitting down with more women, maybe the occasional man, some of whom have mastered their own pivot, some are just starting the pivoting journey. Are some just have something to teach us about the deeply personal moments of life. So stay tuned for more of the candid conversation this season.

milk and like sleep deprived. But I did find something I'd been looking for and lacking in my career to that point. And I, you know, spent a decade in advertising. I'd just gotten my MBA. The expectations were high on my like very linear career track. But I sat at that point that I wanted to downshift, and I started to come face to face with like all the societal

stigma that comes with the quote unquote stay at home mother. Right, So I started hearing like, ugh, you took a spot at Stanford, Like you took that spot just to stay at home, and or like what are you going to do all day? All of the perceptions that you assume with choosing to focus your life on caregiving for a chapter.

And meanwhile, on the opposite like days when I wasn't still consulting because I initially downshifted, I was meeting all these incredible women who were the women you assume like they were in New York. They'd built huge, wonderful, meaningful careers, and we're saying, you know what, I want to take a thoughtful pause and make room for family life for a moment, or I really trust my career to date, and I'm going to start to freelance or consult just

to build in some more flexibility. And none of it matched this caricature that I was being served up of the stay at home mom. And I was looking around and there was a ton of traditional content around the working monther quote unquote, but everything had abandoned the stay at home mother in the nineteen fifties.

time working mother. And it was and I was looking at her and thinking, we work the exact same amount, and we're at home the exact same amount. But there was a sort of veil of and I wouldn't say that she was intentionally masquading, which you know, her version of balance. It was she identified and didn't she identified with working out of the home, and she did not want identify with any sense of slowing down.

it was all on the rise. So I was looking at it saying, like, you're going to see an increasing population of women who have the access to be able to create a career on their own terms, and an increasing number of women who want to make rim for

other priorities for a period of time. And so you know, I think a lot of it was the moment in time in twenty sixteen was it was this perfect collision of like me wanting my own space where I could start to string together a collective of women who are reshaping the narrative for my own sake to say, like, wait, there's like an incredible cohort of women that I belonged to, and also feeling like there was a dearth of any representation of anything that was beyond the prototypical.

American flag balloons. We thought we were electing the first female, right yeah, And that was what we really believed, sitting in life the New York City Echo Chamber, and in that moment, I remember feeling the most feminist I'd ever felt.

And you know so much of Mother entitled When we parse around where do the stigmas exist around quote unquote stay at home mother, one of them is around if you choose this, choose to pause, you are an anti feminist, which is obviously like a trope that we want to upend. Whereas I was feeling the most connected to women that

I'd ever felt. And I think that to your point twenty sixteen was a feeling of banning to get other, wanting to do our part, believing so much so that my feminism was not dictated by whether I was working out of the home or in the home, but because I was part of this collective, collective voice advocating for what felt right for us and our families at the time.

And I do think that collective power in twenty sixteen probably did help shape that that sense of wanting to be a part of it, wanting to explore it and pull the threads apart.

don't know. But the way that women went to work out of home was to emulate men, and so they couldn't show up in the workplace as anything other than I am showing up essentially as a man in a workplace.

around advertising and the advent of television. We started to see these ads depicting the woman at home wearing heels, pushing a vacuum around. And what emerged was this like huge chasm, this power chasm between the woman in the workplace making money and the woman like teetering around in heels like serving up her like cocktails at the end of the day. And that power chasm never went away.

And you know, the media really invented the mommy wars, like just because like media loves a moment where they can like pit two sides against each other, and so the mommy wars were like invented over the course of the eighties, and we created this power chasm that really like obviously had to close over the years because so much changed. Women had access to digital learning, so that they're able to like keep their hand in the game. They were like getting married and having kids much later,

so their decrued education and work experience. None of the fictions around that, like ad with the woman pushing the vacuum in heels, actually existed, and yet we sort of inherited it and brought it with us and like perpetuated the idea of what was feminist and what was not right.

And I think what's interesting about feminism today is I don't think it's just about yes, we want the choice and like we should all do whatever makes us happy and strong and all the things we're advocating for the supports to be able to set us up for success on feminine terms, right, it's recognizing that we can't like

we do birth children. Our bodies are actually constructed differently, and so the workforce and or like the way in which we approach work family has to align with the realities of what it means to be a woman, which means taking a closer look at what that is right.

