007 DNP Unscripted- Working Mom Notes With Ashley Reckdenwald, PA

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Hi, Dr. Nurse Podcast unscripted and I am so happy to have on today. Ashley, the founder of Working Mom Notes and she’s got a supportive platform for working mothers, and she and I connect a lot on a lot of topics that we find to just be like, What the heck is going on here? And so I wanted to bring her on to talk about some of these things as a PA and as a nurse practitioner that we found in healthcare as working moms that were kind of tough to swallow.

So, Ashley, welcome.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here and get fired up with you.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Let’s get amped, girl. Let’s do it. So let’s just go ahead and dive right in. Let’s introduce yourself, kind of how you see your role these days what you’re working on and just share your story.

I wanna hear a little bit about your Shark Tank pitch. You got a Shark Tank pitch. I wanna hear about it

Ashley Working Mom Notes: all. All right, so my name is Ashley Reinwald. I am a physician assistant. I specialize in orthopedics and sports medicine specifically. Before that, I was an athletic trainer, so I’m all in sports medicine, if you will.

I live in New Jersey and I’ve. Three children, they’re ages seven, five, and three. And I had my first one when I was working full time in the thick of it as a PA for a private practice. So I was doing it all. I was in the operating room three days a week. I was in the clinic. We were seeing upwards of 60 patients a day.

So anyone in healthcare knows it’s just like we had roller skates on. It was no joke. Double booked every 10 minutes, all day long. Six surgeries a day. We were flying. And then I got pregnant and everything changed. And when I returned after my first baby from maternity leave, I just had no idea.

What I was doing because I was new to the area I didn’t know many working mothers and I just had so many questions. I mean, this was seven years ago, so there’s so many wonderful motherhood resources out there now. But at the time, there was really nothing. And I decided to make a Facebook group to do two things, meet people in my area who.

Work full time too, who are moms. Because I was literally just going to work, coming home and like crashing, going to sleep, . And so I couldn’t really make friends. And also just ask these women questions about how to be a working mom. Like how do I pump at work? What are my rights? Where do I keep my breast milk?

All of these questions, I had no idea how to navigate life as a working mom. So it started out as a Facebook group and then it grew into what I call working mom notes because it’s the cliff notes of working motherhood. And the community has grown both locally. Where we do mom meetups and we really can lean on each other and get to know each other and ask all those questions.

And also now it’s a national platform where really the goal is just to streamline information for. A working mom so that they feel empowered through both community feeling like they have a village and experience, meaning knowing where they can go and get the resources they need to thrive as a working mom.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Yeah, that is fantastic. I love all of that because it’s so true. You paint this wonderful picture of exactly what it’s like going back into the wilderness after you’ve gone and given birth to your child, and then you go back into the workplace and you’re like, I couldn’t, well, I remember, I remember sitting down to type after maternity leave and I couldn’t even type like, it was like, it was like foreign, like the behaviors that I was doing.

Cause I had taken such a long time to, to go back to work. So it’s like even in those little things that you’re like, okay, wait, how do I. Do I need to do? Okay, I gotta get back to the, it’s almost this rewiring of your brain.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Yes. Like, just trying to remember and like, do I remember how to like, like tie in the or, you know, it’s like, but it does, it’s like riding, you know, way back to that place.

But its. A shift when you’re at home with your baby and not only learning so many new things, getting to know this new little human, but you do become a different person. Your priorities shift, and then you’re sort of, you know, rocketed back into this environment where you’re supposed to be the same person when inherently you’re not anymore.

Mm-hmm. . Kind of an identity crisis. Yes. Who am I? Who do I wanna be now? Am I still relevant in this role? Like, is this still the right place for me to be? Do I, you know, what do I love? What do I need to change about this routine? It’s a lot, a lot of questions.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Again, well said. And, and one of the things that I was thinking as you were talking, or as you.

