Working mom: Scrum Master Elena
Her caption on the Brick overview page says, ‘her only weakness is chocolate,’ but that was before she gave birth to a lovely baby girl. Now she has another weakness besides chocolate and not only that. There is a lot of misconception about being a working mom. For everyone, it’s a different experience, the common denominator being that it can be tough getting back to work.
To support (future) moms (and dads), Elena shares how she experienced (slowly) coming back to work after her maternity leave:
“I was a bit of a workaholic before my maternity leave. I found a lot of joy in doing my job well and being part of teams that are building good products. I felt on top of my game and I was “kicking ass and taking names”.
I totally intended to come back full time, to waltz back in like nothing changed in the last six months, even though I handed over my roles (yes, plural, whaddayaknow). I had a major case of FOMO because I knew there were some exciting new projects ahead. But I was also busy preparing for my own experience of a lifetime, the birth of my baby girl.
However you try to mentally prepare, you are NOT ready to be a parent. This goes especially hard for mothers. The physical exhaustion, the hormones, the changes in your body and chemistry are absolutely wild. Your brain changes — look it up — and your sole purpose in life is to protect and sustain this little human that someone handed you in the hospital and said “Good luck!”.
So you’re pretty much braindead, and yes, you may occasionally open Slack at 3 AM during one of those 45-minute nursing stints that test your resilience to the fullest, but it’s more like trying to see the other side of town through a thick fog. You get almost nothing.
Then your maternity leave is over, for some, it’s earlier than for others (for shame US government!) , but you’re back in the saddle and trying to convince yourself that stuff will be back to normal.
But there is no normal. You’re not your own person anymore. There’s feeding and playing, and bath times and bedtimes, pick-ups and drop-offs, and it’s all (mostly) wonderful. No, you can’t plan for shit, yes, you will need to skip events and parties but that’s ok because your kid comes first.
I have learned many lessons throughout the last year. I became a mom to the most wonderful girl in the world and I am learning how to be a better parent to her every day. She is becoming more and more her own person and she is absolutely the light of my life. But I am starting to slowly get back into working mode more comfortably, and switching that context is no longer hard for me. I’ve found my place in the company again, something which I struggled with for a bit. I want my daughter to know that she can be anything she wants to be and that she can enjoy what she’s doing without feeling any sense of guilt.
Because a working mom’s guilt is the worst — you feel guilty when you’re not spending time with your child when you have to work, and then you feel guilty that you’re not performing “like before” for your employer.
I am incredibly grateful to my company’s management for being so understanding and supportive, and I feel very lucky and privileged in that sense. I am ready for next year to roll around with its new challenges and balancing acts. I realize that setting the wrong expectations in the beginning only made me feel like I failed, so I’ve tried to recalibrate. I know things will never be the way they used to be and that is perfectly ok.
So to all of you (future) working moms — and dads! — out there, I want to tell you that it’s all good. Even when you stretch a deadline, or miss a meeting because the kid got sick, all that matters is that you’re doing a great job. Pat yourself on the back and give yourself some grace.”
Clay Solutions - A SALTO Group company is the daughter company of SALTO Systems. A lock hardware manufacturer based in Oiartzun, Spain. While Clay builds the cloud-based software that allows users to tap their locks open with their phone, SALTO provides the hardware and the locks that are enabled to communicate with the software. This website functions as a platform to showcase our company culture in our office in Amsterdam, the way we build our software, and why and who the Bricks are.
Feel free to browse around, head over to SALTO to find more about the hardware, or apply if you see a job you think you are just perfect for.