The Big Question for New Moms: To Work, Or Not To Work?

I have always felt so lucky to have found a career that I absolutely love, and I always knew that after my baby was born I would happily go back to work as soon as the circumstances would allow. I knew this was something other moms struggled with, but not me! My mind was made up and I had no doubts about it.

…boy was I in for a rude awakening.

What I didn’t realize before my baby was born was that, for me, how much I enjoy the work I do would ultimately have very little to do with my decision to go back to work or not. Instead, what I have quickly realized is the insane level of difficulty that comes with trying to juggle TWO things that I feel deeply passionate about. With that realization has come a complete 360 on my perspective.

Here is an example of the inner dialogue I go through on a daily basis:

“I love my job! And I don’t think I want to be a stay at home mom. But, if I must choose between my daughter and my career, I will choose my daughter first every time. On the other hand, if taking care of my daughter means keeping a roof over her head, then maybe going back to work is the only option. But if I go back to work now, then I will never get back that time—that first year—when my baby is so fresh, so new, and so malleable.”

Never before have I felt so torn about anything in my life.

This feeling? This sense of being expected to be two people at once? —is something I am recently discovering countless new moms are feeling. And it isn’t exclusive to people who have chosen the same path as I have! One thing that is becoming increasingly clear to me is that, no matter which path you choose, there is no perfect scenario.

Perhaps you have decided to go back to work fulltime, and you feel very satisfied with the quality of work you are putting out there. This choice, however, has meant giving up on your goal of exclusively breastfeeding, or you missed your baby taking his first steps, or whatever it is, and you can feel the judgment in their voices when people ask you, “Doesn’t it break your heart?”

Perhaps you decided to stay home, and even though you only get to shower once every few days and you haven’t had an adult conversation in weeks, you look at your baby with immense fulfillment. But you, too, feel the judgement in their voices when people say, “It must be nice not to work.”

Or perhaps you’ve decided to tackle both territories. You wake up every morning and put on your business clothes, attend every meeting, make every deadline, and you take your kid to every doctor appointment, go to every swimming lesson, and make it home on time for the nightly ritual of bath time and a bedtime story, but you are gradually becoming so burned out that all that’s left of you… is a shell.

As someone who identifies more with the third example, I find myself wondering, am I being realistic? Is it possible for one person to effectively be both a mother and a professional?

I suspect, as is the case in so many other aspects of life, it is when we insist on knowing the answers that we lead ourselves astray. The true power, I must remind myself, lies within the acceptance of our own powerlessness.