Some personal thoughts on parenting
Parenting seems to be a delicate topic - just like pregnancy, everybody has an opinion on it and is convinced that they know best. I have hesitated to start this category on the blog - yet it is something that I feel passionate about. My aim is not to tell you what is right or wrong - because only you as a parent know that - but I would like to share my experience and with time also suggest some coaching exercises that might make the one or other reader reflect on their situation.
But for now, here are some words on my personal and still relatively new experience as a parent. To be honest, I did not know what to expect. When I got pregnant with my first son, I was stuck in a job that was more administrative than actual communications work (not what I signed up for), and a challenging boss. My colleagues who had children kept telling me that everything would change once the baby arrived, that work and everything else would become less important, that my priorities would shift. In a way, they were right. But my priorities ended up shifting in a way that I did not expect.
After my son was born, I quickly noticed that I was not ready to go back to work after 6 months. I definitely wanted to keep working, but without any proper parental leave in Switzerland and only 14 weeks of maternity leave, many mothers went back to work after roughly 4-6 months (adding some unpaid leave to their maternity leave). My friends back at home in Luxembourg though got nearly a year off! And I wanted that too. After lots of reflecting as well as the support of my husband, I decided to quit my job and look for a new one once my son was a year old.
Several factors influenced that decisions, but the main one was that I was unhappy at my work place and that it was very challenging to work with my boss. I felt very strongly that if I went to back to work, no matter at what point, and had another person take care of my child, it was important to me that I did something that I enjoyed. Bringing my son to day care at the beginning broke my heart, even though he was old enough to move around and just crawled off to play as soon as we got there. But thinking I would choose to be apart from him for something that I did not enjoy did not make any sense at all to me.
So in the end, I do agree that priorities shift once you have a child. But I also believe that it’s unpredictable which feelings will come up because that is something very personal and depends on every parent’s personality and priorities. For me, it meant taking a break and focusing on my son for a while. I know I’m not the person to be a stay-at-home mum on the long run, but that year off felt like it was what I needed, and what was right for us as a family. In the end, it was the best decision I took, because I ended up getting an opportunity to work for an employer that I had always wanted to work for, in a great team with a lovely boss. It was one of those times where following my gut feeling really paid off.