agonyaunt | Ask a Manager: Update: Working Mother With Little Kids

It feels impossible to be a working mom with little kids (original post here)
Oh man what a time that was in my life. I wish I could say the quarantines ended and I bounced back at work but unfortunately I’m one of the many many women who had to tap out.
My life was in shambles at the time I wrote the letter and there was no time for fun or joy and I felt like my kids were getting the absolute worst of me. I hated everyday.
My intention was to stick it out at work and I believe things would have gotten easier considering daycares don’t close for so long now, however I was just done. I never envisioned myself being a stay at home mom but it’s going well and I don’t see a situation where I’d go back to the work force in the traditional sense anytime soon. My oldest was diagnosed with a rare disease in July and that surely would have been the nail in the coffin of my career anyway. The comments were so cathartic and hard to read. I really hope that childcare in the US gets the attention it deserves soon because it’s a shit show. My husband took on more at work to make this happen and things are tight budget wise but also we cut out about $1700 a month in child care tuition. I do truly miss my working life pre-pandemic. The hard part for me is feeling like I didn’t have the choice.
Does it suck being a “statistic”? Yes. Are we all a lot happier now? Yes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've been thinking about this once since I saw it. There are several commenters who regularly talk about how much trouble.their working parent coworkers cause them, and I was pleasantly surprised that none of them commented triumphantly on this update. This poster's story, and the further update in five years when employers penalize her for the gap in her employment, is being written over and over all across the US.

WORD.

When I look at things like this I wonder why the entire fuck so many people think the biggest problem facing women is trans people. Or lgbt books in the damn library. Or so called cancel culture. Like really. Here is where all the energy should be!

Not ALL the energy - a big part of the energy should also go to

"why don't doctor's take women's health seriously?"

and "why are women who present at emergency departments with an active heart attack told it is just Anxiety and sent home?"

Assigned female at birth people get truly crappy healthcare -

even my GP went to her Dr and said "hey, I'm a qualified GP but they discourage us from writing self referrals, I found a breast lump, can I have a referral for a breast ultrasound?"

and her male Dr said "You're too young to have breast cancer, you must be Depressed, here's some antidepressants"

Fortunately she went to a second Dr, because lo and behold, it was cancer! (She was in her late 20s/early 30s at the time).

And the number of news stories I've read about women who presented with abdominal pain and were told by Drs again and again "your stomach sticks out, so clearly your problem is just that you are fat" when it turned out (too late to do any good) that the stomach sticking out was a giant abdominal tumour

Drs are far too quick to dismiss women's health issues - male patients get taken much more seriously

And the problem gets even worse again if you are
- a fat woman and/or
- a woman of colour

Well, hopefully it's not a zero sum game.

My daughter had a TEN-INCH abdominal tumor -- thankfully benign, because if it had been cancer, it could have killed her (the original doc who read her ultrasounds said they were "normal," the actual report said that there was a suspicious mass that should be checked again in 6 weeks, resulting in a 4-month delay in diagnosis.)

It had caused ovarian torsion by that point, so she wound up with a hysterectomy and one-side oophorectomy at age 27.

And, yes, the assumption was that she was just fat.

Ask a Manager: Update: Working Mother With Little Kids

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject