How to Go Back to Work
By Rachel Nevergall
@rachelnevergall
Step 1. Quit your job.
This isn’t how you want to start. But this is what happens.
The thing is, you always believed you could be a working mom. After all, your mom was, and her mom before her. They leaned in, showed up, so of course you would, too. In fact, you chose a career that would allow for this flexibility. A therapist can set her own hours, and you know how important it is for moms to have control. Bless your heart.
With your approaching due date, you set your preparations into motion. You plan the perfect maternity leave. (You will do nothing you plan, but hopeful optimism is still integral to the process.) You find the nanny. You create a fourteen-page binder including detailed schedules, likes/dislikes, and a handbook for proper shushing technique. When the nanny arrives that first day, you swing the door wide, arms open and ready to be a working mom who can balance the career you know and love in one hand with motherhood in the other—shaky but hopeful—hand.
As it turns out, balance is handing over your five-month-old to a stranger, and the necessary binder, while realizing the weight that once sat between your hip and the crook of your elbow just shifted to your heart.
Balance is driving down the streets of Chicago in between appointments wearing a specially designed sports bra with two peep holes so a pumping machine connected to the cigarette lighter in your car can suckle precious drops of milk from your boobs “Completely Hands Free!” allowing said free hands to be used for more important work like stuffing your face with a turkey sandwich, returning phone calls, and let’s not forget driving a moving vehicle.
Balance is also reading a text from your nanny that says, “She hasn’t stopped crying since you left. Anything I should do?” You will want to respond Well, did you read the handbook, but instead you slump over the steering wheel and declare to an empty car “I can’t do this.”
Text your nanny that you’re coming home. Don’t invite her back.
This is when you quit.
Step 2: Lean in.
Don’t tell anybody you’re quitting, though. Tell them you’re choosing to stay home with your daughter, that this has always been your dream for motherhood. Tell them what a privilege it is to be the primary caregiver for your children nurturing them throughout their early years, a privilege that you can afford to be a single income household in the first place.
Say this aloud so they won’t know the truth you keep deep inside your body, maybe along the same jagged edges of the not yet fully healed c-section scar. Here is the truth: you failed. You are not strong enough. You can’t do it like the other working moms. Those truths aren’t real, but you don’t know that yet. There is a lot you don’t know.
Replace those feelings of failure with an eldest daughter’s natural desire to succeed. The further you move away from your past life as a therapist, the easier it becomes to embrace an entirely new lifestyle. Make it look like you meant to do this all along.
Enter: Pinterest-Mom Era. Create a life that will fit neatly into one of those little highlight reels. Bake the nutrient-packed muffins. Curate the developmentally appropriate toy shelves. Throw another child into the mix, a boy this time, a spicy one to go with your gentle-hearted girl. You love balance, after all. Of course you must also manage the relentless fatigue of tiny emotional grenades that can destroy a room and your spirit in seven seconds flat. But if you look past the mess—way past, even further now, maybe squint a little, ok, yes, there it is—you’ll start to appreciate the satisfying freedom that comes with this lifestyle: slow mornings, soft leggings, open calendars.
Give in to that. No really, do.
Read outside while your baby naps on your chest, feeling the warm sun tickling your nose with the season’s first freckles as you get lost in a good story. Teach your daughter the pleasures of a girl’s lunch over spicy tuna sushi rolls and salty edamame that pop with surprise into your mouth. Go to a live music concert on a Thursday morning in March and dance with your babies on either hip harnessing the carefree abandon of one who has no other responsibilities but to teach her children how to truly feel alive in who they are. And how to scream “ENCORE!”
Remember how this joy feels. You’re going to need it.
Step 3. Doubt, once again.
“So, what do you do?”
The question will assault you at every dinner party and work function you tag along to with your husband. Balance your plate of hummus in one hand and chilled wine glass in the other while you fumble for the appropriate response. For a fragment of a second, tune into the tiny voice that hangs out in the orbitofrontal cortex part of your brain along with your babies’ giggles and the taste of a really good red wine. Tell them about the stories and the lunches and the concerts, she whispers to you. Tell them what makes you glow.
You want to listen to this voice. You really do. But they don’t ask you what makes you glow. They ask you what you do. Allow that little voice to retreat further and further into your memory until your soul is a wrinkly deflated balloon.
