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Sunday, May 21, 2006

The end of maternity leave...

Well I go back to work in three days. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this topic over the next few weeks. Right now it's just such an emotional issue that I'm not sure I can make my thoughts coherent. I hate it. I really hate that I feel like I don't have a choice. A generation of women fought to have an equal place in the working world but now I feel like many women are trapped there. It feels completely unnatural for me to have to leave my two little girls, especially my baby who will only be 12 weeks old. Of course I know I need to actually consider myself lucky. Many, many women have to go back even sooner. (I have to stop myself from thinking of the women in many other countries who get 6 months or more off!) And I'm lucky that I have a job that allows me to be home by 4:00 with my girls every day. Many women aren't home until much later. But it's still so incredibly hard. And I'm also not looking forward to pumping every day, but I'm hoping to give my baby almost as much breast milk as I could if I were home. I guess we'll see how it goes. With my first, I set my alarm for 2 a.m. to get up and pump (in addition to pumping 2-3 times during the day) so she'd have 3 bottles at daycare. There's no way I can do that this time. Why does that make me feel like a failure? There's this terrible Catch 22 in being a working mom sometimes I think. I feel like I can't be the best mom I wish I could be because of my job. And I can't be the best employee I wish I could be because of my family. Not that there's any contest about who gets priority there... Well that's all for now. Honestly, even typing about this is making me nauseous. Isn't that sad? I'll update you all over the next few days.

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