By Naom Scheiber | The New York Times
Just past 9:30 on a Wednesday morning in March, after she drove 20 minutes to drop her son, Jack, off at preschool, after she trekked back for an hour across the Washington metro area into Fairfax, Va., for work, and long, long after she answered her first email, Maria Simon sat in a windowless conference room weighing the odds that she would be able to make a party in Jack’s class two days hence.
Ms. Simon was determined to attend, but the party was at 12:30 p.m. and she knew it would monopolize her afternoon. “Once he sees me, I can’t leave,” she said. “I’m going to have a sugared-up kid.”
She did not say this with dread. She considered the chance to spend a few hours with a bouncy 4-year-old one of the chief benefits of her job. Ms. Simon is a partner at the Geller Law Group, a six-woman firm, the founding credo of which is family-friendliness and whose stance on office face time is best described as “militantly against.”
