After my baby was born, I knew I needed to be on guard for signs of postpartum depression. I paid attention to my thoughts and feelings, and I felt OK most of the time—never sad, just desperately tired and more anxious than ever. I brushed it off as normal.
A couple of weeks later, the virtual company where I worked as a customer service team manager, which at the time had no formal maternity leave policy, reached out to remind me that I needed to be back at the 12-week mark. Panicked at the thought, I proposed coming back part-time, feeling completely unprepared to do my job well. They said that wasn’t an option.
Nursing the baby one afternoon, I cried thinking about returning to work. I felt silly being upset, though. After all, going back had always been the plan! It hadn’t crossed my mind to be a stay-at-home mom or not go back to the job I loved. But if I wanted my position back, which I was good at and which helped us pay our bills, I’d have to start work before my son was even three months old. My job was virtual and I worked from home, so my husband’s and my plan initially was to use a combination of family help in-house and outside daycare or babysitters to watch our son. But in the thick of newborn life, handing him off to anyone else felt scary.
I imagined him crying, his hunger or wet diaper being ignored by the caregiver. I pictured myself trying to focus on work but my brain never being as sharp as before. And worst of all, I worried that he might fall asleep when he was away from me and not wake up. That thought looped in my mind.
I’d been told months before I left for maternity leave that there would be flexibility should 12 weeks not feel long enough. In reality, though, that wasn’t the case, and I started to seriously consider the possibility of not going back to work once it became clear that there were truly only two choices: go back or don’t. I was averaging a couple of hours of sleep each day, starting to see symptoms of my autoimmune disease flaring up again, and felt riddled with anxiety at the thought of leaving my baby in someone else’s care.
Without the option of working part-time, my husband and I crunched numbers, looked at our savings, figured the large portion of my income that childcare would consume, and assessed how I was feeling. Honestly, I felt lousy, both physically and mentally. So I didn’t go back. I stayed home, making a major life change I had never anticipated.
At first, I felt relief: that I didn’t have to leave my son with a stranger or work half-heartedly while constantly worrying. But without the consistency of a work schedule and routine, my days with an infant began to overwhelm me. The irony is that being with a baby all day is an incredible amount of work yet also very boring. I would nurse him and hold him while he napped, wondering if I’d made the right choice but also being truly thrilled to be with him all day. And then I’d swing in the opposite direction just as quickly, crushed by self-doubt and the prospect of never working again.
The number of contradictions that can coexist in a person is staggering. I did my best to seem fine, but I was bowled over by motherhood in those early months. I loved it, even though I kept thinking I had made a mistake giving up my job. I was grateful that I was privileged enough to stay home when so many women have no choice, yet I also felt suffocated by the decision.
Even when we started to settle into the new normal, I couldn’t get a handle on the hamster wheel of thoughts in my head. During the long, idle days, I thought about the last conversations I’d had with my boss. I replayed the conversations but embellished them in my mind: saying better things and crying far less than I had in reality—I was more assertive, bolder, less apologetic, less worried about how my choice would impact other people, and more confident in my decision. But every time my brain spun these invented exchanges, I just felt awful all over again.
I acknowledged that I didn’t have the right tools to properly process how much my life had changed in such a short period of time, so I made an appointment at a local therapy office that focused on holistic mental health care. I’d gone to a therapist years before to help me learn how to deal with anxiety when my autoimmune disease flared up. This time, though, I just wanted someone to listen to the things I was thinking about in an endless loop and tell me how to make it stop.
At the end of the first session, I asked my therapist what I should do until the next time we met. Were there exercises I could try? What does one do, exactly, to stop feeling how I was feeling?
She gave me an understanding smile and said, “You could cut yourself some slack.”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but now I understand how right she was. It took a little over a year of seeing her regularly before I felt emotionally settled. The anxiety that had once been so loud and oppressive felt more manageable. I could see myself clearly again and didn’t feel like I was lost inside a dense postpartum fog anymore. She helped me process the range of emotions I experienced as a new mother transitioning into a whole new identity and taught me to question the validity of each anxious thought.
While there are still days I feel uneasy about not working full-time, as if I’ve derailed the professional side of my life forever, I know I really haven’t. I’ve been fortunate to stay home with my son during his early years, and I know there are so many ways a person can make a living.
As someone who likes control and predictability, leaving the routine of a job and throwing myself into motherhood allowed for incredible growth in my life. Although it was scary and difficult at first, fear, anxiety, and therapy became some of my best teachers—alongside my son.
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