And so it's interesting because some of them when I first launched Mother Untitled, I did feel like a lot of women perceived what I was doing as in some ways traditionalist, when by no means, first of all, let me just say, like, I don't actually think choosing to pause or downshift your career at any point is the right thing for children and or the right thing for families.

I think it was the right thing for me in that moment, and I think many women either because they can't offset the cost of child care and or because they actually want to be at home for a period of time, that is the right choice for them because it works for their families. But it's not. You know, there's proven successful outcomes for children and families no matter what, whether you're working in the home or out of the

home or existing in between. But when I started, I think a big thought was, well, she's encouraging women to pause, And what I would say is no, I'm trying to create a narrative wherein if women choose to pause or downshift, if they they do step out of the traditional workforce for a period of time, they're not only respected and valued for the contribution in the home, but they're not

seen as their brain dying. So that when and if they choose to go back, which ninety percent of women do and aim to do, when and if they choose to go back, they have an easier time entering because they're not ritteno off and counted out as like shriveling and like their homes.

to our salary and our titles. And I mean that's the thesis around untitled with mother Untitled is this idea that when you step into this untitled chapter, we part with a lot of the ego and the identity derived from career ascension. And what does that feel like to

exist in the vastness of the untitled space? Right? And by the way, the other part of that is the other part of untitled is the dismantling between the antiquated titles of stay at home and working mother right, and so stay at home you can understand why we would champion to start to blow the edges around that because it's so black and white, it comes with so many

societal trips. But working muther right when you so closely ident What I'm hearing from you is you so closely hold on to like I am a working mother, that anything that is not that or that is working in other ways, whether you're volunteering or whether you're working in the home, feels antithetical as opposed to just part of

an expansive identity. Yeah. Right, And I think that that is the really the opportunity for women right now is to exist in the gray, is to exist in that mast in between and say that way you're you're not confined to worth and success in one format, and your options are open so that you can sort of tap into what you need to make room for in that moment in time without penalty on the other side, Right, I.

the same coin. Like I feel like what we're trying to do with she Pivots is to tell the stories about the personal events that happens to someone that changes their perspective so that they can then find a different thing they create, whether it's a career, whether it's a business like whatever, maybe it's happiness in the same thing, but changing their perspective due to personal reasons and then finding something professional that comes out of it, like changing that narrative around that.

a rising stat around men choosing to positive careers. But I think men unfortunately are you know, feeling limited sometimes by the expectations of what that role is supposed to include being a male partner in a family, in a two parent households right, And so then when men find themselves at career junctures that we have a lot of discourse around, they don't have the same resources and conversation and I think that is one of the privileges of being a woman is that we talk a lot, especially

I I mean, like we like to talk.

like in the last three years are gay men. Is most of the parents that I know, and of new parents that I know, and of the parents that I see of kids that are sort of school age when parents are starting to kind of like group off and like make plans, I find it hard for I think the gay dads in particular to find their pla because they just sort of don't naturally fall into any of the like very hetero categories of like the way that

families tend to group. And so I think we do need to be intentional about this, And I actually try to talk about every time we have these like parenting talks, but like think about the makeup of the parents in your class, like how they naturally have these random encounters

and like you know, how they'd get included. But you know, a part of the reason that I decided to only have women on sheep Pivots and even call it sheep Pivots well after I got the seasoned desist order, but then there was an intentional reason after that, and I thought I actually wasn't giving up that much, Like, yes, men need it, but I actually don't think men are evolved enough right now to be able to have a really thoughtful conversation about where they feel included excluded, how

they think about their identities. Like I think most male conversations right now would unfortunately be a little bit too stunted. It would be like a real short podcast. So hopefully season ten of she Pivots is maybe it's a full he pivots.

an attribute. Yes, yes, And then I think we can start to have a generation of men that will be thinking about talking about their feelings, how they see their identities. But like, we're of a generation right now like parenting young kids, like we can build them up from scratch, we have huge opportunity.

