Returning to work after having a baby is a nightmare. It shouldn’t be.……………………………………………………………………………………
There comes a time in every working parent’s life when their kid’s artwork must be dealt with, especially the stuff from daycare. The rivers of scribbles and oceans of finger paintings. The cotton balls and glitter, macaroni and beans glued to flimsy backing. Artwork assembled by their teachers and wranglers, pieces that children had only a marginal role in. Their names jotted in the corner or on the back, in someone else’s handwriting. Not my kid’s. Not mine.
Last weekend was the reckoning. Five boxes and three bags stuffed full. I found the drawings that they did with me, on the weekends or on my one work from home day. The ones I remember as the beginnings of ‘real’ drawing. From my son, a sad apple and an unimpressed banana. From my daughter, bunnies and scraps full of hearts. I search these first jabs at artistic expression, thinking about how well they represent the people they are now. Emotional storms and animal allegiance.
In the mix were daily daycare notes (“She had a great day and played with her best friend!” “He saw a firetruck outside and ate all of his apples!”), field trip recaps, and informational sheets from the pediatrician’s office. But one piece of paper stopped me cold. The List. I had forgotten about The List. Seven or eight years ago, back when I was done needing it, I must’ve thought that this was something I had treasured and would want to see again. Maybe it’d make me laugh or bring me back to a specific time I had long since forgotten. Oh it brought me back all right. And my first thought was,
Fuck. This. List.
This was the morning out the door checklist that I wrote for my return to work after my second maternity leave. It was everything I needed to have on or with me as I headed out the door each morning. At that point my son was two and my daughter three months. She never slept. My thoughts were like butterflies, sudden and zigzagging. And completely impossible to catch. So, The List.
There it all was: Bottles. Lunchbox, my son’s. Breastpump, with a list of all the necessary parts because nothing will make you crack like an egg spiked into the sidewalk like realizing you forgot the one tiny part that makes your pump work. Wallet. Hat (mine or his or hers or theirs? I have no idea now). Their tote bags for daycare full of changes of clothes and nap blankets and diapers. Nursing pads and deodorant. Makeup. Phone. Water. Lunch, mine. I’m surprised I just didn’t condense the entire list into one word. Brain. Try to remember your goddamn brain, lady.
For me, this list brings back everything that was intensely, nauseatingly hard about working more-than-full time and having two very young children. I was expected to perform well at both and was doing so at neither. I was exhausted, emotional, many nights falling asleep fully clothed as I nursed my daughter at 7 o’clock at night.
The job I had returned to was stressful, most of the time ridiculously so given that we weren’t saving lives but instead creating catalogs or print campaigns. But it was also the job I had worked my entire adult life for. From my first days as an intern while still in college, through two advertising agencies and three design studios, this is the job I pursued and was succeeding at. I loved working and I still do. A worker with a job has always been the clearest part of my identity. While other girls were playing house, I was playing office. Working hard was my thing. Until living hard challenged it to a duel.
I felt hollow and split, trying to blend back into the world I used to know, as if I wasn’t still getting used to the way my new clothes grabbed at my hips or were taut at my chest. Or pretending that at the most impossibly boring moment of a meeting that ran too long, that my milk wasn’t letting down. Yes, I always hug my chest like this, please, go on. I’d like to think that if the men (and let’s face it, it’s men) who create family leave policy in this country suddenly found themselves back at work with new bodies, rampaging hormones, and the risk of spontaneously ejaculating every time meetings ran long, things would change. (It’s not a perfect analogy, I know. They’d probably just schedule more long meetings).
We need to rethink how the return to work should be done. And when it should be done.
My workplace was not my enemy, not really. I had a paid twelve-week leave, the best I could hope for in this country. And I had a private place to pump. There is just no mistaking that the world of work was not created by women for women. Because it doesn’t work for us. It celebrates the birth of our children with flowers in our hospital rooms and a baby gift sent home, but expects us to snap to and be on our game only twelve weeks (or less) after delivering another human being into the world. It subtly (or not so subtly) pressures us to get our shit together, be like you were before, and god Jesus don’t talk about your kid all the damn time.
