A work story, part 2.

(This is part 2 of A work story.  You can read part 1 here.)

As the end of the year and my due date approached, I started tying up loose ends.  My team arranged for a contractor to fill in for me while I was out from January to May.  I started daydreaming about maternity leave and having packages of baby items -- everything from swaddling blankets to a stroller -- shipped to me at work.  The last Friday before Christmas, I practically skipped out of the office, looking forward to the holiday break and a quiet first half of January before Mila came, and leaving behind (at least temporarily) the spin and pointless battles that were happening more and more often at work.

Then, of course, everything changed.

The following Thursday, two days after I came home from the hospital empty-handed and still in disbelief, I sent an email to my coworkers letting them know about the bad news.  I quickly received several sad and shocked responses.  In my haze, I didn't notice until much later that there were some important people who chose to stay silent in those first days.  My interim manager.  The new senior account lead with whom I'd been seeing not quite eye-to-eye.  The managing director of the office.

I took seven weeks off of work -- six weeks billed to disability, and a week "billed to" bereavement.  I dreaded going back to work, knowing that not only was I not quite myself, but that all the problems I'd watched develop over the last several months would most assuredly still be there.  But I didn't really feel up to launching, gung-ho, into a new job search; and what else was I going to do, hide out at home forever?  So I went back at the end of February, at three days a week, planning to gradually work back up to full time and bide my time until I felt whole enough to find a better place for myself.

The prospect of going back was terrifying.  I felt like I was about to re-enter a lion's den, but I'd lost the will to fight.  I had nightmares about it for the better part of a week.

The day I came back, my closest teammates welcomed me warmly, but beyond that, it was a lot of awkward welcome-backs and strained smiles.  There were probably some unspoken thoughts -- but who knows what they were?  I only heard the pauses, the silence of people who had no idea what to say, so said nothing and acted as if nothing was different.

I didn't hear from my manager right away, so the first couple of days were quiet.  I used the time to try to just get used to physically being back in the office.  At one point I got a call from an old colleague.  "I have been thinking about you a lot."  She wanted to know how I was doing, how I was holding up.  She said, "It is good to work."  I knew she meant well but I grimaced silently into the phone and felt a little hopeless.  If this work was supposed to be a salve, then my life was fucked.  I felt like someone had ripped my baby out of my arms and replaced her with a pile of Powerpoint decks that had been doctored to tell a palatable, client-facing "story."  This was going to be my life now, carrying around this pile of meaningless paper.  What a cruel joke.

After three days, I heard from my manager.  I'd known him since my Boston days.  He talks about his own four kids often.  Everyone in my group knows their names, what they're doing for the summer, what they're doing in school.  He often tells clients funny stories about them to break the ice.  On that third day, he called me from Boston and said "Heygladyou'rebackifyouwanttotalkjustletmeknowbutnopressureyoudon'thaveto--"  I opened my mouth to express my appreciation and say, no, I didn't feel pressured at all, and in fact I felt grateful that he was even opening the door -- but before I could get a sound out, he immediately jumped into telling me about my new assignment.  I realized suddenly that the door had never really been opened.  I closed my mouth.

I was given a small, languishing account to try to resuscitate.  It was in bad shape, having changed hands, been neglected, and left to wither slowly over the last several months.  Word on the street was that our managing director had a chilly relationship with the clients, having quit part of their business a few years back for not being worth the trouble.  It was so bad that I felt I had to ask if we were even trying to keep the business, and couldn't get a straight answer.

Maybe I went back to work too soon, because I actually felt grateful that there wasn't much for me to do.  I waited for each day to end so I could retreat to the safety of my house.  When deliverables came up, I tried to get them off my plate as quickly as possible.  Working on a deliverable felt like an exercise in self-defense -- how fast can I get this done and get this person to leave me alone?

Things kept deteriorating throughout the office, too.  Even as our managing director made noises about how "highly valued" our group was as the brains of the company, he closed the open position for head of the department.  The people in my group felt more and more marginalized and demoralized, and started to leave.  Account execs called emergency meetings to discuss client requests where people talked in circles for hours, before realizing no one actually understood what the ask was.  One large account was lost, and there were whispers that some big pitches fell through because pitch teams got too caught up in showing off and, in doing so, failed to follow the directions.  People were shuffled around as the business shrank.  In other offices, people started asking what the hell was going on in SF.

