During maternity leave, I realized I could never return to this workplace

I ended the life of the child I had raised with such care myself.

Of course, it wasn't my own biological child. It was a new business I had been working on for five years. Even so, I felt such a sense of emptiness spreading in my chest at the thought that I had been the one to bury it.

I want to talk about the time just before I took leave, which was one of the triggers that made me consider changing jobs.

Attachment proportional to the passion invested

That job was one I had longed to do for many years.

At first, I spent six months with no visible progress, pushing and pulling with a client who wouldn't budge. Just before the contract I had finally managed to secure, I went on a grueling day-trip business trip to Europe, weaving through the gaps in the strict entry and exit rules during the COVID-19 pandemic to meet them in person.

To gain internal cooperation, I used logic, passion, connections, and anything else I could get my hands on, pulling in money and people without regard for appearances. In the project that used the money and people I had obtained that way, I did this and that, even outside my official duties, to somehow connect it to sales.

When I had my first child, I went on maternity leave with a heavy heart. When I returned to work, that job was just heating up, and I cut my maternity leave short by half a year to return to work because I didn't want to miss out on the interesting parts.

Even on days when my first child had a fever and I was nursing them during the day, I handled client matters in the middle of the night after the child finally fell asleep. Even after I found out I was pregnant with my second child, I went on a business trip to Europe during the unstable early stages of pregnancy, for which I couldn't get a substitute or support. At the peak of my morning sickness, there were times I went to sell to clients while vomiting on the train during my commute.

And so, after five years, a large market was finally about to emerge.

During maternity leave, it seems I have no successor

I told my boss as soon as I knew I was pregnant.

This was because there were multiple projects I was leading, including that job. Considering the handover, I wanted to have a successor lined up two months before I took leave. At that exact time, people who had been on the project were one after another reducing their workload or taking leave due to mental health issues. I just needed people.

I told my boss that I wanted to consult with them about whether there was someone to take over, or if not, to what extent I should scale back activities.

And so, what my boss told me was,

Another project has higher priority, so we can't assign anyone from the department.

That was it. And, as if to apologize, I was told to negotiate with people in other departments to see if they could take on the work.

Days of repeating apologies and requests

I didn't want to end the project, so I was desperate.

But who, anywhere, would take on a job that the supervising department had judged to be 'low priority'? Nobody wants to do a job like that. I wouldn't want to either.

Thinking what terrible logic this was, I went around telling people I was going on maternity leave and asking if they could take over my work. Of course, there were no takers.

I kept apologizing for taking leave, and as I realized that the work I had pursued with such passion would end here, I became depressed.
Gradually, I started to feel as if it were my fault for getting pregnant.

And so, without finding a successor, I made arrangements to wrap up my work and went on maternity leave.

In the handover documents, I wrote about how to close things out without any trouble.

The frustration, the disappointment in my boss, and the sense of loss over the work I wanted to do

Once I started maternity leave, I felt relieved.

I was probably exhausted from the days of apologizing alone and planning the end of my work. The feeling of happiness in looking forward to the birth of my child was being completely blacked out by the sense of helplessness I faced at work.

I did nothing but lie in bed.

Then, after the baby was born and the hectic days of the postpartum period had settled down a bit, thoughts of work came back to me.

Am I really going back to that environment in six months?

I thought it was impossible.

The frustration with myself for not being able to grow the business to the point where the company would decide to continue it.
The disappointment in my boss, who laid the decision to withdraw from the business on me, masking it with the fact that a woman was going on maternity leave.
And above all, a workplace where the work I wanted to do was already gone.

The desire to work again didn't come to me at all.

Expectations for the future

I can't work out of inertia.

Working while raising two children is going to be tough no matter how hard I try. I can't do such difficult work if it isn't interesting.

I can't wait to return to work.

I wanted to prepare that kind of work for myself.

And so, I began job hunting while on parental leave.