As I sit at my desk eating lunch, I open an email with a weekly baby update. The article that I click starts out “Can you believe it? You’ve made it halfway through baby’s first year.” Honestly, just reading those words almost brought tears to my eyes. No, the answer is no, I cannot believe it. The first 6 months – the first half a year – of my baby’s life has flown by. I can’t help but think about how much of it I have missed. Here I am, sitting at work, missing out on my baby growing up at this moment. There are times when I get hit hard with the feeling that I am not ready to be back to work yet. I feel like there is nowhere more important for me to be than with my baby. I still feel this way, even though I have been back to work for over 3 months now. 

We hear about it all the time. “They grow up so fast.” “This phase of life is so short.” “They grow so much every day.” “Cherish every moment.” I could not agree more. This time is so precious. Thinking about it makes me feel awful. How am I supposed to cherish my time with my children when most days I see them for an hour or two between the time we get home and the time they go to bed? 

On top of that, I have to make time in there to take care of my family. I have to make sure that everyone is fed, has clean clothes, and that our home is clean enough for us to comfortably live in. 

I’m just not ready

Don’t get me wrong, this is not me wishing that I could be a stay at home mom. After my son was born, I spend the whole first year of his life trying to figure out how I could afford to stay home with him. Down the road, I realized that I was ok with being a working mom and most days I do enjoy having a career. This is about having to return to work earlier than I would have chosen. Our family needed my income back, and my FMLA coverage was about to come to an end. My maternity leave had a deadline.

My children are so young, and they need so much from me. I am not ready to split my attention away from them. I am not ready to be back to work full time. 

I’m not physically ready

At six months postpartum, most mothers would probably say that their body still feels foreign. Just recovering from birth is a huge physical undertaking. Then we add to that a lack of sleep, a lack of time to exercise, and the physical need to create nourishment for another human. Breastfeeding itself is physically draining. Producing milk can burn an average of up to 500 calories per day. 

Continuing to breastfeed while I’m at work means pumping for an hour to an hour and a half out of every work day. I spend that much time away from my work. Then I spend the rest of my day trying to fit in my work load and enough snacks to keep myself feeling ok. 

There are mornings that getting out of bed makes me dizzy or that I am shakey until I can eat and drink enough to feel back to normal. I’ve written this off as sleep deprivation or just hunger. It’s my current normal because I have to get up anyway to start our day and go to work. 

My baby is not physically ready 

I went back to work when my baby was about two and a half months old. She had just started to sleep in 4-6 hour stretches consistently, and we were all starting to feel a little more human. That went right out the window when I went back to work. 

Have you heard of reverse cycling? Some babies who are not ready to be away from their parents will switch up their days and nights. When she started full time daycare, my daughter would sometimes sleep 7-8 out of the 9 hours that she was there. She would then wake up every two hours at night to nurse. She wanted to be with me and night was the only time that she had to do that. 

Now, a few months later, we are working to break that cycle. I cannot tell you how many days I have spent at work after waking up every 1.5 – 2 hour all night. 

I’m not mentally ready 

That sleep deprivation has definitely taken it’s toll on my mental well-being. I have trouble focusing both at work and at home. There have been times that I will have a full conversation with a co-worker and then an hour later have to go back and ask “What did we decide on that? I didn’t write it down..” My husband will get frustrated because I tell him things and then have no recollection later.

My mom brain is in full effect, and I do not have the capacity to process everything that I need to. Keeping lists helps, but my brain is just overloaded. After a long day at work, I will sometimes just mentally shutdown. I’ve asked my husband to stop asking me how my day was until after we’ve sat down for dinner. I just can’t even process his question while I am cooking or plating up food. 

This time around, I spent more time trying to prepare myself mentally to return after maternity leave. I felt like I was in a good place when I went back to work, but feeling OK and actually being ready to go back are two very different things. There is only so much that you can do to prepare yourself to leave a child who still needs you.

I’m not emotionally ready 

My mental fuzziness is only made worse by postpartum mood swings and anxiety. I am easily overwhelmed and much more easily upset than usual. Just not being able to keep track of things – usually a skill that I pride myself on – is incredibly frustrating. Thinking about my children can either make me extremely happy that I have them or very sad to be away from them. I am hit with waves where I just miss them so much that it hurts. I know that a big part of this is still hormonal shifts and imbalances. Some of that I don’t expect to go away until I have finished breastfeeding. 

There is no break 

Between a full time job and then going home to take care of my children, there is just no break. There is no time for my brain to just shut off for a little bit. I stay up a short time past my daughter now so that I can have some time to watch adult TV, but that’s not much. I am so tired from working all day and waking up all night, that I am just exhausted and ready for bed by 8:30 pm. Before my daughter was born, I was able to find 20 minute ways to fit in some selfcare, but these days even 20 minutes is hard to come by.

We are failing our working moms

Unfortunately, my reality is simiilar to that of too many moms in the US. For two income households, the norm is that mothers go back to work sometime between six and twelve weeks after our babies are born. We are not even out the fourth trimester period in our babies lives before we are taken away from them. 

I spend my time divided between being an employee and being a mother, and I don’t feel like I can excel at either. No wonder our mothers are consumed by the infamous mom guilt. 

There is no amount of time that would make moms fully prepared to go back to work, but three months is simply not enough. Three months of unpaid time off that leaves most mothers without any more sick time or PTO to use for themselves or their children. We go back to work broke, tired, overwhelmed, and expected to be able to do our jobs like everything is ok. I’m just here to say that it’s not ok. Here in the US, something has to change.