What are the hacks that you, I guess, have learned throughout this time for working moms When they first come back To come back burnout. That’s kind of the thing that I have struggled most with since coming back as a working mom is just again, and we kind of talked a little bit about, about the podcast that it looks different for everybody.

But what are some of those things that you just kind of see the common themes reverberating through your community members? And your working mom notes.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: I really think the most important thing is building the village. So many women these days don’t have a village. They don’t feel like they have. A village to lean on, and that is truly the most important thing.

The biggest mistake. I don’t, I really even, I hesitate calling it a mistake, but it was a misconception I had was that you have a baby and it’s like, poof, your village appears. But that’s not what happened. and I was so confused, like, wait, where are all these people? Where’s my village? I have a newborn.

Like, and everyone’s just so busy living their lives that it’s not that they don’t wanna be a part of your village, but you need to be very clear and explicit in. How different people can play a role in that village. And it’s important for you to know what that means and what that looks like. No one else can define that for you but you, so I would say the biggest.

Thing quote unquote hack, if you will, is really work hard to build the village like when you’re pregnant, you know, get out there. It’s really uncomfortable meeting new people, but it is so worth it in the end just to have people that you can rely on, get to know your neighbors, get to know the people in your community.

Get to know the, you know, beyond your coworkers. That was my biggest problem. And that makes a huge difference. Also, child care. Really trying to tee yourself up with not just one or two options for child’s care, but honestly like five or six and same thing that comes back to your village of, okay, you know, the baby is sick.

Like how sick is my baby? Not sick enough that I need to stay home, but sick enough that they can’t go to daycare, you know? Okay, so now what does that mean? What does that look like for you? And if you have a partner, and if you’re lucky enough to have a partner with a flexible work schedule, then maybe that works for the two of you.

I know for me, my husband’s job was not flexible. even less than my own. And so that was an issue, like when we needed to be at work, we both needed to be at work. So then what do we do? And I’ve done it all childcare wise. I’ve done daycare centers, I’ve done nannies. You know, I’ve piecemealed it all together.

But the most important thing is just to be able to have that list of people that you can call. So that you can feel in control Yeah. Of what’s happening when things get crazy. And the last thing I would say is, except that this is emotionally exhausting and you’re physically recovering, and people like to try to be like superwoman, and I think that we need to just throw that idea out the window and really allow ourselves that time and space to.

Have this emotional exhaustion as you’re figuring out life as a new mom and getting to know your new baby. That is emotionally exhausting. On top of being physically exhausting, being up in the middle of the night, you know, recovering from. Whether it be childbirth itself or learning how to breastfeed or just your, you know, abdominals recovering from birth, but all of this, yes, I think people put too much on their plate because they wanna look like superwoman, and I think scaling it back and resetting expectations for yourself.

And giving yourself that grace to allow for healing both emotionally and physically, but also growth emotionally, which takes up a lot of that bandwidth, will make a huge difference going back to work. Why are you tired? Because you’re doing a lot, your body is going through a lot, and I think if we acknowledge that and recognize it, it, we won’t be so hard on ourselves because that’s the, the worst thing is when people.

New moms especially, are so hard on their selves returning to work and they’re like, it’s just not the same. I’m so exhausted. Well, yeah, it is. It’s very exhausting. So holding that space for yourself Yeah. I think is so essential. Otherwise we burn out too quickly. Yeah.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what happens.

And you said so many things in there that I, I wanna respond to. I think the, the biggest take home is the community part. Like you said, just realizing whenever you get home there’s nobody, like you thought people were coming and no one’s coming. And it just feels very isolating to also be. So exhausted, so tired to not have any support.

And then also feel like, am I the only one that’s like so tired and exhausted and can’t keep up with the work? So it’s just, it’s nice to have people to talk to where you’re like, you too. Yeah, me too. I mean, just that commiserating with other moms that are like, okay, so what are you doing? When you think about ancestrally, how we were, we were. And caves and huts and like we were all like in these little, you know, Communities where you had like the grandmother and the aunt and like everyone was just kind of there and they pitched in and like one would breastfeed the kid and like you would go over to your aunt, she’d breastfeed you and like, like you all like shared, you know?

