Honest Working Mom Confessions: Abby

It has been two years since I returned to the workplace. I shared the experience of full-time mothers returning to the workplace on social media, hoping to give some useful experiences to full-time mothers who want to return to the workplace like me.

We want to be competent mothers, but in the workplace, we must put away this side.

In the post, I wrote down what I think is the most important advice: try to talk about children with colleagues as little as possible during working hours. Even if the boss doesn’t mind, imagine that at work, a few employees are chatting about milk powder, diapers, and Xiaoshengchu. What will the boss think after passing by?

When my baby was one and a half years old, I left my family and returned to work in an advertising agency.

Advertising is probably the busiest line. Work is rushing to work, but I dare not make any mistakes. Once, I was already lying on the bed and preparing to go to bed. Suddenly I remembered that there was another customer’s message that seemed to have not been answered. I was so scared that I sat up suddenly, found my phone, and responded quickly and securely before feeling relieved. It was already around 3 in the morning.

Others may be able to feel my cautiousness when sitting at my desk. The corner of the desk was covered with post-it notes. It was a sentence I wrote to remind myself when I was too busy to record it. In order not to miss any message, I began to write down the things to be completed in the day on the background of the computer desktop and take a look at the document switching to eliminate the probability of missing as much as possible.

The reason for fighting so hard is that I don’t want people to look down upon it. In the workplace, when you become a mother, the leader will think that this employee should devote his energy to taking care of the family and start to care about the “cost-effectiveness” of hiring you. This is how unfair treatment happens. This is what my former boss taught me before I quit my job to become a full-time mother.

At that time, I was 30 years old and worked for a foreign advertising company for five years. Since the company’s establishment, I have carried out most of the company’s business with my boss. I am a veteran of the company. It is natural for me to consider the interests of the company. Therefore, when I gave birth to the first child, I insisted on working until the 38th week of pregnancy.

Maybe I shouldn’t take it lightly; I think this is enough. After four months of maternity leave and returning to the company, I had disappeared from the original promotion list. I was very angry and immediately went to the boss to argue. The boss told me to be a mother at ease, saying it would be my turn next time.

Angrily, I sent a resignation email. After that, the leader of another department suggested that I work in her team first. She is a strong woman and a mother. I know she is a good person, and the same woman understands me better. So I accepted her retention and changed the team. I insisted on it for a year and still couldn’t get a fair number of promotion places, so I still left.

I submitted my resume, I moved to a new company, the position was one level higher than the previous one, and my salary increased by 20%. But just a week before I started, I found out that I was pregnant again.

With these experiences, I shouldn’t leave the workplace lightly. But bad luck, I had a baby just before I joined the new company. I feel embarrassed, and I reported the situation with the human resources experience of the new company. The other party also suggested that I wait for childbirth at home first, so I left the workplace.

After these two experiences, I returned to the workplace again. At this age, with two babies, it will be difficult to find a job again after being fired.

In this mood, I am as sensitive as a frightened bird.

The girls in the team are all 90s and 95s, they are not willing to work overtime, but I am willing because I know that I do not have an advantage in age, I can only work harder, and I am unwilling to expose my vulnerability in the workplace.

A very serious middle-aged man is my leader. Once, I encountered a technical term that I didn’t understand and asked him casually. He said coldly: “How can you ask such a question?” His tone and eyes made me shudder. Afterward, I didn’t dare to ask anyone else when I encountered anything I didn’t understand and thought about solving it myself.

Abby Hao is the Head of Marketing for WellPCB in China. You can find her on LinkedIn here.