First Day Back from Maternity Leave: A Boilerplate
If you’ve ever worked in marketing and communications, then you know the importance of having some boilerplate language for various crisis communications scenarios. As a business, you will have a stack of email or PR statements drafted in your back pocket—what to say in the event of an earthquake or if the CEO is embroiled in any number of scandals, etc. In fact, most communications released on a given day are drafted well in advance. This is how your favorite influencer writes something poignant and thoughtful on Christmas morning while you are burning your turkey and trying to wrestle one kid off of another. She definitely wrote and scheduled that post a few days prior.
Today is not my first day back at work, but I already know what I will want to say—really, what I will need to preach to myself—when that day arrives. No matter what I end up feeling, the truth of God’s goodness and His plan for us as workers don’t change. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
So here is the raw version, a peek behind the writer’s curtain. This is my boilerplate return to work post. All it needs is a few edits to the bracketed sections, and it will be as authentic as if I wrote it next Tuesday. Perhaps it resonates for you too? If you’ve gone back to work after kids, how would you finish these sentences?
I woke up this morning with a huge knot in my stomach. 11 months deep into our pandemic isolation, after a wild pregnancy, birth, and all the newborn snuggles, today is my first day back at work. Well, virtual work.
[Surprisingly, I haven’t shed a tear. / Not surprisingly, I was already in tears by XX a.m.] I have so enjoyed these quiet months learning my newest little one, even if the days were awkwardly punctuated by Zoom school meltdowns from the older two. Now it’s back to digital slide layouts and website edits and Zoom meetings of my own.
This is my third maternity leave at the same job, but obviously the most unique. With previous babies, I spent the first day sifting through hundreds of emails and figuring out pumping breaks. This time, I kept on top of my email for news about Covid changes, so my inbox is already clear. And instead of pumping, I’m taking regular breaks to feed the baby who is playing just off screen and to deal with [spit up on the blazer I haven’t worn in a year / a massive blow-out in the middle of a department meeting / a baby who cries every time I put him down / ALL OF THESE THINGS].
Even though I am [missing the undistracted baby time terribly / feeling guilty about enjoying the company of adults more than the baby], I am grounded by this:
Our work as humans has value in God’s eyes. This includes all work, paid and unpaid, that we pursue in the course of our lives on this earth. Just as Adam and Eve before us, we are called to the work of fruitfulness and dominion, multiplication and care of all the resources within our sphere. The work I do mothering is very important and so is the work I do for my company. Both honor God.
I am incredibly privileged to be able to make choices about the kind of work I do. For many families, education, circumstance, or finances force their parental hand. Sometimes two incomes are necessary to make ends meet. Sometimes earning potential and high costs of childcare require one parent to stay at home when she might rather work. In our current pandemic chaos, new pressures have forced many out of work. I am not only privileged to choose work that I enjoy, I am able to do that work from home while so much of the world remains shut down.
Today’s work is the result of prayer and regular discussions of work-family balance. Every year my husband and I revisit a set of questions. How are the kids doing in school/daycare? What ministry and professional opportunities do we have in our current jobs? Are we content where God has us or do we feel a need to make a change? We try to assess these questions during a slow season, where we can pause the day-to-day pressures and reflect thoughtfully. Then, once we’ve committed to a pathway, we ask God to give us the perseverance to stay the course on the hard days that inevitably pop up.
God is sovereign even when our plans go awry. Certainly, in all our family planning, we didn’t foresee this kind of work-family balance. We wouldn’t have chosen to both be employed while trying to manage online school. We might have even considered different kinds of work, had we been able to glimpse Covid in a crystal ball. But here we are. And God has not changed. So with all the challenges of today or successes of tomorrow [or vice versa], I humbly submit to today’s calling, which is good work. And I lay my head down at the end of the day in peace.