Working remotely after giving birth

How I learned acronyms like NAK

I’ve always known I wanted to have a family. Some people know they don’t, some people decide later, some people don’t end up choosing. Despite otherwise often being indecisive pending more information, I’m not one of those people. I wanted children, I didn’t want them later, and I wanted to do right by them.

When it became clear that being a stay-at-home full-time mom was not pragmatic, I started thinking about what it would take to both physically grow and financially support new family members. Could I possibly work full-time — thus, healthcare and a regular paycheck — and have babies?

I was a couple years into my first job as a web developer and getting involved in an open source software community. I learned that many community members either work for themselves or for a company, all from home. Well, I wasn’t very interested in the world of freelance, having done my time as a freelance classical musician, so I thought I’d start setting myself up for a future of remote work. What better way to be efficient, flexible, available (within reason), and set good examples for your children, right?

Then my husband took a one-year visiting professorship in, of all places, Wichita, Kansas. Just like that, we were moving away from my beloved East Coast. We had three weeks to pack everything, find a place to live, drive 30 hours, and, oh, for me to find something new to do that wouldn’t disappear when I moved again 11 months later. Perfect time to find that remote job I knew I needed if I wanted to chase the dream of Havitol.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured.
— Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”

I didn’t just find a job that let me work from home. I found a dream job. It was hard work, being Employee #1 at a rapidly growing company, but it was worth it. Havitol Phase 1: complete. After about a year, I found myself feeling like I was in the right place to go after Phase 2: Mini-Me.

As my due date approached, I learned about the ins-and-outs of paid maternity leave in the US (hint: there is none, at least not on a national level). Not to worry, though. My company is very supportive of having and growing a family. I figured three months would be a good balance of investing in my little one and the company investing in me.

My leave largely consisted of sitting in bed, reading in short bursts on my phone while the baby ate. The posts I came across on working from home in the tech world after having a baby were nice. Really nice, in fact. I wasn’t the only one! Other people agree that I need my own space away from my child! But then I realized something — these posts aren’t written by the party who grew a person, pushed it out, and then had it attempt to remove her nipples by way of suction. That doesn’t make the posts any less nice. I just felt alone, and when I feel alone, I think about it and sometimes my own blog post pops out.

It turns out breastfeeding is hard. All those lactation consultants who tell you it won’t hurt if you’re doing it right? Bullshit. It hurts, and it hurts a lot. And then sometimes you hate your baby for waking you up with his rooting just as you’d managed to stop obsessing about his breathing patterns and fall asleep. Sometimes he gets all squirmy and then cries endlessly because he got milk shot up his nose AND he’s still hungry. Sometimes cluster feeding leads to 4 hours of HGTV and browsing Twitter while you diligently switch him from side to side. Sometimes you sit there and hate all those people who tell you to get good at using your computer one-handed while nursing, because you can barely manage it with two hands, a knee, and a Boppy, and typing control statements with one hand really effing sucks, anyway.

Giving birth is hard, too, but it seems like that’s more of an accepted fact. It also doesn’t last nearly as long. But it takes a huge toll on your body, and that’s yet another thing to adjust to and mourn.

Mistakes I made

1. Convincing myself that tough days always meant I was doing something wrong.
2. Letting family all come in the early days while I was still on leave, and not later when I actually needed extra help.
3. Being too proud and stubborn in my do-it-myself ways to seek peer support, which is already difficult to come by in a male-dominated industry.
4. Buying a house during leave and moving the week after I came back. This was probably the biggest mistake, but also a relatively unique one.

Yes, you can give birth to a baby and work from home; you just might be breaking new or seemingly-new paths to do it. I don’t really have words of wisdom, and it turns out I didn’t want to write a how-to guide for female web developers who want to have it all (as if there could be such a thing), but a little empathy goes a long way.

Oh, and if you’re still wondering, NAK is Nursing At Keyboard.