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While moderating the 2008 Presidential Debate in Austin for CNN, Campbell Brown was the very definition of calm, cool and collected. “It was a lifetime dream for me coming true,” the 41-year-old television journalist recently noted during an appearance on Julie Menin‘s Give and Take talk show. Little did Campbell know, however, that just hours after the debate she would suffer her first real meltdown of new motherhood.
Having welcomed her first child two months before, Campbell had been shipping her breastmilk back to New York — but disaster was about to strike. “There was a snowstorm or something and the FedEx flight was delayed. The milk didn’t make it and my husband had to give the baby a bottle of formula,” she recalls. “I was crying, literally, in the airport.”
“I couldn’t believe that something had fallen through the crack. I hadn’t thought of every possible scenario to cover myself and, ugh, the baby was going to get a bottle of formula. I just stopped for a minute and I thought, ‘I’m losing my mind. Stop obsessing over this stuff or you’re going to make yourself crazy.’”
Campbell — whose best piece of parenting advice is to keep a sense of humor — says her mood was instantly lightened. “I went from sitting in the airport crying, where I’m sure people were walking by thinking, ‘Who is this crazy woman?’ to laughing out loud at myself at how ridiculous I had become in trying to do it all,” she says. “It ain’t happening; it’s never going to happen; it’s not possible.” Now that she’s a mom of two, Campbell says she’s learned to relax — as well as learned to accept that “there’s no such thing as balance.”
“It’s so much easier and so much more fun. Because you finally do realize that you can’t do it all. Formula is fine. And sometimes the baby is going to have a wet diaper a few seconds longer because your conference call went long and that’s okay. Everyone is okay in the end.”
Her new mindset has been liberating on all fronts. “Once you sort of get to that point I think you enjoy your children more, you enjoy your job more, and I’m getting closer to that point which is fun,” she says. “It’s chaos, I’ll be honest. I’m sleep-deprived. But it’s also the greatest thing that ever happened to me, so I can’t really complain.”
That said, Campbell admits that as a mom she “always feels a little bit inadequate,” and that she still struggles with fears that she’s “not getting it done, whether it’s at home or at work.” While her “heart aches” each day when she says goodbye and heads to work, once she arrives at the office Campbell is able to “get focused and move on.” Not for long! “They enter my brain and I feel like I’m not focusing enough on what I should be doing at work” she concedes. “You go through this constantly. Balance does not exist. Who made up that word?”
Campbell is mom to Eli James, 19 months, and Asher Liam, 4 months, with husband Dan Senor.
Source: Julie Menin’s Give and Take
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