“I change diapers.” This is one response. You find others over the years. Your answer changes with varying degrees of self-deprecation laced with humor such as “#momlife” to “Well, I used to be a therapist but now I work pro-bono for my kids. Rough clients.” That last one is your favorite line. Chuckle uncomfortably loud. Walk away. Meet someone else. Repeat.
Wish you had a better answer.
Step 4. Become a writer.
The question “what do you do” haunts your thoughts. But it’s not the question that bothers you as much as your response. You don’t like how your answer sounds like an apology. There has to be a better way to tell your story, to tell others, as much as yourself, what makes you feel alive.
This is when you find writing. With an empty journal and a pen, write the stories of your day. Write about the moments that make you glow, and the shade that threatens it. Write the answers and the questions. Write the beliefs and the doubts. Write letters. Write essays. Write poems.
Write your way back to yourself.
Now, notice how you feel. Pay attention to how your breath calms when you wake early in the morning to catch those first flutters of a story. Observe the spark in your eyes when you tell your husband about an idea for a new creative project. Feel the way your heart pitter patters the first time someone asks what you do, and you answer “I’m a writer.” You feel like you’re falling in love, don’t you?
It feels that way because you are. You are falling in love with who you’re becoming.
Step 5. Have a third kid so you don’t have to go back to work.
The terrifying thing about finding yourself is you start to remember what it felt like to lose yourself.
This fear surfaces around the time your second child turns two. It shows up as an ache in the place where your c-section scar long ago healed. Do the math in your head and sigh with realization. Other mothers warned you of this bittersweet stage of motherhood. In three years there will be no more children at home needing your care and you will return to work.
Return to work.
Anxiety threatens to pull apart the stitches where failure rests. Not again. Not now. You can’t let this happen. Don’t worry though! There’s an easy solution to this problem.
Have another kid!
Oh sure, adding to your family to stave off the responsibility of returning to work is terrible advice.
Except maybe it’s not so terrible. The thing about three kids is it throws off your balance—two parents, two arms, two eyes, two feet. You can never truly be in balance with three kids.
You need to learn this.
Welcome this third baby into your life, the one who charms you with his dimpled grin, who knows what he wants and how to make this desire known. Feel your body fighting for realignment as this child’s presence throws off your ability to balance every need of every child, and yourself. A night will come when she needs help with her science experiment, and he is peeing all over the bathroom walls and you’re trying to help both of them with one hand while clutching a wailing, overtired newborn in the other. You remember the girl in the car years ago juggling a life she couldn’t handle, and you wonder if she was right all along.
But then you remember something else. You remember the stories you learned to tell about your life, how with every wobble you grew stronger. When the work was too hard, you chose a different path. When glimmers of joy caught your attention, you followed the light. When you didn’t like an answer, you went looking for a better one. Along the way you found your wobbly, imperfect self. Balance was never the thing that moved you forward anyway. The imbalance is what pushed you to recalibrate, to find the next right thing.
It’s time.
Step 6: Go back to work.
Walk the last baby to his kindergarten classroom. Cry all the way back home. Open the door to a quiet house. Feel the awkward balance of no hands to hold for the next seven hours. It’s weird. It’s supposed to be. Now, ask yourself that same dreaded question.
What do you do?
Your answer will be I don’t know. So you google it, of course. The internet offers plenty of lists, ones that include resume refreshing and interview practicing and networking. Ugh. Networking.
But then you’ll land here. And you’ll remember all of it was part of the process. The trying and the failing and the recalibrating and the learning and the becoming—that is the story. That is how you go back to work. The rest? You’ll figure it out. Lean into the wobble. Your body will right itself.
Oh wait, one more thing.
Step 7: Get a better bra.
But keep the leggings.
Guest essay written by Rachel Nevergall. Rachel is a mother, partner, writer, and maker living in Chicago with her college sweetheart and their three kids. Rachel wants to be defined by the things she loves, like an impossible to carry stack of library books, the many layers to a well mixed cocktail, growing vegetables from tiny seeds, and obsessing over the complexity of a Taylor Swift lyric. You can connect with Rachel in her monthly Raise & Shine Letter, on her blog, and Instagram.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.