Parliament | I Spent Five Years Rolling My Eyes at Working Parents. Then I Became One.
by Bri Thomas, Creative Director
I have worked at Hoot for almost seven years. For five of those years, I watched my coworkers with kids from the other side of the glass, and I thought I understood what I was seeing.
I didn't.
When my colleague left at 3:30 every day, I noticed. When internal meetings got rescheduled because someone was working from home, I noticed. When I was asked for the fourth time that week to grab a file from the office because a teammate couldn't come in, I noticed. And if I'm being honest, I judged. Not loudly, not cruelly, but quietly, in the way that people do when they think they know what's really going on.
Must be nice.
That phrase has a way of making itself at home in your head when you're watching someone else's life through a very narrow window.
Here's what I actually knew about that 3:30 departure: nothing.
I didn't know that daycare charges a late fee for every minute past 4pm, stacked on top of a monthly invoice that already feels like a second mortgage.
I didn't know that "working from home today" usually meant a sick kid who technically doesn't have a fever, except school policy says 24 hours symptom-free before they're allowed back, so here we are, on the couch, deadlines blinking, while Bluey plays the granny episode for the 27th time.
I didn't know that the person asking me for the file wasn't disorganized. He had just gotten a call from the school at 10am that changed the entire architecture of his day.
I didn't know because I wasn't looking for any of that. I was looking for confirmation of what I'd already decided: that working parents had figured out a softer version of this job.
I was so wrong.
What I missed, what I couldn't have seen without living it was everything that happened after 3:30. The laptop back open at 9pm. The low hum of guilt that follows you whether you're at your desk or at pickup, because you're never fully in either place. The mental math that never actually stops: can I make this work, is this working, am I enough here, am I enough there?
Before I had a kid, I thought about what I was doing after work. Me, my husband, maybe our dogs, whatever we felt like. That kind of freedom is invisible until it's gone, and then it becomes one of the most tangible things you've ever lost.
I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I'm saying it because I think we've collectively decided that parenthood is supposed to be additive, that it should only multiply the good things, and if it ever feels like it's costing you something, you must be doing it wrong. Push through. Optimize. Find the balance.
Except balance, as Hoot has always said, is bullshit.
We call it Work-Life Harmony here, and I used to think that was just a clever reframe. Now I understand it's the only honest way to describe what working parents are actually doing. It's not balanced. It's conducted — dynamic, constantly adjusted, occasionally out of tune, and somehow still making music.
Having a child didn't make my job easier. It made me harder to rattle. It upgraded my capacity for decision-making under pressure in ways that no workshop ever could. My relationship with time is completely different. My understanding of what actually matters has been restructured from the ground up. The feedback I give and receive lands differently now, because I don't have the bandwidth for anything that isn't real.
None of that came for free. All of it came from doing something genuinely difficult and choosing not to quit.
Hoot has always offered working parents the flexibility to do both things. I spent five of my seven years here thinking that was a perk — a little extra given to a specific group of people.
It isn't a perk. It's the infrastructure that makes it possible to show up fully in two places that both deserve your full presence. Society should have built this infrastructure a long time ago, and largely didn't.
Hoot did.
So if you're a working parent and it feels hard: it is. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. That's what it feels like to do it right, in a world that still hasn't fully figured out how to hold you.
And if you're where I was five years ago, watching someone leave early, quietly tallying the inconveniences, I get it. I was you.
Just know that the window you're looking through is a lot smaller than you think.