‘Five Months After Coming Back to Work, I Left a Job I Previously Loved’

A woman’s account of returning to her demanding job after she had her son, and quickly realizing that something had to give. Here’s how she found her right work-life balance.

As told to Korin Miller

I first told my boss that I was pregnant when I was about four months along. I worked as a programming director for a TV network, and, since my job was so busy, I wanted to make sure she knew as soon as I felt comfortable.

My boss was in the middle of giving me a promotion, and I didn’t want to take on the extra responsibility and travel without her knowing the full deal. Somehow saying “Yay — a promotion!” only to follow it up the next week with “Oh, by the way … I’m pregnant!” didn’t seem right to me. To my relief, she was very excited for me and still gave me the promotion.

Pregnancy was a rude awakening for me, though, since I didn’t know too much about the Family and Medical Leave Act. I was the first of my friends to get pregnant, and we were all shocked to realize that your employer doesn’t have to pay you while you’re on maternity leave. My work gave me 12 weeks of leave and had a plan that you’d be eligible to be paid after you’d been with the company for a certain amount of time. I ended up getting my full salary for six weeks and half of my salary for three weeks, and I cobbled together the rest of my vacation days and applied them to two more weeks of maternity. Two of the weeks I took were completely unpaid.

Before I went on maternity leave, I’d always worked long hours and had a very “get the job done” mentality. I was at the office until 8 or 9 p.m. most nights a week, and that lasted up until I gave birth. In fact, I was on a conference call the morning I went into labor, so I finished the meeting before emailing my boss to let her know it was time.

I was nervous to go back to work when my maternity leave wrapped up, but I had a full-time nanny and everything was set up. So, I went back to work. I quickly realized, though, that it was too much to try and do the same level of my best that I had done before, and I was starting to feel like I just wasn’t satisfying either side of the equation — work or motherhood. I was no longer willing to stay late at night, and I had to leave at 5:30 to get home to my son, who would fall asleep from 6:30 to midnight.

I’d work when he went to bed and then lie down for a few minutes before he woke up to nurse.

After a while doing that, I stopped caring about some of the work minutiae.

After I’d been back for a few months, we were coming up on the time of year when I’d have to start traveling for a few days to a week every month, and I realized it just wasn’t working for me. I had to have some kind of happy medium.

I knew from other people in the office who had had kids that there was a ramp-up period that allowed new moms to get their bearings again, but that was a luxury that was timing out for me. My boss was pretty supportive of me, but I knew her patience would run out eventually.

At the same time, I started to realize little things about my job that I wasn’t thrilled with as a new mom. For example, the office had a “lactation room” that was supposed to be a great perk, but it was really a gross storage closet with no windows that never got cleaned. And then there were the long hours.

I knew things would be rough at first, but I realized that this wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. I looked at the cost of childcare, and my husband and I figured out that I could go freelance and work from home while watching our son.

So, five months after coming back to work, I left a job that I had previously loved. The kind of position I was in was asking for more than I was willing to give.

I’m happy with the way things turned out, but I still think we could do better to make the work-life transition easier for new moms. As it stands now, we have a long way to go.

If Donald Trump is elected, this mom’s financial situation would be no different, because the Republican nominee’s plan calls for six weeks of paid maternity leave for mothers who don’t already receive paid leave from their employer. However, Trump hasn’t specified how much money a woman would get, only stating that she would receive paid leave “through unemployment benefits.” If that means moms would get unemployment payments, they would earn, at most, $450 weekly, about half of what the average American worker makes in a week. Under a Hillary Clinton administration, however, moms would receive 12 weeks of paid leave — and their husbands would too — at a minimum of two-thirds of their salaries.