Jennifer Weiner Quotes

I don't understand how women can manage to get back in shape with a new baby and a job.

‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

I have a very difficult, high-pressured job. Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.

Absolutely the worst thing about this job is the travel and being away from family. I have a wife and three wonderful children, the kids are all active in sports and it's very difficult to up and leave and miss them growing up.

I honestly wondered how on earth I would manage to combine work and motherhood.

I find it is increasingly difficult to spend the time I need with my family and at the same time do the job that needs to be done.

It's hard to balance work and family.

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

I've never been a hands-on dad. I'm not ashamed to admit it, but you can't run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

I vividly remember early on in my career when I was eight months pregnant, working literally around the clock, and worrying that each trip to the restroom or my need to catch the occasional catnap was causing my colleagues to question whether I could keep up.

As any female executive with a family knows, you're making mental lists all through the night. You're often not sure you've managed to sleep at all.

I cannot deny that there are unavoidable, day-to-day tradeoffs between being a parent and a professional. There are only so many hours in a day.

Working from home is so, so hard because I want to be present for them and yet there's so much to do work-wise. That's the biggest challenge for me.

All parents are trying to balance. Look, I'm lucky in the sense that I can control my hours. I can choose my jobs, and not everybody has that choice. But I definitely, it's a family decision every time I take a job.

I'm working 18 hour days and I'm feeling guilty not being able to be there when all those times I want to be mother.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

The trouble when you have a job like mine is it's your social life as well, so I need to actually [find] something to do in my downtime when my kids are at school.

I admire the women who can have babies and jump right back to work. As a nursing mother, I couldn’t sit there and just pump all day. I needed to be close to my baby.

It's hard to have little children and a job and career at the same time. There is no time left for you as a woman.

If you think you can do two full-time jobs, people will expect you to do three.

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

If woman wants to have kids and work a little less she has a big disadvantage compared to a male colleague who has a stay-at-home wife packing his suitcases.

My children are babies and my husband has scarcely half an hour in 24 to give me.

These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid.