It honestly seems like yesterday I was very pregnant, and very angry that I was still very pregnant, and wrote this blog post about it. But here I now am with an 18 month old daughter (yes, I’m still doing the counting in months thing), and have now been back at work for the past 7 months, after having a year off work.
The original plan wasn’t to have a year off work, in fact I remember talk to Chris about how I would love to be one of those mums that could take a year off work to spend with their child. But instead my plan was to take the 9 months of statutory maternity leave off, and return to work in June 2020 once that had ran out because I sadly could not afford to have unpaid leave.
But Lisa, you went back to work in September, and you’re talking about how you had a year off work and not 9 months?
Ah yes, because in true Lisa style, nothing quite goes the way I’d like it to, and I got made redundant. So instead I found myself job searching in the middle of a pandemic, along with many other people, and trying to find some humour in the irony that I actually wanted longer off and now I had it. Wasn’t that great?
So while I was feeling like I was struggling in motherhood with only the thoughts of returning to my lovely job soon keeping me going, there were other plans for me. While being made redundant is a generally crappy time, throw in a pandemic and it’s a right barrel of laughs. Not only did I get made redundant over Zoom, I never got to say goodbye to my team, my colleagues, or do the last day in the office thing, and instead just left the office one day in September 2019 and never returned.
I worked there for two and a half years, I felt like I was good friends with my colleagues, had the nicest manager ever, knew the inside jokes, and actually enjoyed going to work. I was quite heartbroken that that was the end, and even more so I may never see these people properly to say goodbye. There is the opportunity to go back in and say goodbye, but that whole lovely pandemic thing we’re having, everyone is still working at home indefinitely, and who wants that strange employee you haven’t seen for two years to come in to say goodbye months later?
Job searching was interesting, as loads of other people are in the same boat jobs were having 100’s of applicants, it was pretty competitive. Job interviews took place over Zoom or Teams, where there were occasionally technical problems, I found it really hard to get my personality across and make small talk through a screen, and interesting things happening in backgrounds – often in my case a crying baby.
And because so many people were in the same boat, I found it really difficult to move past the interview stage. General feedback would be we liked you, but there was someone better. Or often worse, I’d just be ghosted by the interviewer.
I honestly felt like I was going to be unemployed forever, and being the person I am who always seems to see the glass half empty, I was panicking about how I was going to keep the roof over our heads, and provide for the tiny human I brought into the world.
When then in July, someone called me and offered me a job – hurrah! It’s very strange that I interviewed for a job in my bedroom on a webcam, and started my job in my bedroom on Teams. I started back in September, and I’m still here working on the small fold-out desk in my bedroom that I bought second hand because ‘It’s fine I’ll only be working from home for a few weeks!’ – fool.
And now comes the fun part, leaving the baby when I returned to work.
Prior to starting my role in September, there were only been three times in Ivy’s life where she hasn’t been with me or her dad. Due to the lovely pandemic, we spent a lot of time together, and not with anyone else. To the point that when Ivy could see her family again at around 7/8 months old it blew her mind and she was terrified of them. Cue screaming, clinging and crying to be with me or her dad.
Leading up to leaving her, we had settling in days with my mum to get to know her, and the childminder, and eventually Ivy stopped screaming blue murder when I left her, and got used to them both and was ready to go into her childcare while I went back to work full time.
While Ivy started settling into childcare well and was happy, I felt a bit lost. I’ve mentioned before, but I am not the staying at home mum type person. I like having a career, and very much enjoy talking to adults about things that are not my child. And after a year off and wishing to go back to work, I now really missed her. I felt sad that I chose to work full time, and was missing moments where she became steady on her feet and walking, when she learnt new words, learnt to play and got to go to groups and make friends. I felt sad for these moments, mostly because this is what I imagined my maternity leave would have been, not full of me worrying about paying the rent and trying to find a new job while we stayed at home.
Looking back on my first few weeks of my new job I think I felt a lot of grief for the time I missed, and an awful lot of mum guilt for leaving Ivy with other people, even though she was happy.
I’m now 7 months in to my new role, and I’ve adapted to working, and almost forgotten that I haven’t really met anyone, and I’ve only been in the office three times. I never worked from home prior to this, as my last role wouldn’t allow me to, but I’ve very quickly got into a good working from home routine, and dare I say it, enjoy it.
Three days a week I work from my parents house for childcare, surrounded by sewing machines in my mother’s craft room (note, my bedroom), and two days a week I work on my tiny fold out desk upstairs while Chris works at the kitchen table downstairs. I get to balance seeing my daughter, get to pick her up from the childminders, eat lunch with my parents or Chris, and have lots of time to put into my role. I get a chance to miss spending time with Ivy, and then the time we do have together is great. I’ve been able to take a few days off in the week to play with her and do mum things, and yes I still miss her a lot, but she has happy parents, who love their jobs. It’s taken a few months to iron out the details and adapt to working from home, but I feel I’ve got quite a nice balance now.