Even though I knew I wouldn't be staying for long, it was hard not to let these things affect my state of mind.  I started to feel really, really fucked over -- first by the universe, then by my office, which just piled on as it flailed and tried to cover its own ass.  The worst moment for me personally was an internal workshare a few weeks after I returned, for which I was tasked with presenting the work being done on my new account -- in the sad, shitty state in which I'd received it -- while others presented shiny new projects that I had gotten off the ground before my leave.  At a few points during others' presentations, our senior leadership asked, "This is great -- how on earth did you sell that in?" or "How did you get that set up?"  The presenters said, "P did it," and all eyes turned to me.  I felt suddenly self-conscious.  I tried to smile but I think it came out as a grimace.  I should have felt vindicated but I just felt embarrassed.

I told D, "It feels like they're just waiting for me to quit, for an opportunity to lay me off, or for me to get so demoralized that they can fire me without severance and say it was a performance problem."

After a couple of months, I'd finally had enough.  When I didn't feel beyond caring, I felt angry -- about the general mismanagement of the business, about the marginalization of my group, and about how personally marginalized I had started to feel.  I also just couldn't forget about the lack of response when Mila died.  I know this shit is hard to talk about, but I didn't want to work with leaders, who are presumably adults and seasoned professionals, who can't muster up some kind of human connection when this kind of crisis happens to their people.  Other bereaved moms' stories about returning to work -- where their VPs pulled them into offices to hug them and cry together, or had food sent to their houses for months -- made my company's response seem even lamer in comparison.

I started looking around in earnest at the beginning of April.  I'd spend my Mondays and Fridays off sitting at Peets or Cumaica, working LinkedIn and polishing cover letters.  In my early twenties I felt too insecure to deviate much from a standard cover letter structure, but now with several years of experience under my belt, I felt I'd earned the right to inject some casual personality into them.  It felt good to do something positive and productive that wasn't directly related to processing what had happened to Mila.  I started hearing back from companies right away, even from cold opens.

At D's suggestion, I started keeping notes for my exit interview, in a Google doc I only half-jokingly titled, "Ways In Which [Company] Has Fucked Me."

I started rationing my time and emotional energy.  If I had a spare minute, should I spend it putting in some extra effort on my latest deliverable?  Or should I spend it on my job hunt or something that would make me feel more relaxed or more happy?  I started choosing myself consistently.  Since it was becoming clear my employer wasn't going to look out for me, I chose to look out for myself.

I finally got the call I was waiting for on a Friday evening in late May.  I sealed the deal within a week.

My manager sounded, over the phone, surprisingly blindsided.

The managing director looked and sounded a bit depleted, my news having come at the end of a string of other recent departures from my group.  But I suspect a part of him was secretly relieved that by leaving, I'd made his overstaffing problem a little easier to deal with.

A peer from another department who'd been there with me since the start of the SF office, and herself recently a new mother, nodded and said, "I thought this was coming.  I didn't feel like you've been as hungry as you used to be."

My closest teammates just smiled.  They'd quietly observed everything that had been happening in the office, and to them, this was no surprise.  Old teammates who had left before me winked knowingly, slapped me on the back, and welcomed me to the other side.

My last day there was June 5th.

I feel optimistic about my new job.  I also have different expectations now, ones which I fear are not very fashionable.  I don't expect my employer (without the influence of the government) to take care of me when the chips are down -- that's what family and friends are for.  But on the flip side, I don't think it's fair for employers to expect employees to devote the entirety of their lives, time, and care to their jobs as a matter of course.  To choose, at every juncture, the professional over the personal lest they be branded as not "dedicated," not "a team player."  After all the shit I've seen and experienced (at all the companies where I've ever worked), I feel like a bit of a mercenary.  This is an exchange of services, and I'm okay with that.  If that sounds jaded, well, I guess it is.

A work story, part 1.

Since I'm bored of my own feelings, and I don't have much insightful to say about grief that I haven't already said here, maybe I'll try something new and tell some other stories.  I'd hoped by this point I'd have some stories to tell about subsequent pregnancy, but since apparently life doesn't always give us what we want, I'll tell a little bit about work.  Here's the story of my work life and how it collided, in spectacular fashion, with the rest of my life.

I was at my last company for six years -- an eternity in millennial professional time.  I was 24 years old when I started out in the Boston headquarters, and 30 when I left, almost two months ago, from the still-a-baby San Francisco office.  Long enough to have been promoted multiple times.  Long enough to have worked on several accounts, with clients and coworkers located in Chicago, New York, Dallas, Charlotte, San Jose, LA, and beyond.  Long enough to have gone from plugging data into spreadsheets to working on pet projects with my group's national lead and our CMO.  When I started there, I was living in my Comm Ave bachelorette pad, had just gotten unceremoniously laid off from my first job after college, and D and I had only been dating a few months.  By the time I left, we had cohabited, remodeled a condo together, gotten engaged, gotten married, moved cross-country together, lived in four different apartments together, gotten pregnant, and lost Mila.  So I kind of grew up there.

I had a lot of success in the Boston office, though I had to work really, really, hard before I was finally recognized.  I did good work and took pride in doing it, but was not particularly self-promoting.  Really, I'm an introvert, as it's classically defined.  Hate small talk, like deep conversation, need to be alone to recharge.  I'm not a showperson.  I don't like talking about what I don't know.  I need time and space to think.  For better or for worse, that's my nature.  I know that kind of personality is not popular or even particularly useful in getting to the top of the professional heap as fast as possible, but it's what I got.  I was lucky enough to wind up reporting into S, who was a mother hen and took me under her wing.  She hustled for me, real hard, but her word wasn't enough to get me my first promotion.  I wound up working on special projects for and impressing the hell out of her boss, and then her boss' boss, before I was finally promoted to Manager.  I didn't mind (too much) that it sometimes demanded late nights and working weekends; I liked the feeling of doing my job well, and I liked the recognition.  From there, I kept advancing, getting more responsibility, and getting my own teams.

In early 2012, after nearly four years in the Boston office, a company-wide email landed in my inbox.

I am happy to share the news that we are about to open our newest office, in San Francisco. We will be moving into a cool space right on the Embarcadero and we'll be servicing some new and existing clients in this office. Eventually we see it as a full-service office with its own clients, in the near term we will be moving folks into the office to help service existing clients. If this is something you want to consider, please alert your staffing manager, noted below.

D and I had been talking idly about a move -- maybe Austin, maybe Seattle, maybe San Francisco.  It was a sign!  I raised my hand immediately and it just so happened that someone at my level from my department was needed.  I'd be among the first twenty people there, and only the second in my department, after the SVP who would be my direct manager.  Things moved quickly.  I got that email in March, and by July, D and I had rented out our Beacon Street condo to some returning expats and were rolling across the country in an underpowered Prius packed to the roof, headed for a new home at the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking the Bay Bridge.  Adventure!

I could get to work in about 15 minutes on foot.  It was a beautiful, if sweaty, walk.  I'd take the winding, precarious Greenwich steps down through overflowing flower gardens and secret houses clinging to the hillside.  The steps would pop me out at a Starbucks on Sansome Street, where I'd stop if I had time, and then I'd walk up the Embarcadero in the sunshine, following the water and car traffic.

The SF office had a great view of the bay -- all water, flags flying, bobbing sailboats, booming cruise ships, and Oakland way off in the distance -- but terrible local lunch options.  The first year was a blur.  We were constantly hiring, constantly dousing work fires, constantly in meetings, constantly making up new processes.  There was no time and weren't enough people for formal, or even much informal, training.  My boss joked that with my arrival, I had doubled the size of our department.  We brought in another transplant from the Boston office, and then added a local hire.  Whoever was available whenever something urgent needed to get done, did it.  We all did analyst-level work, VP-level work, and everything in between.  We were flying by the seat of our pants for a while.  It wasn't that great, professionally speaking, but I figured it was part of opening up a new office, and I was assured that I was on track for a next promotion.

In the second year, things started to come apart - slowly, and then faster and faster.  I started to see the writing on the wall as it appeared, gradually, letter by letter.  Here are some of the things that I watched unfold over the course of several months:

1. A new managing director was brought in to supplant the exec who had opened the SF office.  She smiled and put on a brave face as she welcomed him, but left shortly thereafter, recognizing she'd been effectively forced out.
2. The head of my department, my boss, left the company abruptly.  An SVP who I'd worked with back in Boston was designated as my interim supervisor.  I liked him personally, but knew from past experience that he was an absentee manager.
3. People from other offices, drawn by the allure of the West Coast, started transferring in, sometimes showing up virtually unannounced -- even as the amount of client work in the SF office stayed about the same.
4. Even as the open position for head of my department languished, empty, for weeks and then months, other departments started hiring in their senior leads.  Unrealistic things started getting promised to clients on our behalf, forcing us to scramble to make good on bad promises.  We started getting requests to pull forecasts out of thin air, as long as we could make the numbers tell the right "story."  Even as we got good client feedback on our most innovative projects, internally I found myself being asked to explain their value again and again to the same people.  I started to realize that the new leadership didn't actually understand what my group did, nor did they care to understand.  I had the uncomfortable feeling that, as a result, they were sniping about us further up the chain.

While this was happening, I was also starting to have some serious doubts about what it would mean for me to be promoted to the next level in this industry, in this company.  I felt skeptical about what I saw in the highest levels... buzzwords, hot air, confusion, constant travel and a million competing demands across multiple clients.  I was also realizing that I'm not, at the end of the day, motivated by power and prestige.  I wanted to be available for my family and loved ones.  I wondered, did I really want to keep advancing there?  At what price?  For what purpose?

By this time it was late summer of 2013 and I was about halfway through my pregnancy and starting to really show.  I resolved to stick it out through my maternity leave and then look for new opportunities.

(To be continued...)

You can read part 2 of A work story here.

Scraped up.

D and I went to Turtle Tower for dinner tonight.  I like the one in the Richmond because it's easy to get a table, there's an ice cream shop two blocks down for after dinner, and it's the cleanest one in the city.  (D thinks it also tastes the best, but all the locations taste the same to me.)  It was perfect because I was feeling kind of down, so not in any kind of mood to fight crowds or yell in a crowded restaurant; and also D was starving, and the food always comes fast at pho places.

We were quiet as we ate our noodles, but afterwards he told me a funny story from his run this afternoon.  He was running near the warming hut on Crissy Field, which sits by the water just east of the foot of the Golden Gate (which means it's almost always fogged in at this time of year), where he spotted a kid about eight or nine years old on a bike ahead of him.  As he watched, the kid wiped out and landed on the ground.

"I went over and helped him up - oh, he was fine, he just had a scraped-up knee.  So I asked where his mom was" -- here, I imagined the kid looking back down the road into the fog and realizing he was alone with his bloody knee -- "she was somewhere way back - and then he started crying.  I mean, it was pretty scraped up but I was like, ahh" -- D made a pffft face -- "I've done that to myself like, ten times.  You can show that to your friends later and tell them they're wusses.  Yeah, he was fine but it was the kind of thing you can show off.  So he stopped crying and I walked him back to his mom."

I'd like to see D as a dad (again), someday.

Loud and boring.

When Mila died, everything went quiet.  My mind felt filled with a dense silence.  I didn't think much about my feelings; I just felt them.  I couldn't plan for the future, so I lived in the present.  I didn't want to be anywhere but where D was, so I stayed by him and focused on him.  The thoughts that came, came one by one.  Each one was painful, but new.

At almost seven months out (is that even possible?), I find I'm bored with my own grief.  When it doesn't hurt too much, it's just really boring.  All the thoughts I have, I've had a million times before.  All the bad ones, and all the good ones with which I automatically try to counter them - they yell back and forth at each other in my head, the same thoughts, one after the other, over and over again.

A majority of couples are pregnant within three months of trying.
You really haven't been trying for very long!!

Mila's not coming back.
You're so lucky to have what you have!!

Maybe something's wrong with you.
You're healthy and normal!!

Maybe you'll never be a mom again.
Don't be dumb, just relax and keep trying!!

You're still kinda fat.
What are you talking about, you technically can zip your old pants!!

No one cares anymore.
Uh, probably true; pass.

I wish things would quiet down in there.

This is bullshit.

I'm sick of trying and failing and not being able to stop thinking about it.  I'm sick of remembering that even having other kids won't take away the fact that Mila's gone, and that fact will always be there, an immovable wall that I'll be banging my head against for the rest of my days.  I'm sick of being angry when people complain about trivial hardships because they don't really believe that life can dish out the fucking worst, and I'm sick of then feeling ungenerous because really, am I really going to play the dead baby card?  I'm sick of trying to be a better, more enlightened person because I had this experience.  I'm sick of feeling ungrateful when I remember that even though losing a child this way is the worst thing that can happen, it's actually not; that in a lot of ways, my life is no different than it was two years ago, and things could be a lot worse.  I'm sick of reminding myself to feel grateful that at least I have this, at least I have that, at least the only truly terrible thing that has ever happened to me is that my baby died.  Seriously?  I'm supposed to take this and just keep smiling?  Fuck you, universe.  This is bullshit and I'm angry about it.

Stuck.

This six-month funk is lasting longer and feeling worse than I had anticipated.

Everything is the SAME.  No matter how much I blog, or change jobs, or talk it out, or cry it out, or enjoy little things, it is still the SAME.

Meanwhile, is everyone I know popping out babies?  Sure seems like it.

Goddammit.