very conscious parents. Who really I mean is there is such a wealth of information, maybe too much information around parenting and this is the first generation of parents that have been exposed to that and are taking that in And whether you're focused on nutrition or you're focused on gentle parenting or respectful parenting, that is a level of intellectuality that is that is unparalleled with any other generation. And so it's both impactful and it's a lot more

around self healing and self growth. And one of the things we talk a lot about, and this is another way women are, you know, an evolved species, is that when women step in to parenthood today, we're not only committed to how can we raise our children meaningfully, but how can we raise ourselves alongside? Yeah, and that is something really interesting when I think about, you know, the

power you talk about the pivot. I talk a lot about the power in the pause and in the transition, and I think it's a lot of that power lies in the personal development that this sort of time and transition in our life is so so primed for.

like it was. There was a lot of quote unquote working mother communities, and I was excited about this little haven of shining the light on women who were making room for family in a new way. So excited about it. Twenty seven to teen to twenty eighteen, there was great sort of organic growth. I had my daughter in twenty eighteen, and where I'd perfected this like perfect two days a week. You know, I was consulting at the time and working

on this platform. I had sort of thought I'd nailed it, and then I had my daughter, and it like up ended any sense of rhythm that I'd constructed. And so it was like I was hitting pause on pause, on pas on pause. And then twenty nineteen came and I was like, Okay, this is going to be the year.

And then I had shingles, and then twenty twenty came, and then it was twenty twenty one when both my kids were school aged, and there was sort of this incredible divine timing where suddenly the world and culture felt ready to re examine work and family in a way that they hadn't right, and you talked about the pandemic being a potential catalytic moment for a lot of your guests, and so even though I started noodling on this in twenty sixteen and really putting it out of the world

in the world, then twenty twenty one, in post pandemic, was really the moment I said, no, this is the time to step in and really drive this conversation. And it happened to align with personal timing too, but there was a lot of planting the seeds in the years prior and then when the timing worked for myself and my family, dialing it up right.

her page and being like what happened? Like weird? Yeah, I'm just like a little person again now, and she she I mean, her timing was fabulous, and I think twenty twenty one had a similar feeling for me, but it was twenty twenty two that I saw them like twenty twenty one, I you know, where I had been, like, I mean, if you're going to talk about it from Instagram numbers, I was like, had sort of just maintained from the time of my second daughter till twenty twenty one.

And I think one of the big shifts for me was sharing content as I was like experiencing and living in the pause versus like, I've now studied this and like interviewed two hundred women and I'm going to start speaking about it as an expert. And I really shifted into much more thought leader content around and the reframes that you know are shared widely, and I think that

that was the catalytic moment of growth. And I think it was twenty twenty two that I really started to share content around re examining our worth in sort of quantifiable terms, the worth of an at home parent, sharing reframes around how to think about financial interdependence, you know,

with our partners. So if you're someone if you are the partner not working at home or sort of not working for pay versus providing unpaid labor in the home, how to think about that as like a financially intertebeddent organization as opposed to like, one of the unfortunate limiting beliefs is like I am now and dependent and that can feel really hard for an ambitious woman, Right, So that reframe really took off reframes around not feeling like

you can't ask for help. I think so many of the women I've interviewed will say, like, if I'm not working for pay, I don't deserve help. So really challenging some of those false beliefs and using social media to do that and have a discourse about that, those pieces of content were shared and really helped grow the audience in a huge way. How do you sit with that exposure of vulnerability?

that doesn't mean I'm any less successful. That means I'm being deliberate and that I trust that process, right, Like sharing that is a personal reflection. But I don't share about parenting like. I don't share like I will never claim to be a parenting expert. I love parenting, I really do. I think I've grown tremendously in it. But I think I've made mistakes and I think i'm learning. I'm a consumer of other people's wisdom and I'm trying

to do the best I can. But I do not talk about unless it's in the context of parenting is helping me and helps women grow themselves, and that's the ripe opportunity and career pauses, that's the power, that's the unlocked potential. So I really keep it tight as to what are the angles. I'm willing to share and explore. But I don't openly share about what it feels like to stay up at night worried about my child and something that they're going through, Like that's off limits to

me and or my marriage and or my parents. You know that to me is irrelevant to community who's collectively exploring what it means to exist in the gray area of holding personal pursuit and personal ambition alongside motherhood and that constant recalibration. Well, Mylilah loves yourlila, so you're obviously doing a great job. And the parenting that's so nice. I hear good reports from there. But like you know, at home is always different. It's a different level of chaos.

more in the career. You know. One of the big societal tropes, like the big game changer that we're trying to enact is that women on career pauses should still be considered career like it is one chapter of an evolving story of her career and she can't be counted out.

