Navigating maternity and coming back to work in the world of tech

Help, how on earth do I return to work after maternity leave?

This is not a post telling you how to ‘do maternity right’. I do not believe that exists, after having 3 children I am beginning to believe there is no ‘right way’. I am however, on my third maternity leave and therefore this post aims to discuss some of the many things I have learnt.

As most people working in the world of tech /coding know every time you open up anything - whether that be VS code, github, whatever cloud you are using - there is change! Much like having a baby. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on things the goal posts move…AGAIN.

During my first maternity leave I had learnt how to code. Having decided to dive into the deep end of a career in code. My second maternity leave I learnt the cloud. I remember sitting in bed breastfeeding my second daughter reading about AWS and elastic warehouse scaling.

My third maternity I was determined to do much the same using my KIT days to do snowflake badge training. Yes - I could have been napping or ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’ - but lets be honest I would probably be just cleaning porridge off a highchair all the while my coding/tech skills going stale.

I guess that is what concerns me most… going stale or worse still - being stale but not knowing you are stale. And actually this can happen at any point in ones tech career not just maternity leave.

Therefore I would say that each time I have used maternity leave as time away from the daily grind as a moment to learn something a bit deeper. One of those things you always put on the back burner and think I want to learn this i’ll learn it later ‘when I have time’. Which inevitably you never have on a normal basis.

I found maternity is a bit nuts, reading my previous blog posts you’ll see I’ve written having a baby is simply insane I’ve found. It is so viceral and there is no rules with a baby, there is no ‘read the docs’. And if anything the more you ‘try harder’ when something isn’t working actually the worse it becomes. Which sounds nuts but hey ho here we are. The only comfort I have found is actually a bit like with a super hard coding problem, just calm down, go eat something, take a shower or take a walk and the answer comes to you. Or in the case of motherhood - strap the baby to my chest and go for a walk. She will sleep eventually. And actually she does, almost immediately.

I digress - this blog post was supposed to be about returning to work.

My top 10 musings:

1. Firstly you have to make peace with the fact that you are not going to see your baby all day everyday. Sounds silly, but this is huge. I truely believe biologically this is a big deal. It is pretty crazy that we go from almost 100% mum and baby to putting baby into a childcare setting and sitting at a screen paying for said childcare. For me for each baby I have found this hard but also - being a mum and being on call all day everyday is also hard. To that end this final time I am only going back to work 3 days per week which I have found to be much more mentally ok than previous maternity leaves when I have gone back 4 days or even 5 days. Doing the mental tally of 3 days out of 7 per week and therefore aprox 12% of my 168 hours per week (because mumming is a 24 hour job) it feels ok in my own head. I also believe some separation is good for babies as it gives them a chance to grow and learn and have a bit of independence.

2. Choose childcare that you feel comfortable with. I try to approach this like an engineer too - thinking logictically, how will pick up and drop off work. Who will do what days? What happens when my partner is away in the US for work? How will it all work then? Where will she sleep? Also what are the people like? Are they warm and will they listen to your child - this is a big one for me. We have a local childminder, a pair of women who are absloute gold!

3. Do not rush it. Transition in stages. This last maternity - my partner did some shared parenteral leave. This meant I was working in the same home, breastfeeding where I could around naps and lunchtime etc. It kind of gave a first level of seperation that wasn’t too different. For me it felt like half way between childcare setting and me being with my daughter. Like a kind of ‘dev branch’. You can try changes - but you can also roll back if things aren’t working. Aka - someone has a sniffly cold and needs extra breastfeeding that day. Having said that this third time round I had not appreciated that my daughter had spent aprox 8 months inside a baby carrier and was having mostly breastmilk. As when I took her to the childminders she said ‘Steph I can’t wear her in a baby carrier and I cannot breastfeed her so you need to sort that out’. With 3 I don’t think I had even realised this - in my defense my life mostly consists of trying to do the school run which is much easier if people aren’t crying. But I persevered and put her in the pram for some naps and tried milk in a tommee tippee, and in a bottle and we got there in the end.