Whereas that’s not the case now, it’s all on. To people. Are you currently working as a PA right now or, I believe I read somewhere in the pandemic. You had to step away from your job. You were fighting burnout, and so you decided to kind of do your own thing. Tell me a little bit about, which I love side hustles, becoming main hustles.

How did this happen for you?

Hey guys. And thanks for listening to another episode that doctrinaires podcast unscripted. I would like to take this time to let you guys know about the doctor nurse podcast website. On this website. I have free resources for nurses that are looking to up their career. Maybe start a side hustle. I also have my Etsy shop where I’ve created really cute digital downloads for nurse practitioners. In regards to life. Pregnancy. Planning. As well as portraits guys check out my resources@thedoctorspodcast.com and let’s get back Episode

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Yeah, so that’s correct. I’m not currently working as a pa, as we said in the pre-show discussion I, and keeping all my certifications are up to date and you know, I might go back at at some point and I mean that’s the beauty of healthcare, I think. And why. I chose this profession in the first place is because of the flexibility and the opportunity to do part-time versus full-time versus as a pa, you know, I was an ortho, maybe I’ll do just surgery or, you know, it, there’s many opportunities to pivot even within healthcare itself, which I thought was so wonderful.

For right now, I did step away. I had had my third baby in six years working for a very busy, busy, busy private practice. Taking call, taking weekend call some holiday call, and it was, it was a lot. And I was really just having a really tough time. After my third pregnancy, I went through horrific postpartum anxiety, I think a lot because of the concept of needing to return to work at that level of performance and not being sure I was going to be able to do it.

That was definitely a contributing factor. And so when I returned after. Third baby. It was like the end of October of 2019. And we had just taken on responsibility at our third hospital. So I was taking call over three hospitals when I was on call on top of our normal patient. It was a lot. It was a lot.

And it was really, Just I was just slowly, I got the sense that things were off when I came back. And I was just being given tasks that were like pretty absurd, especially for, you know, a pa to have to do when we had other people within the company that we’re fully capable and qualified to be doing these other tasks.

So I was just burning out all around. And unfortunately I was reassigned to fully just an office role. And then they switched me from hourly, from an or from a salaried position to an hourly position. Like without really discussing it. Wow. So if you wanna know what push being pushed out feels like

That’s what it’s in a small company. And I said, you know, it was just ridiculous. And so I started interviewing for other places and the pandemic hit

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: after how many years of working there? Seven. After. How many years have you been working there? Almost eight, seven years. Mm-hmm. , that’s how they, almost eight years.

That’s how you treat an eight year old, like an eight year old. That’s given years working through multiple pregnancies. This is how and I worked. You treat

Ashley Working Mom Notes: her my due date with every Wow.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: It’s incredible.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: to my due date. Like I didn’t take any

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: time off. Living. Living in the stress, living in the stress of work, all that jazz.

Yeah. Letting it cuz we know. Medically research based, the stress effects pregnancy, we did it. We kept going. All that jazz. Yeah, I was. And then as you were kind of struggling, Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh my. This stuff fires me up. Yeah, I get pissed about this kind of stuff because it’s like, do we value what women are doing?

Instead of just coming and talking to you, having a conversation with you, Hey, what’s going on? How are you doing? Like we don’t ask women, and I wrote, I wrote, wrote a piece on this, on women and postpartum depression. We don’t ask how they are, and yet that first year, It’s the hardest year. Mm-hmm. , and we’re mostly deprived, pumping, learning how to do now you’ve got three babies.

You’re like, every child is a level of complexity. You’re doing it all and the work is just starting to put you out to pasture. Yeah. She’s not worth much anymore. Let her just live out her days. It’s what they’re doing.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Right, right. We’re literally, in my head I was thinking, okay, I’m definitely done.

