rosie gibb on the unexpected side of choosing to take an extended career break to be a stay at home mum
better qualified than a stranger to look after my own children or that there is more to looking after a child than meeting their basic physical needs was apparently laughable. I even had someone suggest I was setting a bad example to my son: that by not going back to work straight after my maternity leave ended I was teaching him that women have to stay at home. As if I personally was single-handedly setting back the entirety of the progress of women’s rights. To be fair,
it wasn’t all outrage and criticism.
I must also give credit to the many who were incredibly supportive of my decision. My
husband & family
were totally
behind me. Many colleagues were
encouraging. One in particular, whom I barely knew, took the time to write a very sweet email describing her decision to take a career break to be at home, encouraging me that she had rebuilt her career and has no egrets. But the whole process left me feeling rather battered. Had I made the right call? Could I make it work? And if I decided I didn’t want to return to the same job, how would another
employer view such a gap from the workplace?
And that was just the career side of the whole thing. There was also the downside of staying at home. Would I get too bored? Could I hack the daily grind of life with small people? I was shocked by the complete disintegration of my once
ordered and full life when my son was born. The challenge of just feeding and getting my baby to sleep felt completely overwhelming, let alone doing anything else at all. Putting a wash on or having a shower felt like climbing Everest in the early days. I felt very lonely at home with a baby, not having any local community at the time, as I had previously spent most of my waking hours working, or socialising in town with other non-parents.