(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.
