The Work At Home Mom Project

Currently, I’m scheduled to go back to work part-time, starting in August. I’m a little torn about the whole thing. I know that I need some sort of outlet to do some work, thus the reason for this blog and the technical projects that I’ve been playing around with while on mat leave.

However I also know my son, and the prospect of leaving him without me for 8+ hours a day causes my chest to tighten up and my heart rate to soar, and I start stressing out, knowing that he’ll be fine for a couple of hours, but then he’ll be tired and hungry, and want mama’s milk and touch to fill him up and calm him down so he can sleep. And the thought of not being there for him just tears me up inside. There are many people who I’m sure will think I’m being a helicopter parent, or spoiling my little guy, but we subscribe to the attachment parenting philosophy around here (more so than I ever anticipated before having a baby!), and at this point I really still feel he needs me to provide those things for him, and so I’m happy to give them.

Before peanut arrived I wasn’t sure how I would feel by the end of my time off with him, so I left work with the impression that I would be back to full time in a year. But these feelings prompted me to ask my company if I could come back part-time after my leave was up. As background: I’m a computer engineer. I had been at my company for four full years (almost to the day) before going on mat leave, and the company was only 8 years old at that point, so I was relatively senior in the grand scheme of things. I have done some time managing projects but have never much liked it, so a couple of years ago I begged to get taken off and put onto “product maintenance”, which mostly means fixing bugs and corresponding with support engineers to help them diagnose software problems onsite. It’s not really a shooting star career path, but I really LIKE it. I love the small contained units of problems that each “bug” represents, and I love that little feeling of accomplishment when I’ve fixed one, especially the ones that are hard to track down. (And if you’ve ever worked with multithreaded C++ code, you can know that some of those bugs, memory leaks in particular, can be a real bitch to track down.) And I’m damn good at it. I know that the support engineers have been counting the days until I come back from leave. There are people who have taken over my responsibilities, but they just aren’t as good at it as I was.

Unfortunately, those support engineers are going to have to learn to live without me, because although I’m coming back at least part-time, I have not been offered back my old position. Which is a shame, in my opinion. In the back of my mind I think one of the other reasons I enjoyed that job was because I knew it was the kind of job that could easily be done piece-meal, on a part-time basis, and I was thinking about this day when I would want to cut down from full-time work. Perhaps I’m a little full of myself, but I thought that I had made myself indispensable enough in my job that the company would gladly accommodate me, just to keep me and my knowledge base around. That seems to not be the case. I have been offered a position in a different department, doing work which will be somewhat similar, however will require some work that I’m not too excited about (coding in TCL? Ugh.)

I find myself a bit torn. I know of several other moms in professional careers (software developers, accountants), who wanted to go back part-time after having kids but were told flat-out that it was not an option. So I suppose I should be very thankful that my company is making this work for me. But part of me just doesn’t understand why it has to be so difficult, and why I have to be made to feel like they’re doing me a giant favour. I’m in the lucky position where financially we could afford it if I wanted to stay home full time. So I feel like in some respects I’m doing them the favour by coming back. Am I just overly full of myself? Or am I finally doing what I was never able to do five years ago, which is to know my own worth when it comes to my career?

There was an interesting news story that came out back in April, saying that part-time moms have the healthiest kids, when compared to both moms who work full time and those who stay at home full time. There’s also lots of data out there that says that most mothers would actually prefer part-time work. So I find myself wondering: if it’s what most moms want, and it’s actually better for families, why is there not more support for moms to do part-time work? Canada’s current conservative government has made it no secret that they fully support stay at home moms, to the tune of $100 per child per month paid to parents, instead of funding institutional daycares. While I don’t suggest that I support this funding model, it raises the question: if having moms work part-time is actually more beneficial for the family than a stay-at-home-mom, why is there no government programs to encourage it? There should be incentives to companies to find opportunities for moms who want to come back part-time, or to facilitate job-sharing where that’s an option. Of course I realize that not all jobs are going to be suited for part-time work. You can’t be a part-time CEO of a company. But what’s really preventing you from being a part-time surgeon? Or a part-time lawyer? Could you not just take on less patients/clients? There are many possibilities here, I just don’t think they’ve been examined very thoroughly, probably because most companies (and governments for that matter) are run by men, for whom the issue is not at all a priority.

If most women would actually prefer part-time work, then we’ve got a very strong voice. I think maybe it’s time to make that voice heard!