4. Skills, skills, skills. I always find during difficult times in tech that upgrading my skills is one of the easiest ways to combat a lack of comfidence, or just a general uncomfortable feeling. At work we were due to get snowflake and therefore maternity leave was a great time to checkout what learning was on offer. Snowflake like AWS etc has its own exams which I love. It is clean what to learn, there are usually hands on labs and it is a really good acoompanyment to working with these tools. Also - I used dbt daily before maternity but being off I had forgotten a lot of the basics as my brain had been elsewhere. With the help of various conversations with chat gpt I decided on 1 repo with 3 small projects - just tiny ones. To help me re remember dbt. It is a work in progress but I am really enjoying it.

5. Be kind to yourself. I constantly have to say this to myself - and I am not good at this. During this maternity leave I listened a bit to a book Bill Gates recommended called ‘Factfullness’. This book is a reminder of how far as a planet we have come from only 100 years ago. And whilst it is nice to look to the future let us look at how people 100 years ago lived e.g. life expectancy has gone up, child mortality has gone down. I find this sort of text very grounding.

6. Listen to yourself and your body and your baby. Crazy but this mat leave I wrote myself with the help of chat gpt a manitfesto. I promised myself I wouldn’t go to too many baby groups. I would instead go for nature walks and slow down. Readers of this blog probably are already aware of this need to slow down but in my first maternity leave I defintely sped up. I remember being so sucked into the hype. Taking my son swimming at 8 weeks old and coming home after what was a super stressful, sweaty horrendous experience and just crying on the sofa it had been utterly over stimulating. I just don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Being a mum can sweep you into this whole other world of competition around sleep, eating, who can hold a cup? I mean it is nuts. I once had a joke with a friend and said its not like you get to 33 and Bob from HR still can’t roll is it. Most children develop all the same over time so getting stressed about development milestones is not something I entertain. Instead - I am much more interested in observing small moments like the way my 10 month old collects bits of fluff between her toes. Her smile when I take her to the local swings - sometimes at 8am just because why not?! And the fact that she has a corner of the kitchen with this carboard box that we call ‘her desk’.

7. Get help! A good friend once told me - get help before you need it. We are lucky as we live in a village and I try to get to know the neighbours. This has involved friends of older children sending me messages when someone wants to do some babysitting. This sort of thing is gold, especially if it comes from a person you trust, recommending a person they trust. After having a third I have been using this get help before you need it philosophy and it has worked really well. A bit like cloud computing - it is good to have remote servers that you can spin up when you are looking for a bit of extra capacity at a busy time. But start this work ahead of time. If I know my partner is going away to the US for work I book in help so I don’t get myself into a state trying to do it all alone.

8. Design the days, weeks, months that you want. Otherwise - I feel like life happens ‘to you’. My sons school runs forest school. Another mum had helped out and said it was great and I was desperate to help out for all my children. This meant whilst my partner was on pat leave I knew he would be home with the baby and i’d get 2 hours on a thursday to help. Volunteering at the school was quite the undertaking - lots to read and sign off, a DBS check to do. However I planned months ahead and I did it. And what a rewarding experience it was.

Daily tips:

Be organised and think ahead, much like a data engineer.

Pack lunch boxes the night before. Where I can cook a dinner that at least one child can take for lunch the next day.

Put clothes on radiator the night before - no decision making in the morning.

No TV in the morning. I really struggle with this. TV is sometimes a great way to relax and enjoy the entertainment but I am very concious that it is a passive activity and can sometimes stop other types of play. I also observe my children after watching TV and sometimes their behaviour is terrible. I’m a strong advocate of having a huge pack of paper and pens near the dining table and encouraging drawing/writing whenever I can. This is not for schools sake but more for ones imagination. I also detest colouring books - I do not understand them. Why would I wan’t to colour something in when on a blank page I can draw my own monster or animal or person or house or whatever it is. Maybe as a coder I am a ‘builder/maker’ at heart and colouring in someone else’s creation doesn’t fill me with any joy. I want this creativity bug for my children as I think being able to imagine a different world is so important.