This is a guest post from Lizzy Silverton, aka Mother Running Vegan. We loved reading her musings about returning to work after having her daughter, and we think you will too, whether or not maternity leave is something you’ve already handled, will face one day or have no desire to experience!
Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels
I want to preface everything I’m about to say with a simple statement: I love motherhood. I say this, not because it’s necessarily surprising (although perhaps it may be), but because so much of the discourse around parenting, and especially parenting and work, is wrapped up in how incredibly hard it is. And it is. It’s really hard. But it’s not just hard. It’s also rewarding. It’s challenging (in a good way) and it can help you to develop new levels of empathy and self-awareness. There is a lot of value in hearing about the rawness of coalface parenting. It’s nice to know that you’re not alone in your struggles; that it’s normal to have moments of desolation, fear, panic and anger. But there is also great value in positivity and perspective.
The experiences I’m sharing here are personal, and to me they carry a certain novelty. But they are not novel experiences. Nor are they exceptional or limited to a balance between motherhood and work. Such a juggle also exists for many others, many of whom did not take on their balancing act by choice. The universality of feelings of guilt and anxiety, multitasking and prioritising are not only the preserve of parents in the workplace, but it is through parenthood that I have gained a privileged insight into this tide of emotion and experience.
Leaving work
I was afraid to leave work for maternity leave. Yet when the time came, I found letting go easier than I might have imagined. In the run-up to my leaving, instead of work gently slowing down, everything seemed to gain a new sense of urgency. I found myself trying to do more and more until I reached fever pitch. And as long as I kept showing up at the office, there remained an expectation (which came as much from me as from others) that I was firing on all cylinders, which, if I’m brutally honest, I was not. Deciding to finish work and acknowledging that I’d been struggling was like an enormous weight being lifted from my shoulders. It also gave me the impetus I needed to start handing over my workload.
And once I’d stopped I felt, well, fine. I didn’t feel my identity had been ripped away as I had feared, or that my brain had immediately atrophied. It was a hot summer and reading in the garden, yoga on the lawn, bobbing in the lido and trying to keep my enormous, swollen body cool preoccupied me well enough in the days before I had my daughter.
Returning to work
Just as I had feared leaving work, so too I felt a lot of anxiety about going back a year later. In the weeks leading up to my return this manifested itself as an underlying sense of unease. A little niggle in the pit of my stomach that somehow managed to take the shine off my days. Of course the 11 months of maternity leave were rife with ups and downs, but just as the ecosystem of our household had seemed to reach a perfect balance, it was time to dislodge it again. While I felt positive about the prospect of going back to work – I love my job and my colleagues – and relished the thought of sinking my teeth into some new challenges, I was also aware that my decision to return to the office was about to upset the equilibrium we had found.
Nursery Guilt
On top of this was a sense of guilt over sending my daughter to nursery. This is a strange kind of guilt, and one that I can’t really explain. My rational mind knows that nursery is a positive place where children enjoy new and important experiences and interactions. It knows that by going to work I am also acting as a role model to my daughter. Yet this doesn’t seem to counterbalance the emotional tug of walking away from the nursery gates each morning (a tug which never really seems to go away).
From a practical perspective, if you are planning to send your child to nursery, take your commute into consideration. You may love that nursery 20 minutes’ drive in the wrong direction to work, but I can promise you, you’ll love it a little less at 7:00am when you’re racing there covered in breakfast cereal, or at 5:30pm as you tear yourself away from work, phone to your ear, hoping to avoid the guilt of being the last mum, while your child sits waiting in their coat. And don’t forget, the nursery may charge you extra for being late. If you are that colleague who raises an eyebrow when a parent-peer races out of the office bang on time (and I admit, I was once that colleague), remember that they are off to face more raised eyebrows from the nursery workers who are cleaning up around a solitary, weeping child.
Finding time
I went back to work part-time. In theory, this seemed to me like some magical panacea to the mum-guilt/work dilemma. The reality was that it left me feeling like I wasn’t really fulfilling either role particularly well. With my return to work, came the realisation that my life pre-parenthood had a certain amount of contingency time built in. There were pauses between transactions, minutes kicking around on train platforms, cups of tea before work, the capacity to work late. The time that I had previously taken for granted, that I hadn’t even noticed existed, had been taken from me and it made things difficult. Every transition became a rush, every journey a race against the clock. The success of a day could hang on something as fragile as the time my daughter woke up, or whether the trains were on time. I had to learn fast. To prepare.
If I wanted to shower, have breakfast and hit the office like a woman in control of the situation (which I did), I realised that I’d have to have everything ready to go the night before (down to the teabags sitting in the cups and the kettle full). If I didn’t want to keep being the last mum at pick-up time (which I didn’t), I’d need to work more efficiently, start asking the question if my attendance at a meeting was really crucial, focus colleagues’ minds on agendas and learn to prioritise (I mean really prioritise, not just the kind of casual prioritising you mention in your CV!).
A big part of feeling satisfied at work now has been communicating with colleagues my fears around not being as ‘all over everything’ as I once was, or feeling like my ‘part-time’ status implies that I’m any less dedicated. It’s important to remember, if you care about work, it will be apparent to your peers whether or not you have to leave the office at 5:30pm.
Am I still me?
I feared in becoming a mother I would become a different person and at first I invested a lot of energy in trying to prove to my friends and colleagues that I hadn’t changed. But I have changed. The beating heart of my day has gone from a rhythmic thump, thump, thump to a more random thumperty thump thump....thumperty thump. But that’s ok. I’ve learnt a lot about what has value to me and how and where I want to invest my energy. I’ve gained perspective on my work projects: yes they are still important, but not at the cost of my family or my emotional health. I’ve learned the value of transferable skills and to be less judgemental about absence (both my own and other peoples’). And I’ve proven to myself that I can embrace change, both from within and without.
You can read more of Lizzy’s thoughts on exercise, motherhood and veganism on her blog.