The new mother: Society’s underestimated powerhouse

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Say you:

Pretend, like that baby you just carried for 9 months, and then had taken out of your body in any number of intense measures, doesn’t exist. We celebrated you while you were pregnant, but now that you’re back with us, and without that thing growing in your belly, please, let’s not talk about it.

Oh, and while we’re pretending it doesn’t exist, we’ll always wonder if any slip in your work or need for additional time or days off will be a direct result of motherhood.

We won’t ask how your weekend was, or what your aspirations are, we will know that you’re drowning in stress and pity you. We’ll ask about your baby as our only way of connecting to you on a personal level, but we won’t really be interested or able to relate.

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One day this unspoken haze will dissipate all together. One day, many moons from now, my daughter will look at me half confused and disappointed when she hears me tell of days long ago when women felt the description above with such intensity that it drove them to a place of stress and frustration the depths of which she will only understand in the context of the hurdles we will be tackling in her present tense.

Almost 3 months post partum, I was ready to go back to work. I was ready to be my own person again. I was in love with these two little beings that I had carried, delivered and cared for but I was also ready to rediscover myself in every facet, and that included work.

So I came back with ferocity. I had a new sense of time. Before kids, it was “I wake up, I go to work, I exercise or socialize, I go to bed.” Things happened to me in the day, and I scheduled things as I did. Time didn’t have the same sense of weight, or measure, as it does for me now and recognized in those early days coming back into the workplace. Now, time at work, meant time away from my kids. For a lot of mothers, that meant sadness. And particularly as my work often involves travel, I have found myself in pockets of sadness as well. But for me, sadness did not dominate my sense of time away from my kids. The bar with which I used to measure time away has been in its productivity and effectiveness. If I was going to spend time away, it was going to be used efficiently with significant output.

For those of you who know me personally, or better yet, worked with me professionally, my pre-baby self was no lazy sack to begin with. I work very quickly, I have foresight and I build, plan and execute with tremendous result. Post-babies, I broke the dial, and cranked it up past 10.

I recognized that I had bought into the first two paragraphs of this piece. I had believed that new mothers should keep their mouths shut about their kids and that they were tired, and strained in a way that reduced output. What I hadn’t expected was my distaste for the narrative I had prescribed to. For me, and other new mothers I saw reenter the work place, we were ready to work.

That post-partum period had taught us that no matter what was going on inside, we were going to buck up. No matter how many sleepless nights, that baby still needed to eat. And no matter what it was like when we left home that morning, we were going to get our shit done.

So please, eyeing co-worker, take a step back.

We aren’t interested in your bullshit run around for why things can’t get done, or that ‘this is the way we’ve always done it.’ Our bodies are new, our love is new, our outlook has been cracked open, turned upside down, spun around and set back down.

We are the unsung talent pool, overlooked, underappreciated, and misunderstood.

We are the powerhouses that will take your business to the next level.

Shake us too hard, ignore us too much? And we will leave you.

We will build on our own and our tower will stand taller and stronger, for its foundation is built on love, on hard work and the knowledge that we have created the generation of the future.