I’ve been back at work from maternity leave for about 2 months now. It’s been a journey coming back to work, to say the least.
First of all, I’m SO HAPPY to be back at work! I took exactly 3 months of leave, and will save the rest of the baby-bonding leave for a family trip to Taiwan for 4 weeks. For me, the first month of leave was necessary for the body to recover, and the second month was more of a getting-to-know-the-baby time, and the third month was the real baby-bonding, mainly on sleep training the baby, learning to get out of the house and travel a bit, and that was when I started to crave for human (adult) interaction and when I started to write this blog :)
Being back at work was very interesting. I worked from home for 2 days, and got into the office on a Thursday. I scheduled some one-on-one’s with my manager, people on my team, and spent the first week or so trying to catch up on what happened during my leave. I was so excited on my first day physically back at the office. Got into the office, sat down at my desk, only to find out I couldn’t log into my desktop computer anymore and had to re-image the whole Linux box. Also my team changed how we would work together on the cloud with file and code sharing, so I had some “fun time” moving from the us-west region on Google Cloud to us-east while I have about 30TB of data to copy and move. That was fun (sarcastic, in case you can’t tell)…
A few things really struck me during this first weeks of work:
1. There’s a lot to catch up on, but nothing has really changed that much. Supportive team (and managers) really helped me feel more settled.
Coming back from maternity leave can be daunting - I felt refreshed since I had been “resting” in terms of not being too stressed from work, even though physically I was tired. Even so, I still had a few panic moments of “oh gosh, everyone has been working so hard, I’m falling behind”. Fortunately, it didn’t last very long. I had been well supported and people are extremely understanding with my new schedule and changes I have to make.
In terms of my ability to contribute to work: I didn’t feel “rusty” at all, if that had been a concern for anyone. I didn’t feel like I was thinking slower, or unable to concentrate at all. I did get a bit distracted when working from home and had the baby crying/nanny accidentally walking through my door to go to the garage. But overall, I didn’t have to worry about my work performance, nor did I become more stupid just because I had a baby.
2. Breastfeeding and pumping takes up time in my day! I needed to really adjust my work style to incorporate it
Speaking of distractions, breastfeeding and pumping do take a toll on my time in the day.
My daily routine in terms of breastfeeding/pumping goes (roughly) like this:
- 7 - 8AM: breastfeeding
- 12:30 - 1:15PM: pump in mother’s room (at office), or at home
- 4:30-5:15PM: pump in mother’s room (at office), or at home
- 7PM: little breastfeed (baby usually prefers bottle at this time) + bottle supplement
- 10PM: pump before bed
In reality, it’s not as “scheduled” as I stated above. The 7AM breastfeeding usually goes OK, but sometimes baby is sleeping then I’d be running really late to shower and then commuting to work. The two pumping sessions during the day get delayed because of my meetings. And usually I just want to lay down and watch a show at 10PM and go straight to bed, pumping usually makes me really upset at that 10PM time.
At work, the challenge is how to find the time in the day to pump, since it adds basically two “meetings” every single day. In order to incorporate these pumping sessions into my day, I had to start being very straightforward with coworkers and let them know I’m heading to the mother’s room. Both male and female coworkers are very respectful of my needs. The thing with pumping is that - when you have to go, you have to go! Sometimes I’m in the middle of something and the pumping session would interrupt what I was doing previously. I have worked on the laptop in the mother’s room before, sometimes watching a video. There are a few times I just couldn’t move meetings successfully and I had to have a meeting (without video, of course) during the sessions. I have tested with a few close coworkers to make sure they can’t hear the pump going in the background.
There was one week I was at a company offsite and there were activities and meetings all day - pumping was definitely a lot harder during that week.
The thing is, you’ll work it out. The traveling moms, the working moms, the executive moms. I met some other pumping moms in the mother’s room, and even when we don’t really talk that much (people are usually in and out and get on with their own work life), it’s nice when we greet each other. I met a few women there with babies just a few days older than mine. It’s also nice to chat about how the babies are doing and if/how stress affects milk production. It’s a safe little fort of comradery, then when we leave, we walk out the door and put our work face on.
3. Being able to work from home is awesome, but I prefer going to the office even more than before
My commute is close to an hour each way, so being able to work from home is a huge perk and the main thing I relied on to be not so concerned going back to work. By working from home, I could answer any questions that the nanny has, see the baby when I have a break, and save some commute time (and nanny cost). Being at home also enables me to pump at my desk while having a call. But really, having this flexibility is SO CRUCIAL for me.
However, I very quickly realized that I much prefer going to the office and not working from home. I originally planned to work from home 3-4 days a week, and now I’m usulaly at home only 2 days a week. Why? I think I lose the sense of “work” when at home, since I could be doing other things like checking on the baby, making lunch, etc. When I’m at the office, even when I have to spend time commuting and pumping, I’m a lot more focused and feeling like myself. And then at the end of the day, I’m happy to go back home and see the baby.
I struggled with this for the first few weeks - feeling the tug between home and office. I learned that I don’t have the mental energy to decide each day on whether I’m going to the office or not, so I’m normally going in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and when I have the ability to switch things around, I go in on other days.
4. Anything you didn’t like about your job before you had the baby, only gets more intolerable after the baby
This was a big realization, and I don’t think I have figured this out - I’m still working on it.
A lot of people would say: don’t switch jobs or make any big changes to your job before baby, since you might want to come back to your familiar work and not feel overwhelmed. While that is very true, I expeirenced some other feelings towards my job.
I absolutely loved my job - but I started to want to do something more, even before my maternity leave. I started to look at what I could do before my leave, and found it very challenging to tackle new projects when I have this long leave coming up. But when I actually came back to work, the feeling of needing a change in my job became even stronger post-baby. The part that I was tolerating before, the part that I procrastinated to make a change in my role - “I should fine-tune my job responsibilities some time” - started to haunt me and became more of an urgent need. I started to ask myself every single day what I can do to make bigger impact. I started to talk to people more, reach out to people and getting their feedback. I try to be honest and open about how I feel, and to my surprise, I’ve received overwhelming support and understanding of my feeling.
Again, I do think that I have very good coworkers/managers to give me that level of support and trust. I think I partly am very lucky, and partly earned the trust and respect over the years.
5. I’m less afraid to ask for help, to challenge the status quo, and changing things up
Since I started to be more open about wanting to start new projects, I also became more brave and more open to talk about new ideas with people. I ask for help almost shamelessly, admit what I know and don’t know. To my surprise, it wasn’t as scary as I imagined. I’m getting help when I ask for it, and it’s a very refreshing feeling that I never experienced before. After all, I wasn’t as stuck as I thought before and actually had space to grow - I just didn’t put my mind into it.
I’m very thankful for all these changes that came to me after the maternity leave. They definitely keep me more motivated at work. Afterall, I feel that my time is more precious now, so I really need to spend time on things that are worthwhile. And if they’re not, I’m going to make them worth my time!
^ My writing speed has gone down significantly since returning to work! Writing this post took two weeks of writing while commuting, and edit while breastfeeding. I’m still very proud of the ability to multi-task on this one :)