And so it's actually like a lot of this work is keeping her confident and clear that this is one part of her story, and then from a larger macro level, shining a light on the gray area around her role at home, the ways in which she's volunteering, the way that she's networking and meeting incredible women that she's you know, at the playground, the way that she's taken an online class or freelancing, and so that side of it is

just proactively trying to blurrow the edges. So that she has never counted out of the career conversation.

You know, we recently released the results of the AMP Survey American Mothers un Pause it's the first of its kind survey of twelve hundreds at home moms and then a thousand general pop and it was really centered around taking a closer look at this new woman making room for family life and from a general population perspective, we really wanted to understand perceptions. And what's wild is seventy eight percent of women say they feel completely misunderstood for

their role at home. You know, that's the disconnect that we want to solve for because it's one part feeling completely undervalued for the contributions of unpaid labor. Because where that holds you back is then your ability to ask for help. And when you ask for help, then you help your mental health, you help your ability to stay connected to the workforce and other community contributions in other ways.

But in the other way, like that misunderstanding makes very challenging for women to re enter.

have part time, very intermittent childcare or none. And so I never want that woman to feel like my day wasn't purposeful because I didn't share life five hundred i Instagram stories and reframs that are going viral like that, that isn't We cannot all share the same metrics of success and the same metrics of productivity in a day, but we certainly can't if we don't understand the other

person's support system, right. And also I had to remember for myself in a personal experience, right because I had you know, I had sort of oscillating levels of care. Mostly not because I have the privilege to be able to have childcare if I want it. I really just don't like people in my space, Like I am like a very classic only child, and so when I'm with my kids, I want to be with my kids and

I don't want anyone else around. So I always it worked for me to have two days of childcare, sometimes three afternoons of childcare, depended on the on the phase we were in, and I would look around and think, like I could be doing more, I should be doing more from other untitled and I had to remind myself but like, I don't have the support to do that right now, and I will one day one day, and I'm in that day right now. One day my children will be at camp from nine in the morning till

four thirty and I will have that time. But it was really important for me to remember and reflect on that myself, and to make sure that other women weren't comparing themselves to me. And how do I feel about

it after I share? Sometimes I feel nervous. I feel nervous that someone's going to turn around and be like, and someone did say this, well, you're not truly fully an at home parent because you have you know, X amount of hours of childcare, to which I would say like great, because I'm trying to dismantle the trope of like a black and white nature of an at home parent. You're right, I'm somewhere in between, and I'm so lucky to be able to do that.

them anxious? Yes, Yes, because you always, like you said, you always felt like you were supposed to be doing more. You always think you're supposed to be doing more. That I when I think about this show as the opportunity for culture change by opening up and telling stories, I think maybe that's a more impactful path for us right now, like us being like you know, cheap hboits and the team.

up options. There's a ripple effect there, and so I'll tell you also in the AM survey, three and ten women had to make the choice to pause their careers because of the cost of childcare. So yes, we often speak to and speak about the other seventy percent for whom it was the privilege to choose. But the ripple effect when we change the perception of the pause is felt by everyone. It's felt also by the women who

don't get our right to choose. And I would say the same for you, because women come across men and women come across pivots for a whole onslot of reasons. But whatever the profile of the guests you have, you're shining a light on this very big, powerful moment where women are transitioning and it's unlocking huge amounts of opportunity and it's sort of you're infusing trust into that process

that can be really hard, and that is felt by everyone. Right, Well, we actually haven't gone through your own personal story.