I should make one thing clear — I don’t look back and regret returning to work. Nor do I think I should’ve stayed home full time with my kids. That’s not what I wanted to do, full stop. I was fortunate to work from home some of the time. I was fortunate that my husband’s employer allowed him to work four days a week so he could spend every Friday with our kids until both of them were in elementary school.
I just wish I could’ve stayed home longer without risking losing my job. I wish I didn’t need that list because my brain was such a pile of garbage that I couldn’t remember the most basic of items in the morning. And I wish I could’ve worked less initially. But what I was doing was working fifty to sixty hours a week, right out of the gate. It’s impossible to recommend that.
I also wish these conversations — about different choices, when a choice is even an option — didn’t automatically devolve into a shaming pissing match between working mothers and stay at home mothers.
We can’t all stay home. And we can’t all work. We don’t all WANT to stay home. And we don’t all WANT to work. Many women HAVE to work. And some never will. Let’s just embrace that your team will never contain all the women on Earth. And neither will mine. Let’s embrace the idea that people (that includes women!) are different with different goals, different measures of success, different skills and talents and pain points. We all make different choices. We can’t all make the same choice. So let’s embrace that and then let’s move the fuck on.
And while I recognize that all of the work I did back then during those long hard hours has allowed me to have the career I have now, I just look back and wonder — did it really have to be so hard? Did the choices need to be so impossible? And did I have to feel like I should act like it wasn’t ridiculous? That I wasn’t being ground to dust?
While we’re at it, can we stop making fathers feel guilty for fully taking their meager paternity leaves? Or expecting that they check in, be on e-mail, or actually work while they’re at home?
My husband is a carpenter and you can’t work from home as a carpenter, thankfully. I needed all the help I could get, both times, all the time. So when I returned to work and was shuttling layouts and notes home to my co-workers while they were on paternity leave, I felt like a part of the horrible machine. I knew it was wrong. Because if someone had arrived on our doorstep with work for my husband during either one of our leaves, I would’ve slapped that shit right out of their hands. Leave us alone. Is that too much to ask?
The early days and weeks and months of a family are sacred. That’s what I’ve come to believe all these years later. They aren’t easy, not by a long shot. But they should be untouchable. The weeks should be longer, the time less fractured. We have the rest of our lives to be pulled in a thousand different directions. Give us this time to heal, to get to know each other. Give us more weeks and, yes, months to create a foundation that we can all launch from.
Give us more time. We all want more time. We’ll be better for it when we return.
I remember when I was preparing for my second maternity leave. I wanted everything as dialed in as possible. I made lists upon lists, cc:ing my teams on everything I could think of. Meeting with everyone, giving them the status. I was grilled. A lot. I remember saying to my husband one night, “I just wish one person would be big enough to say ‘everything will be fine’. Just one.” On what was close to my last day, in what was close to my last meeting, I sat with a designer I had worked closely with and rattled off everything I knew — the list, the contacts, the next steps, just everything I could shake out of my brain and release into the air before it morphed into a post partum blob of jelly. He nodded. He didn’t seem that worried. And then, to my amazement and relief, he said exactly what I had wanted to hear all along, “Everything will be fine”. If I just could’ve heard that more. If we could all just say it more. If we could all just show it more, through our actions, with empathy, with patience, and, hey, how about with our policies?
If you’re returning to work or preparing for maternity leave or just wondering how this will all shake out for you, let me tell you right now: Everything will be fine. You will make it. I just wish it didn’t have to be so hard. Or the time so short.
Fuck that list. We deserve better.
Medium is convening a conversation about work, parenthood, and how the two mesh — or don’t — in our lives. To get involved, please follow the Working Parents publication and the tag, and help us expand the dialogue by writing a post or a response.