Children, that was my third child and I was like, this is great. I can finally now focus back on work. Like I was really excited now with the experience that I had within the company to now be really building upwards, not outwards. So it was disappointing. I started interviewing for other roles and then the pandemic.

And I pulled, you know, at that point, everywhere I was looking were in hospital settings exactly where I didn’t wanna be with a six. You know, I had a four year old, a two year old, and a six month old. And we didn’t know anything at that point about how it was affecting children or, and I was like, Nope, not doing it, not doing it to my kids.

And I pulled all of my resumes and And just said, okay, I need to be home with my kids right now. Which felt really weird like I was doing something wrong, you know? Like it was so strange. Not

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: waking off, but you aren’t going

Ashley Working Mom Notes: to work. Yeah. You know, it’s such a mindset. It was so strange.

Yeah. But luckily I did always have working mom notes on the side and I thought to myself, well, this is a really awesome opportunity to dive in full time to this community building. And experience and see what happens. And here we are now two years later and you know, it’s just been so wonderful, the people that I’ve connected with and the lives impacted and the.

Things that we’ve done including, I put together a whole salary transparency report. It’s on an Excel sheet. I’ll have to look for you, but it’s, yeah, it’s awesome. It’s just women just coming forward and being true about what experience is like for them as a working mom, and it has advice, how much they’re making, how many years experience.

Some of them put their email down so that people can network together, and this is like hundred. Of not just, you know, 50, it’s like almost, I think almost a thousand women so far. And it’s, it’s just a rolling list of, it’s amazing. It’s just been really fun to see women come together in such a

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: positive way.

Two things first. I love the idea of women coming together and building businesses, building options for other women, no other human is gonna understand this. The struggle. Unless you’ve been there, like I have worked full time. . I remember just being like, oh my gosh, this is gonna kill me. Like if I keep doing this, like I’m, and then to see how your job devalues you and you’re like, wait, this prince is making more than me. Like all these things, if you can see if we could open the doors to one another, you hear about physicians in bro clubs.

They look out for each other, but women don’t do this. The second thing that I love about your whole journey is that you kept working mom notes, going in the background as this possible option.

And that’s something that I want all of my listeners, especially my moms to hear, is that yes, you have a job. Yes, your. But you need to be building something for yourself on the side, something that you’re passionate about, something that you can get fired up about on a podcast and talk about, because that is part of how you get back to who you were prior to your child.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Writing on Instagram people were like, how do you come up with this stuff? And I was like, it’s literally like a public journal. It’s not like I’m, I didn’t do it to create content.

I was doing it because I. All these pent up feelings inside that I had to get out and something about hitting send on the post button when it went out to the world. And having women come back and basically validate my experience by saying, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I feel this way too.

You know everyone said you’re so brave for talking about these things. And I’m like, I needed to because I was literally going crazy in my own body, not talking about them. And this platform was really to help me like, yes, I’m helping people, I by talking about it, but they’re helping me just as much by validating that it’s not just me.

It’s like a normal thing. So I think it’s important. It can be really scary to be vulnerable and talk about those tough things that you’re thinking or feeling, but that’s where the magic is in those hard conversations. To your point when you were talking about finding that thing for yourself there’s this wonderful author, her name is Eve Rodsky.

She wrote the book Fair Play Method. And it’s amazing if you’re having trouble with your husband after this baby has now arrived and you’re doing all the things in healthcare and your partner’s doing all the things in their job, this. I just highly recommend it. I mean, I literally sat down, it’s a deck of cards and it breaks up all the tasks that you have to do.

All of them. And if you wanna know why you’re burnt out, just it’s called

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Fair Play Game. Fair Play,

Ashley Working Mom Notes: yes.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: And it comes, cause you started breaking up. It’s called Fair Play. Okay.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: Fair play, yes. And it’s a deck of cards and the book outlines how to do it and how to use it. But ultimately, you know, I sat down and looked at this deck of cards and I was holding about 70 cards and my husband was holding about 15.

