Crowdsource comfort:
Today’s new working moms don’t have to do it alone
Most mothers have vivid memories of the milestone days in their parental lives—the day they found out they were pregnant, the day they gave birth and sadly for some, the day they first dropped off their children at daycare before returning to work. “One of the worst days,” says Katherine Michaels, a 32-year-old mother of twin daughters who returned to the workforce in 2018. “The entire time I was pregnant, I always assumed I was the Liz Lemon type. I never really thought that I wanted to stay home every day with my babies. I just didn’t think it would be something I would enjoy.”
Turns out she was wrong, Michaels says. Well, at least for a few months. “I really missed my job and I really missed my students,” says Michaels, a high school English teacher in Morristown, N.J. “I felt like I had spent all these years getting my degree and my master’s, and now I was going to take this 10-year break? God bless the women who do, but I was just never really comfortable with it.”
It may take a village to raise a child but for some mothers, that village’s true importance comes through when it provides the love and support many new moms need when they return to work.
Michaels says she learned quickly that all moms, no matter their personal situation, “have a huge chunk of their hearts set aside for their kids.” And that lesson was no more relevant than the first day of the school year a few years ago. “I thought I was OK but when I dropped them off, I completely broke down. I pulled over and actually called
the school to leave a message that I would not be able to make it,” she says.
Michaels said she got herself together and drove to the school anyway. And it didn’t take long for her to get back into her routine. “I’m a total nerd for female authors and I created this great curriculum based on Sandra Cisneros and Alice Walker and other great contemporary writers,” Michaels says. “When I started explaining to my students what we would be doing that year, they kept asking me about my daughters, so I talked about them, which made me happy.”
Michaels says her students became her support group. “I didn’t go overboard but I’d give them little updates,” she says. “I began to realize that I could actually be a parent and a teacher and I could be excellent at both.”
Although Michaels describes herself as a working mom, she says she’s not interested in the debate between mothers like herself and their stay-at-home counterparts. “Do what you want to do,” she says. “Do what feels right.”
Friendly competitions
Sarah Duran, an Atlanta-based retail manager who has three children, says she used to have the same separation issues. “I used to cry on my drive to work because I had these irrational thoughts – ‘what if he doesn’t recognize me? What if he doesn’t like me as much as his daycare mom,’” she says. “I wish I could go back and tell 27-yearold me that there’s no way your kids are going to forget you. And then I’d tell her that in about 20 years, she’ll sometimes wish they would.”
Duran says that having a sense of humor about putting her children in daycare helped her deal with it. “I was working for the state of Georgia and I was in a room with about 10 other women and I would say half of us had babies or toddlers in daycare,” she says. “We’d do this pretend thing where we would answer the phone and act like it was our daycare calling and we’d be like, ‘What? He’s speaking
Latin already?’ or ‘You want to teach her calculus?’ Just dumb stuff, like my-kid-is-better-than-your-kid stuff.”
Duran says working in close proximity to so many new moms also helped her realize the futility of trying to be there for every milestone event in her child’s life. “My oldest is now in college. In 21 years, I’ve been there for plenty of his ‘firsts,’ some of which I’d rather forget. First
step he took? At daycare. First time he took his diaper off and wiped it all over the kitchen cabinets? At home,” she says.
Working together
Working for an employer who understands the commitment of parenting and sets appropriate policies and expectations can help. “Employers need to keep in mind that some of their employees are likely to be parents who are still trying to juggle childcare for their kids. That means they should go into re-entry being more understanding of the unique needs of their employees,” says Olga Zakharchuk, founder and CEO of Baby Schooling, a
website focused on helping parents raise children from birth to age three.