I left my last full time W2 role during my final weeks of being pregnant in 2022. It was not part of my grand plan, but necessary. Since then, I’ve experienced childbirth, postpartum, and have the sweetest 20 month old baby boy whose age I still insufferably count in months. According to some studies, I am on the precipice of my brain returning to its pre-pregnancy size. What a relief. (Well actually, the NIH can’t decide if it’s 6 months or 6 years because…gasp…women’s health is severely underfunded). Either way, during this lizard brained time, alongside my love for him, my ‘career guilt’ has exponentially increased.
You see, I have spent my whole life thinking about my career. I had an OG girl dad, and my father’s career successes were always made to seem within reach. In elementary school, I spent after school hours running around his office conference rooms. I colored with neon highlighters, scratched doodles into fax paper, and pretended to be on very important phone calls (“Hello Narsy! Hello Billy!”*) while my dad finished his own. In high school, my own academic successes were lauded, landing me in a nationally circulated newspaper more than once. “She’s going to have a very successful career”, they said. In college, coveted Wall Street internships were snagged, with a job waiting at graduation. I subsequently exceeded both the formula and my own expectations, working in East Africa, India, and West Africa and sitting on multiple company boards and numerous conference panels before I was 30. My cumulative choices landed me back in an ivy league institution for graduate school, being congratulated for the continued investment in my career. Now nearly ten years later, I tally my accomplishments. Personal growth and development? Check. Family? Check. Incredible life experiences? Check check. Secure, stable, fulfilling career waiting for me to return to it? Well…um..maybe…no…erm, I fear my choices have not actually led me here. I’ve often wondered how the path to professional irrelevance and obscurity starts - I continually hope its not this, and the dreaded ‘motherhood penalty’ (data be damned).
So what is this ‘career guilt’? Well, it’s not what you think. Or at least, it’s not what we often hear the most about. It’s not about the mom investing in her career, sacrificing time at home, learning that she can’t do it all, feeling guilty. Nay, its about a mom not investing in her career, bowing out from a company with no real maternity policy (illegal?) or job security, well aware of the fact that she can’t do it all (see Kirsten Powers’ We Don’t Need ‘Self Help’, We Need Support). It’s also about her being worried she may never get to invest in it again, and will only have her own decisions to blame. There. I said it. (Does this mean I’ve put a name to my ugly inside thoughts or have I just manifested the worst? This woo-woo stuff is hard to keep up with). Guilt is also of course, an oversimplification. Despite some serious financial tradeoffs we make as a family, this decision reeks of privilege. It’s time bound, but it’s still a decision I get to make. And there’s nothing like gratitude to spice up your guilty feelings even more.
Career guilt. Yes, it’s more guilt, less fear. Because I’m still making the choice to spend my time away. Despite potential repercussions, I wouldn’t change it. But it’s guilt because of all my parents have invested. It’s guilt because of all that I’ve invested. It’s guilt because of my immigrant work-hard-forever roots. It’s guilt when I look at our bank account or consider home ownership. It’s guilt because of capitalism and productivity culture. It’s guilt when I feel the weight of the world on my partner’s shoulders. It’s guilt because if things don’t turn around, I won’t be able to say, well I didn’t consider it a possibility at the time. It’s guilt because it lingers, like a slight aftertaste to every social sip with women who have made different choices. It’s guilt because it primarily hinges on my own decisions. It’s guilt because I had previously looked at stay at home moms differently, we were never the same until we suddenly were. It’s guilt because, well, I won’t be able to plead not guilty at my imagined future court date with myself. It’s also guilt because I don’t see a lot of other me’s making the same decisions. I’m not a meal prepping pro or trad wife no (I would very much like to be excluded from that narrative), not a young mom no, not in the best fittest healthiest most organized version of my life no, not an involved philanthropist no, not a multi-kid home no. I’m just a regular old me, with only one baby (without half my identityyyyy? At least it rhymes).
Of course I’m discussing the impossible choice that shouldn’t be a choice. See again Kirsten Powers’ viral The way we live in the United States is not normal. But I still have to sit the test, even if the multiple choice options are flawed. My hope is that like progress of any kind, both my career and career guilt are not linear. That once my ‘family formation’ era ends - this crucial time of growing, birthing and then celebrating monthly birthdays and early school pick-ups - I can incrementally make my way back to what was once a pillar of my identity. Not linear. Not linear. Not linear, I repeat. I’m waiting for this to sink in, like a Pavlovian response to every career related alarm bell.
At the risk of one metaphor too many, I end with this. One summer while road tripping with my family as an adolescent, having exhausted the available entertainment options, I obsessed over a new saying I saw from the front seat. It was an activity only a bored technology-less 80s baby would do. I read it over and over, making it into a song, counting all the different meanings and interpretations I could think of. Strangely, it gives me hope when I think of it now. So, in the wise words of our electric blue Dodge Neon: objects in rear view may be closer than they appear.
*Narsy, Bill and I chatted every so often. Narsy was of course P.V. Narsimha Rao, India’s Prime Minister from 1991 - 1996. And Billy? That would be President Bill Clinton. 15 years into my career, I’m yet to intimately conference with two world leaders, but I suppose there is still time. Not linear, right?
More from Inside Thoughts
Where are you from? | Captain’s log | Do you have to know sorrow to know kindness? | Mama uses good words and bad words | What do we owe each other? | These four walls
What do we owe each other?
When my then boyfriend, now husband and I made our first big purchases together, including an indulgently deep-seated cream Crate and Barrel sofa, we added it to a now defunct Splitwise. We giggle at it now, thinking we ever made plans to ‘go Dutch’. Our losses and gains could never be zero sum. But this has been a topic of conversation in our house - w…
Wowowowowow. I have felt and feel all this. This is magic.
Loved reading this, Manasa. While I'm not a parent, I've experienced similar feelings about my career break. I still struggle with this idea of losing the quick career progression I've made so far, and worry about not being able to go back to something as "impressive" as I was doing before. It's interesting that stepping away from capitalism (for any reason) can create such strong doubts and insecurities.