Things I Thought I Knew

Even before Mr. Metropolitan and I decided that we were ready to propagate, we made a number of decisions on eventual-offspring-related grounds. Back a few years ago, I switched jobs in significant part because the new job would be more family-friendly than the prior one. Family-friendliness wasn't mission-critical to me at the time -- we were a hard-working professional couple and planned to remain so for quite some time -- but I knew that somewhere along the line, I'd care about my hours and would want the kind of job that had a clearly defined start and end to the day, wouldn't require me to travel as often, and that wouldn't tie up my weekends. And it even paid better. No brainer, right? So off I went, with full spousal encouragement, to start over with a brand new job and a brand new career.

The theory had been to work on getting me knocked up starting about a year after my move to the new job. But shortly before we were to get rolling, one of my managers took me out for drinks one night and told me that if I really knocked the cover off the ball over the course of the next twelve months, he was confident that I'd get promoted a year earlier than I'd anticipated. Mr. Metropolitan and I had a long talk about it while sitting on the beach at a lovely Caribbean resort, and resolved that we'd wait another year before trying. So we waited.

We actually didn't quite wait the full year -- my grandfather, who would have adored being a great-grandfather, died a few months later and we decided that the time had come to repopulate the planet before we lost any more prospective great-grandparents. I did get promoted early, and was several months pregnant at the time. Having checked off that box (the one labeled "Get Promoted Before Having Baby"), I relaxed, brought a yummy little daughter into the world, and didn't think about work too often during a very enjoyable maternity leave.

When I returned to work post-baby, it became clear that a number of things had changed. All of the people I had originally worked for had left my company to pursue other opportunities, and the vibe at my office was substantially different. People worked a lot later at night. They started working earlier in the morning. They worked weekends, for God's sake! Everyone said they understood my situation -- as part of a two-working-parent family, I had to leave by a certain time and sometimes wouldn't be able to arrive until a certain time and would have to excuse myself to the medical suite a few times a day to provide my daughter with sustenance served up in little plastic bags. Everyone was cool with that. Until they weren't.

I guess I shouldn't say that. Everyone still says that they're cool with my schedule. (Let me be clear -- by any normal calculus, they're still full-blown full-time hours. I'm in the office for 8-10 hours a day and work at home on evenings and weekends when necessary and carry a blackberry and cell phone at all times. It's not like I'm at work from 10 am until 2 pm and calling that a full day.) But my reviews, cloaked in the freeing aura of anonymity, tell another story. "Not terribly hard-working." "Often inaccessible." Funny thing, that. Especially since no one ever questioned my work habits before I went on maternity leave.

So now here I am, in this job that I took several years ago for the express purpose of being able to be both a successful professional and a successful mother. In my heart of hearts, I am about 75% sure that my career switch was the right one. I still don't work most weekends, I still can keep the hours I need, and I still don't travel. But it gives me a pit in my stomach every day to know that I'm looked down upon by my colleagues for doing the right thing by my child. Am I supposed to look for another job that will accord the working mother who chooses not to blow off her kid the respect that I think and hope she deserves? Am I supposed to stay put, ignore the terrible feeling in my gut, and accept the fact that I'm apparently viewed as a slacker? I have no idea.

The one thing I do know is that working longer hours and seeing my daughter less frequently than I currently do is not one of the choices. But of all the things I thought I knew back when I made my career switch, the thing I didn't know -- and couldn't have known -- was how much it would bother me to be looked down upon for insisting upon spending an hour or two a day with my daughter.