It was predominantly white, and I'm not going to go on like a big racial tangent, but I will tell you I did self sabotage, honestly in my teen years to fit in. I think I wanted to dismantle I was all about dismantling stereotypes even then, and I wanted to dismantle the stereotype of being an Indian girl. So I was like, Ah, the best thing to do is like tank my math grades, you know, or like party

really hard, or do whatever. And I woke up one day it was the morning of my graduation, and I said to my parents, I don't know how I had this one moment of wisdom because I hadn't had many, but I came downstairs and said, like, if I go to college right now, I'd already been accepted. But I said, like, if I go now, this like path is just going to continue and I need to take a pause. And I went to India for a year. My parents were like, you do what you do, you you do whatever you

need to do to get back on track. And I felt like breaking from the path was what I needed to return to myself. Like that trip started with like three weeks in the Himalayas. And I'm not outdoorsy, like I just like I claim to be many things, I'm not outdoorsy, except there was something about separating from everyone and everything and all the expectations and all the wanting to fit in that you come back to, Okay, what do I really like? What do I not really like?

What do I want my life to look like? And that was a gift from breaking from the path. And I think that that gave me the trust to obviously replicate that experience in motherhood, you know, decades later. But in between I came back. I did go to college. I think I came back it to college with like a very renewed sense of ambition, like and I think I really went to college to just go, like I just wanted to get through it, and I got in

three years started a career in advertising. I got lucky because I started in the advent of digital media, so like Twitter had just launched, and they basically were like, oh, you're twenty two years old, Like you seem like you know what you're doing, Like you should probably do this, and mom blogs was my beat, like that was what I was so hilariously, that was what I was assigned to work on, and I fell in love with women.

I fell in love with digital media. My boss took me over to start digital strategy at a larger agency called Hill Holiday. So I got lucky. I got some like lucky timing, lucky breaks. Had a really nice career there, focused on mom brands, and I knew I wanted again, like a pause. I wasn't ready to part with the perceptions and optics like I wasn't I was still in my late twenties, like I wasn't about to take a career break then, But I did go to business school.

That was my juncture, that was my train stop to surround myself with smart people figure out what came next. Came back and you went to like the top business school. I did, I di I did. It was the only one I applied to because I really did. I don't think advertising people usually go to business school, like that isn't a typical path, But I think Stanford is like really really receptive of that sort of unique, non traditional background. So it was the right school for my background and

what I wanted to do. And I came back. I thought I'd be in the startup world, and then I had my son, and I think motherhood was sort of this incredible collision of two things. It was similar to business school a train stop to like surround myself with incredible people. And that's something I talk about all the time, is that, like I met some of the most diverse women across industries on the playground, like in baby classes, because otherwise I'd been in the lack halls of ad agencies.

I'd met one specific type of person, one specific type of industry prior to that, and so it was a real opener and expander in that way. And the other thing it brought up was that time like back in the Himalayas and then teaching in India, where you know, when you're stripped away from other people's expectations, the ego of like trying to fit, you can really figure out like what really matters?

their creativity and the opportunity and their career pause. But it's also above all things, it's a movement to change and dismantle the tropes around stay at home motherhoods so that women can choose to pause or shift and exist in this like vast gray area between stay at home and working mother so that we can make the right choice for right now and transition back to the workforce when we're ready.

Obviously they've all had their challenges, you know, since and I wished I really saw what I was doing as big, and yet I couldn't make it big at that moment, right Like I was in the depths of postmarket and anxiety transitioning to two children, like sitting there being like I don't even know how to split my hours up in the day, let alone like run this thing alongside, And I don't think I would have sold. I wanted to write this book, The Power Pause. I wanted to

write it back then. But if I'd tried to sell that book in twenty eighteen, it wouldn't I've sold.

that we're still unknown to me. And I feel like I'll just keep I think we'll all keep exploring it, like you're season ten. Yeah gonna look a lot different. It's called he pivots, like apparently we just announced it. Yeah, here breaking down. I think our husbands are going to be like the first ones on it, I know, except the first guess. I know.

Timing is everything, right, Like everyone takes an adjustment period, like there was a learning curve of like wait, this isn't going to disrupt our entire life, like she's actually one of us in like other ways, And I was like, no, oh, my marriage isn't gonna implode if they don't approve of like every single thing I do, Like this isn't like this is this is safe? Yeah? Time time.