Gaining a New Identity

I have never been let go from a job before.

I’ve left jobs. I’ve outgrown jobs. I’ve spent plenty of Sunday nights questioning jobs. (Sunday Scaries - amiright??) But I’ve never had someone else tell me that my “job was being eliminated”.

There is something uniquely disorienting about that.

You can know it’s a business decision. You can understand the numbers. You can know that good people lose jobs every day for reasons that have very little to do with how good they are at them.

And still, when it happens to you, you can’t help but feel it’s personal.

I expected to immediately panic about what came next. I was grateful to have my next therapy session that week.

The job search. The résumé. The awkward networking conversations. The sudden realization that apparently I am now supposed to have a “personal brand.” The LinkedIn posts written in that very specific dialect where everyone is simultaneously humbled, thrilled, and excited to announce something.

And yes, I’m thinking about all of those things.

But that isn’t the part that has caught me off guard.

The part I keep thinking about is that when I started this job, my first daughter was five months old.

I can barely remember that version of myself.

She was a brand-new mom trying to figure out how to be ambitious and exhausted at the same time.

She had a baby who still felt impossibly small. She was learning an entirely new job while also learning the logistics of childcare and pumping and how to ask your new workplace if they can make a pumping room just for you.

Somewhere along the way, the job stopped being something I had started after becoming a mother.

It just became the backdrop to our life.

My daughter learned to sit, crawl, walk, talk, and become an entire little person while I was building a career there.

I grew too.

I took on bigger responsibilities. Built teams. Solved problems I had no idea how to solve until someone needed me to solve them. I became more confident, more capable, and more resilient.

Then I got pregnant again.

And this time, work and motherhood didn't feel like two separate parts of my life. They were completely intertwined.

I worked through pregnancy. I gave birth. And three weeks later, I went back to work.

Three weeks.

When I write that now, it sounds slightly insane. I know it is. Don’t remind me.

At the time, it just felt like what needed to happen.

There were calls to take. Decisions to make. People depending on me. A business moving whether I was there or not.

So I figured it out.

I answered emails with a newborn sleeping next to me. I switched between feeding a baby and talking about SharePoint. I learned that you can be deeply sleep deprived and still somehow have very strong opinions about a compensation plan.

I don't say any of that as a badge of honor.

If anything, I look back at that version of myself with a combination of admiration and a desire to gently take her laptop away.

But she was determined.

And she kept going.

Now that baby is a toddler.

She runs around the house. She has opinions. She does not sleep through the night consistently. She screams…all…the…time.

Her sister, the five-month-old I had when I started this chapter, is a full-fledged kid. Telling me to leave her alone when she doesn’t get her way or begging me for “a little snack”.

And for the first time since becoming a mother, I am stepping away from the career that existed alongside almost every version of motherhood I've known.

That is the part I wasn't prepared for.

Because jobs are supposed to be jobs.

You work. You accomplish things. You get paid. Eventually you leave.

But some jobs quietly become timestamps.

I learned how to walk into an important meeting after being up half the night with a baby.

I learned how to manage people while sometimes barely managing myself.

I learned how to care enormously about my work and also know, with absolute certainty, that there were two little people at home who mattered more.

I learned that ambition doesn't disappear when you become a mother.

It just gets more complicated.

And now I am in this strange in-between.

I am still working, but I know the ending.

I'm transferring knowledge. Wrapping things up. Trying to leave people and projects in a good place.

At the same time, I'm looking at job postings and wondering which version of myself is supposed to come next.

Because the woman applying for my next job isn't the woman who applied for this one.

She has two kids now.

She knows herself better.

She has a much lower tolerance for meetings that should have been emails.

She knows what she is good at.

She knows what kind of work energizes her and what kind slowly drains the life out of her.

And maybe most importantly, she knows that a career can matter enormously without being the thing that defines her.

I did not understand that as deeply before.

There is a small part of me that wants to immediately replace what I'm losing.

Find the next title. The next company. The next challenge. Maybe a VP? Hm, that sounds nice. Make the transition so seamless that, from the outside, it barely looks like a transition at all.

But I'm starting to wonder whether that would miss the point.

For nearly the entire time I've been a mother, I've been moving. Working. Pregnant. Working. Having a baby. Working. Pregnant again. Working again. Having a baby again. Working again. again. again.

There has always been a next deadline, a next meeting, a next problem requiring an answer.

Maybe there is something valuable about not racing through this part. About picking my daughters up early sometimes and taking my oldest to gymnastics. About being more available. About remembering that Summer will only be this age once, and that her sister somehow became a kid while I wasn't paying attention.

About giving myself enough space to decide what I actually want my next chapter to look like instead of simply grabbing the first thing that proves I'm still successful. I’m still good enough. I’m still a “working mom” (as if any of us moms needs a reminder that being a stay at home mom isn’t equally demanding of a working title).

Because I am realizing that being let go isn't the same thing as being set back.

Sometimes an ending just forces you to look up, and out.

I'm still nervous.

I still have moments when my brain jumps six months into the future and demands a detailed strategic plan immediately.

I'm still going to network. I'm still going to apply for jobs. I'm still ambitious.

That part of me isn't going anywhere.

But underneath all of that is something I didn't expect.

Gratitude.

This job held an enormous stretch of my life. It knew me with one baby. It carried me through another pregnancy. It saw me become a mother of two. It watched me grow into a leader I wasn't yet when I arrived.

And now, just as the baby I once balanced beside my laptop becomes a toddler, this chapter is ending too.

There is something almost too neat about that timing. I don't know what I'm doing next yet. For someone who has spent years being paid to have an answer, that is deeply uncomfortable.

But maybe I don't need one immediately. For the first time in a long time, there is a little bit of blank space in front of me. And I think I want to see what I put there.