This same conversation found me four times over the last three months, in four completely different settings. Twice with old colleagues catching up about something else entirely before it drifted in the same direction. Once at dinner last week with a gf who’s single and doesn’t have kids, who is genuinely curious about my life and asked questions I didn’t have tidy answers for. Once with my sister-in-law while lounging on the beach during a family camping trip.
Different women, all different circumstances, but somehow every version of this conversation landed in the same place — talking about the other women/moms we used to work with or know from work and what they are doing now. The ones who had their babies close together, went back to work fairly quickly, and how their careers took a “hit”. How some are now back to traveling the globe, doing the fancy schmancy fun corporate girlie things aka the kind of life I used to live too, before I traded it in.
By the fourth time, I’d stopped being surprised by my own reaction because I realized then that it’s not my story anymore. I’m not on a career break, and I didn’t take a hit… I said a full goodbye and closed that door in August 2023. I will not be returning to corporate software sales after climbing that ladder for 10 years.
I do think about this more than people may realize (even though I am aware I have basically fallen off the face of the earth at this point). But I am aware that every day that passes is a day further from the job/career I used to have as a senior director in enterprise sales, the kind of role you don’t just step back into after a few years away. I knew it the day I didn’t go back at 12 months, and I knew it more at 15. By the time I was approaching a full 1.5 years at home, I understood I wasn’t simply taking a short career break, I was completely closing one door and stepping into the unknown with very few people doing the same thing at my stage or in my immediate circle.
That would have been easier to sit with if I hadn’t spent the two years before getting pregnant convinced I would do the opposite when my time came. Even after my miscarriage and early on in my second pregnancy I told myself I’d go back to work for my hip 30 under 30, female founded software company by six months max. Partway through my maternity leave, around eight months, I came up with a whole new plan where my husband would be the one to quit his job and I’d take a brand new job in Europe that required flying to Paris every month, and I was allowed to bring my husband and daughter (according to an old boss who wanted to bring me along to her new company). I have no idea what I was thinking, and I realize now that I was completely delusional. But underneath that realization, I was trying to protect the version of me that needed a leaderboard, or at least a paycheck, to prove I hadn’t lost myself.
So when my gfs and I began talking about the moms whose careers only took “a hit,” I didn’t feel envy so much as I felt the size of the gap between me and my old gfs/colleagues. And it made me ask a question I’ve been circling for a while now: if my ambition didn’t shrink, where did it go?
A few weeks ago I asked something similar to my fellow moms here on Substack. I wrote a note asking other stay-at-home moms who used to have careers how they felt about not being in one now and what they felt about their future in relation to their careers. I expected two obvious sides: the ones who grieved what they left behind and the ones who didn’t. What I got instead was a chorus of women who were all, in their own way, mid-negotiation with the same question I was asking on that Wednesday morning.
A few commented that at times they still miss the coworkers and the sense of solving something and I could relate to this for sure. Some women said they found peace they weren’t expecting and kept waiting for the grief that never came. But most of them, like me, missed tiny pieces instead of the whole thing: the paycheck but not the actual work beneath it, the identity but not the pace of being always on. One woman wrote that she left an engineering career to stay home for years, then came back as a specialist doing something she loved more (which I thought was soo fricken cool!!). She shared that you can change in motherhood, become something more true, and still have it all, but just not all at the same time.
One of the comments that stayed with me longest wasn’t about missing anything though. It was a woman admitting that the hardest part hasn’t been grief for her and that it’s been learning to separate her ambition from monetary gain. I recognized it instantly because I’d felt the exact same words myself before I’d even finished reading hers (hi Annaliese Godderz , my og substack inspo!)
That's the part I don't think gets said enough: my ambition didn't get smaller when I left my career or became a mother. If anything, I believe it got more specific. It's no longer the always-climbing and always-comparing kind of ambition that came from closing a big deal or seeing my name at the top of a sales leaderboard. I loved that version of it and especially loved the validation of knowing publicly that I was doing a good job. But that ambition doesn't fit in this chapter of my life. What fits now is my ambition in smaller windows that happen before my daughter wakes up, during her one remaining nap or in the little bit of time after she's asleep at night if I manage to keep my own eyes open to jot down one last note.
It shows up in my writing here. It shows up in the two women I coach, when I do (not right now!) — which is the most I've been able to hold since becoming a stay-at-home mother. It's not paid the way my old job was, bi-weekly, to help us from going behind some months. It doesn't come with a title someone else gave me, or someone else to schedule my next performance review. Most of the people reading this don't actually know me, which is a strange kind of visibility and different from the version I used to have with people who knew my face and my name in a boardroom. But it's still building something; it still connects me to other people, and most days, it connects me more than anything I ever built over a lunch.
I don’t think I’ve fully unlearned the old belief because it came back to visit me this very week in the middle of the conversation with my gf — a flicker of a thought that maybe I should put my daughter in a forest school one day a week so I could go do something that pays. I noticed it, thought about it a few times over the course of the week, and I let it sit there for a second before I recognized what it actually was. Not a real need but just the old pull, the one that still equates a real life with a paycheck and a title.
Since I started writing, I’ve slowed down more than I ever thought I could. I think less now about what makes a life look successful and more about what makes it feel rich, outside of anything material. I think about what it means to be a woman who doesn’t rush through the day. I think about building something that doesn’t happen overnight, and it def doesn’t make money overnight either (even though I tried that more than once in the first year lol), and it’s trusting that it’s still worth building.
That’s the main thing I’d tell the version of me who panicked the other week, and the version who came up with her delusional plan to fly to Europe every month. Your ambition isn’t gone — it’s just been reshaped, and you’re still learning ambition does not need to be measured in a paycheck or a title.
If you've stepped away from a career or an old version of ambition, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
Where does your ambition live for you now? What does it look like when it's not measured by a paycheck or a title?
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