And it’s like, well, no wonder I’m so tired because I’m holding all the cards. And it’s easier for him to see, or your partner to see because you’re like, okay, yeah, I need you to take these, you need to take the cards. And now they’re, they need to be

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: your responsibility. Yeah.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: So it’s just a really

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: nice way to have a That is so good.

Mm-hmm. .

Ashley Working Mom Notes: And she did a follow up book called Unicorn Space, so it’s called Finding your Unicorn Space, which is what you’re referring to, that passion project or just a place for you. And she has dubbed it her unicorn space. Like whatever that means to you is your

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: passion. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . And again, like you said, it doesn’t have to be monetized.

I mean, when I first started doing podcasting, it was me pouring money into all the different things I needed to keep the podcast going. I mean, that was it. And I was just like, I’m just gonna talk cuz that’s what I feel like I’m good at. And I just, it’s cathartic to me to talk to people about what they’re doing with their careers.

And as someone that had just recently kind of had this shell shock of like, I have to work, I have to go back I wasn’t prepared. I’m not prepared. Is anybody else not prepared? I can’t be the only one that didn’t see this coming. I began to go, I wanna have these conversations. And yes, it was to help me, but it ended up being that I was solving the problem for other people too.

Because I’m not alone. And you aren’t alone. We are all in this. And one of the Instagram posts I think is so funny. You posted. I was a PA she’d worked like 54 hours in a week. And she came home and she’s like, It’s harder being a stay at home mom than it was being at work, and we need to give ourselves space as moms and as women to recognize that the work of being at home is extremely tough and extremely valuable.

And we need to start valuing ourselves in those roles because I think reverberating not just in nursing, I don’t know if it’s this way with PAs, but it definitely is this way in nursing, is that women don’t know their worth. We, for whatever reason in society or in. Culture or I don’t know what just gives us this, this internal thing within women to kind of go, we’re not enough and we aren’t worth certain things. I need to start understanding what my value is and either go that needs to go. I can’t do this. I gotta say no to this because I am still valuable. You could be replaced tomorrow. And you are irreplaceable in your home. You are irreplaceable in your home.

I wanna normalize this conversation. I wanna normalize pay transparency. I talk about my salary all the time on the podcast. I’m like, this is what I make an hour. People are like, oh gosh. Poor thing. You know, like I talk about that stuff because I want people to know like I went part-time, but it was a 70, 80, 80% pay cut. but for me, that number of what I’m missing is vital. It’s my sanity. It’s my sleep, it’s my, it’s my time with my son. It’s my memories. That space for me has infinite value. Yes, for me, it might not be the same for you. And so everyone do what’s good for you, but listen to yourself. Because if you’re not listening, you’re gonna wake up 50 and 60 and you can regret the decisions that you made through your twenties and your thirties and your forties. Tell my listeners where they can find you, Ashley, if they’re like, oh, I wanna, I wanna see what she’s talking about.

Like, what is it that she’s talking about that impressed Sandra so much. So you can find me.

Ashley Working Mom Notes: I try to post daily on Instagram at working mom notes. Basically every social media platform that’s my handle, whether it be Twitter, Instagram Facebook if you are in the New Jersey area, we do have a private community on Facebook for working mom notes again, to search that name.

I also run for my local community. An emergency babysitter group so that when parents are in need of emergency childcare, they send me a form and I blast it out to like hundreds of babysitters locally in our area. So all these little things you can make this stuff too.

I know moms are so burned out, but It’s not just me that can do it. You can do it too if you need more people in your community. I always say just create a Facebook group or throw a message in people’s mailboxes. Hey, let’s start a GroupMe chat, or whatever it is. It’s possible it takes a little bit of effort, but it’s well worth it.

I always, always say, it will pay you back tenfold. It’s just getting going and if you need the inspiration to get going, Come follow me at working mom notes, and feel free to DM me anytime I try to reply to everyone, and it’s been really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Sandra Pagenta: Thank you, Ashley. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor Nurse podcast.