How Are Moms Navigating American Workism?

On returning to work post-parental leave in a transformed working landscape

Feb 18, 2025

I want to discuss returning to work, post-baby. I’ll be returning in March after nearly five months of paid parental leave - an almost unheard of expanse of time in the U.S., for which I’m surely grateful. Of course, the feelings of conflict, overwhelm, angst, and guilt abound, as I think about making the one-room-over shift from the nursery to my home office. My particular return to work context couldn’t be cushier, and yet this particular return after my second baby feels more monumental and existential than my last. That’s because our society has undergone massive upheaval since baby girl was born in October of 2024. I’m not going back to the same working world I left. Experiencing the last five months (or even 5 days) as a human has me questioning corporate work and my place in it. And as a mother? The feelings are murkier and more muddied than ever.

Before I expand on this transition and why I think working moms are at a wild crossroads, I want to clarify my stance on work, and why I’m (maybe) uniquely qualified to talk about it.

Up until now, in the brief history of Motherloud, I’ve written about the new baby and the joys and challenges that come with parenting two under two. But to let you in on a little secret, I’ve been a bit of a serial Substacker since before the term even existed, and my first advice column (if you could call it that) was branded, “The Career-Life in Progress” or “the CLIP.” The CLIP was born in 2015 or 2016, as I was working my first post-college job at a research firm in Arlington, Virginia. The focus of my work was actually evolving the science of Human Resources management. Translation: I wrote about work for my job, and I had a lot of impassioned feelings about it.

This was also the era of peak millennial hustle culture. Obama was in office and I lived in a group house filled with his staffers a mile away from the White House. I commuted on the metro, wearing J.Crew pencil skirts, flats, and peplum tops, making my way to my spinny chair at the end of a long row of occupied cubicles. I smelled whatever my coworkers were eating for lunch and we went out for actual (not virtual) coffee at the overpriced shop on the ground level our building. My energy was that of someone either thriving or drowning: frenetic and flailing.

When I wrote the CLIP, I was trying to make sense of what I was researching at work and what I was experiencing in work, via the broader American corporate culture of the 2010s - perhaps, just a veiled abusive working system.

I didn’t see the harmful working culture then and I’m not sure many of us did. Thus, the thesis atop which I built the CLIP was a rosier, more empowered #girlboss view. I espoused the idea that in your twenties, you may feel lost in your career and also in your personal life…but (!!) taking a perspective of progress and striving towards longitudinal self-improvement will save you.

Prioritize progress in the various sectors of your life, knowing that you may stall out in one area while kicking into gear in another. Take a long-term view of career rather than work and focus on progress over balance.

I don’t think the take was off, per se, but it certainly was optimistic and decidedly child-free. Not only did I write about this topic, I personally coached and mentored a gaggle of friends and coworkers through their own career moves. It still brings me joy helping people land on a path towards their dream career, but I had attached my own identity to this thesis. My current stance on work feels so different.

As a working mom, there are lots of days I would prefer to burn the idea of a career-life-in-progress to the ground and just get some [shakes fist] balance!

But it’s not just motherhood that’s changed me. The world has changed around each of us in ways that have exposed work and career-building as being help up by fragile and perhaps toxic scaffolding.

I guess if I were to take another attempt at a thesis about work and how it should fit into our lives now, I would cite one of my favorite articles of all time on the topic: Workism is Making Americans Miserable.1

In this piece, author, Derek Thompson, discusses the intersection, intermingling and eventual integration of work and identity for Americans, such that work becomes almost a religion. Because our social safety nets are tied to our employment, long-hours and excessive work became the norm. In our search for meaning, we began to assign it to the cubicle-shaped altar at which we worshiped for 40+(++) hours each week. The core proposal Thompson shares for how to escape the religion of work and live a more fulfilled life is not just to make work suck less, but to decentralize the role it plays in your life. Broadly speaking, I believe this is where we need to head.

Rather than building our identities and lives around work as a centerpiece, let’s revert to the world that some of our parents lived in, where a job was just a job.

But of course achieving this vision is complex. Because our jobs exist on shakier ground than they used to.

Thompson’s piece was written in 2019- a date we cannot ignore as sitting just ahead of a major fulcrum point in work: the COVID-19 pandemic. 2019 was perhaps the last point at which Thompson’s thesis about Americans and our idolized work identities held firmly true. The great slowdown and reset that we all experienced with COVID ushered in a new era of remote work and provided an alternative glimpse at how we could conceive our work-lives (see the pop vernacular of the time: great resignation, quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, lazy girl jobs, etc.) To a degree, the pandemic working era played into Thompson’s recommendations to make work less central. Despite working from our homes, many Americans took on hobbies and rejected the corporate pull for *more* during a period of collective trauma. Others - working parents very much included - saw work seep its way through the walls they had erected between work and home lives. Stretched to their breaking points with Zoom school, full-time remote work, and the baseline responsibilities of keeping their families alive and operational, most parents with kids during COVID will get a glossy far-off look when recollecting the period. The scars are visible and unhealed.

In the wake of COVID emerged the aftershocks of broad-reaching layoffs that persist to this day, especially in Tech. The pervasive culture of overhiring and then resorting to layoffs to pivot quickly has unmasked any remaining facade that work will “love us back.” In my own 9-5, I spent much of 2022 close to a series of ongoing layoffs. It’s demoralizing and stressful to see wave after wave of qualified and well performing colleagues let go, due to poor workforce planning.

Again in 2024, mere weeks before I gave birth to baby girl, my entire function was disbanded and scrapped for parts. Tech companies have been open to admit that they use hiring and layoffs as an “easy button” to quickly pivot and adapt their offerings to compete. But today’s layoffs are a hammer, not a scalpel. They’re an effective blunt option for short-term cost cutting and are imprecise and expensive in the long-term. The thing about a hammer is, you never know when it might hit you. Regardless of their value or effectiveness to companies, once you know enough about layoffs as an employee, you start to watch your back.

To sum up the decade I’ve experienced as a working professional, I would say this:

They made us obsessed with work and working hard, so we’d believe what we were getting in return was worth it’s weight. And once we finally saw work for what it was, they showed us how quickly they could take it away, rendering us insecure, unstable, and grateful to even have a job.

Ten plus years after writing my first optimistic takes on work in the CLIP, my goal now is to make work less central, rather than (just) less awful. Past me was hyper-focused on work as a core part of my identity. Current me feels like corporate work in its modern iteration is not something we should be idolizing or embedding into our identities any more than we have to. What we’re seeing play out is certainly not the vision of a 15-hour work week bolstered by art and leisure that John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s. The reality is that growing wage inequality is pushing more of us into the working class, and making the “side hustle” that seemed fun and freeing in the 2010s feel more pressing and necessary today. And the current political environment in the U.S. is so unstable it feels like mass strikes, layoffs, and boycotts are surely around the corner. Like so many others, feeling unprotected in my day to day employment has led me to wonder how I can make myself more individually resilient and less reliant on traditional work to support my family. And if I’m being honest, that’s how my career advice to other working moms sounds these days, too.

So, in a few weeks I’ll return to work and navigate all the emotions that come with pumping and being away from the sweet babe currently napping on my lap. I’ll hope to secure and evolve my role to one that fits my strengths and lets me do the kind of work I enjoy. But, I’ll have an eye on my next role and the one after that, too. And I’ll be writing here and thinking about how best to secure our family’s financial future, I’m sure.

I’d love to know your thoughts and experiences in this space.

-LJ

Motherloud

How Are Moms Navigating American Workism?

On returning to work post-parental leave in a transformed working landscape

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