Trading Corporate America for Crazy Kiddos
Executive Summary: I made the difficult decision to pause my career after my second child, even though it went against everything I was raised to do and had worked so hard for.
You know what keeps life interesting? The fact that you can never predict what’s going to happen, or anticipate how your beliefs and feelings might change someday. For me growing up, it had been ingrained in me that I would pursue a steady career with a consistent income until the day came to retire. That’s a common immigrant mindset, and one that my parents espoused constantly. They’d given up everything they’d known to move to a country where they didn’t speak the language or know a single soul. Like the generations before them, they arrived empty-handed but full of hope and the conviction that hard work would eventually yield success. Their dream for their children is that we would further build upon that foundation to secure ourselves respectable careers and paychecks, having had a head start by being raised in this country and understanding its language and culture from an early age. That would be the marker of success against which to weigh their sacrifices. From as early as I can remember, my parents told me that I needed to be financially self-reliant, and to work in a field with plentiful job opportunities. Therefore, only certain majors were acceptable in college. I didn’t end up being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. But I was close enough – I went into banking after my undergrad (in economics and business administration), then into management consulting after my MBA. I studied and worked my butt off to succeed academically and professionally. Never did I imagine that I would do anything but work full-time indefinitely.
View from the McKinsey office where I started after getting my MBA.
There’s another part to this story too. My husband is a genius. No, really, I do mean it. His mind works in different ways. He might not be able to remember what the kids should wear to school or where we keep the can opener, but that man can do some serious thinking. Without breaking a sweat, he graduated with 31 A+’s from UC Berkeley with a double major and minor in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Physics, and Math. To put that in perspective, I took 36 classes during 4 years of college to earn my double major, and I was no slouch. Then he got his PhD from Stanford in Computer Science, where his advisor called him his “star student.” He received a tenure-track professor offer from Princeton at age 26, which precipitated our move to New Jersey after he completed his postdoc at MIT. In the dozen years so far of his research career, he’s written ~80 papers (several of which have earned Best Paper awards) and is among the top few most prolific researchers in his field globally.
Four years and 31 A+’s later.
What does this tangent have to do with me quitting my job? Well, here’s the thing I didn’t anticipate when we got engaged at age 20 (we met at 17, so despite being young, it wasn’t a hasty decision): that I would feel guilty when he didn’t have time to work because he was taking care of the kid(s) or chores while I chased never-ending work deadlines. Before kids, we pursued our (very different) careers simultaneously but separately. We were there to help, support, and cheer each other on every step of the way, but we largely were able to make our own choices and commitments to our careers without encumbering the other person too much. Having kids during COVID changed the equation. With a baby, no childcare, and no family within 3000 miles to help, we found ourselves in total chaos when COVID hit and we were working full-time while watching our son 24/7. All of a sudden, I felt terrible that my husband had no time to be brilliant, that he was throwing his potential away with every diaper he tossed out, because I was too busy with work to take care of our son. For 2+ years, we juggled our jobs with spotty or non-existent childcare (along with the daily mental cost-benefit calculations of which social interactions were worth the risk to an unvaccinated toddler), and the experience just drained me dry. My husband resigned from Princeton, even though being a professor was his dream, so we could move back to California to be closer to family. That helped, but still, we held our breath and plowed on as best we could.
When my daughter came, I told work that I’d be out for a year. I felt that I needed the time to recuperate, to let out that breath I’d been holding since 2020. But when the time came to return after mat leave, I still felt the cumulative stress and exhaustion of the past few years weighing me down. (And let’s be honest: staying home with an infant and a 4-year old isn’t exactly a relaxing vacation to recharge my batteries). So when there was no part-time option (which feels almost impossible to find in efficiency-driven corporate America), I had a lot of thinking to do. Chief among my fears is that I’d be giving up a great job that I’d worked hard for years to obtain, flushing all my previous efforts and sacrifices down the drain, and dooming my resume to be automatically tossed in the “reject” pile if/when I wanted to return to work because there would be a gap in my employment history. Not to mention that this route would be going against everything I was raised to do. But the alternative would be to take another deep breath on top of the one I was already holding and plunge back into the chaos for an undefined amount of time. So I took stock of our mental, emotional, professional, and financial situation and mustered the courage to walk away from that steady career with the consistent income that I’d been taught to prize. It felt so wrong and so right at the same time.
Trading my full-time job to become a full-time parent.
Does this story have a happy ending? I don’t know – perhaps there is no ending. I will say that I feel so immensely lucky and privileged to even have this option to become a “full-time parent,” and I don’t take it for granted. Instead, I will take it for all it’s worth and use the newfound freedom to become a kinder, calmer, more mindful person. I am grateful that I will be able to watch my kids grow without always rushing to be somewhere else, mentally or physically. Perhaps it’s not variety that is the spice of life, but surprise. Not being able to predict the future keeps us coming back for more, waking up every day curious about what it will hold. For now, I can tell you that it contains a lot of diapers, babbling, messes, and jigsaw puzzles (for the 4-year old), and sometimes the decision to trade corporate America for our crazy kiddos feels like the easiest one ever.