When a Layoff Means More Than a Job Loss

After putting my LinkedIn account in hibernation more than a year ago, now feels like a right time to resurface and reconnect. Reactivating a work-related social media account means putting myself out there “professionally” again, something I hadn’t felt like I needed to do for a few years. Of course, there's both privilege and inertia mixed into being in that position. Not to mention life can be tiring sometimes, and I’ve harbored a genuine desire to remain private over the years.

The most direct reason for resurfacing now is that I’ve been laid off recently and for the first time ever from a full-time job. I feel pushed to “get back out there” and get another job and start earning a regular income as soon as possible, because I’m reacting to a sudden job loss that’s out of my control, and I’m prone to anxiety.

Knowing myself, there’s more to the logical laid-off-and-need-to-get-another-job-asap line of thinking. Because the reality is, I’ve been processing this layoff for a while and frankly, also “behind” on job search. Digging into the why behind this “procrastination” is what compelled me to write this blog series. I’m curious where these words lead me, and how the next seasons of life unfold after a formative decade in the Silicon Valley tech industry.

I think for most people that work for a company and trade time for income, being laid off usually means more than just losing a job. We’ve invested time, energy, relationships, good intentions to do well, and often even sanity into a job. A job is so easily tied to identity, not only as the answer to the straightforward “What do you do?” but also the profound “Who do you provide for?” and even the existential “How do you spend your limited time on this planet?” When a job is taken away, so does a substantial part of one’s identity, a sense of control and stability, and relationships. For many collective and personal reasons, being laid off can be really, really tough.

Adding “being newly postpartum” to the mix and all the beginnings and endings of what that entails, I’ve been examining this layoff in a uniquely layered way. Quickly, this exercise overwhelmed my already strained postpartum nervous system. Emotions are quite smart and are usually the foundation of reasons. So when I gasped to my husband at the height of anxiety a few days after the separation meeting, “I don’t have a job now!” I hadn’t yet been able to articulate why I felt so devastated.

On writing publicly again

Over the last few years, life has taken me and my family through some very treacherous waters. Running on a parallel track is a decade of working full-time in tech, here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The layoff that marked the end of my 10 years in tech is not accidental at all — the industry is going through a “tech recession” after several years of boom cycle and cheap money with low interest rate. In many ways, I’m very lucky to have not been personally impacted by layoffs until now. (Although I’ve witnessed many along the way.) So the gravity of the job loss is not unlike that of anyone going through any adversity or loss for the first time. I wasn’t joking when I said to my husband that this layoff felt, in some ways, similar to that first heartbreak I endured from also about 10 years ago. Emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (still working on that last one) underlie both experiences.

Writing has always been an integral method of coping for me. Over the last decade, my relationship with writing has grown more private. But curiously, I’ve also been writing professionally in full-time jobs for almost eight years. For anyone that considers herself as a writer, words usually matter in multiple spheres of her life, often with different levels of depth and honesty. Writing product and marketing content for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup holds a very different meaning to a writer from writing poetry to cope with the suicide of a friend. Recalling the first book I self-published in 2014 — a collection of essays that capture the wonders and woes of being a twenty-something, asking her questions, and searching for her people and places — is an intriguing exercise now. So proud of what I did back then, I now squint at the words on those pages, more puzzled: I no longer share my creative writing as comfortably and openly as before.

In many ways, this discomfort reflects a heart that is both more grounded and more closed, and for good reasons too: Marriage; settling from several years of fast relationships to a few lasting and deeper ones; growing inertia in tech and the Bay Area. And most recently and profoundly, the loss of my daughter over two years ago that halted all efforts or intention to still be “out there.” All I desired was to be cocooned in the safety of baby loss support groups, private (but long and ongoing) writings of thoughts, fears, and reflection surrounding the loss, and the gentle holding of my husband, the only other person who shares the loss with me intimately.

Now I join hundreds of thousands of tech workers impacted by the recent industry-wide job cuts. Shaken by new motherhood and a layoff at the same time, I find myself desperately needing to write, to make sense of numerous role and identity shifts, and to connect with so many others in the same boat. After losing writing as a way to sustain myself and my family financially, I’m gaining it as a creative endeavor once again, a sustenance in a very different form. I don’t know exactly what holds in the months and years to come, but I feel compelled to start with writing. And then, inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s creative ethos, I’ll put myself and my writing out there once again, and see what happens.

Being a mother, laid off, and grieving

My son was about to turn three months old when I was informed that my role was eliminated. He’s my second child and first living child — our rainbow baby. The week I received the separation documents was also the two-year anniversary of the loss of my daughter, my first child whom we painfully lost back in 2021.

It is an understatement to say that being a mother to a newborn for the first time is like being hit by a truck. The fourth trimester is intense and comes with a steep learning curve. The knowledge about how to be a new parent to a living child is almost entirely experiential, and cannot be acquired most other ways. (I say this even after I spent a ton of time taking birth and breastfeeding classes during pregnancy.) And it’s not at all like I get better at it if I simply work harder, shattering the input-leads-to-output mental model that I’ve been trained to adopt for years. In fact, these first-year months continue to be messy, beautiful, unsettling, and ever-changing. This is a marathon that tests the body and mind to the core, even though our son is generally an easy baby, and most importantly, he’s healthy.

But the pregnancy preceding my son’s birth wasn’t a healthy one, even though precious. It was also woven into an uneasy year emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the industry backdrop of multiple layoffs even at historically stable and massive firms like Google, Meta, and Amazon, the tech sector has been reckoning with strategic mistakes made during the pandemic. My former employer was no exception. Facing a myriad of industry headwind & a false projection of post-pandemic growth, the company has been conducting several rounds of layoff and leadership changes since early 2022. For a long time, it felt like it was only a matter of time before most employees would be laid off as the stock price continued to trend downward.

Grieving my daughter still while trying to conceive again, I was in a particularly tricky spot. I had known for a while that my job would not last long. The rational side of my brain pointed me to active job search while still employed to protect my long-term prospect and financial stability, especially for another pregnancy. I interviewed around in early 2022, but needed to pause after a few months. It turned out that job hunt on top of an already stressful full time job while also trying to conceive again was way too much. I didn’t want to burn out at the worse time possible, and prioritized my health instead.

After we tried for almost a year and finally conceived, we were so incredibly relieved but at the same time cautious. Losing a child had opened our eyes to a world of pregnancy risks and complications completely unknown to us before. Biology truly is both magical and relentless. The second time around, we knew all too well just how precarious pregnancies could be, and were weighed down by the burden of that knowledge. A rough first trimester coincided with a high-stress project I was leading at work. Very thankfully, every first-trimester ultrasound and test revealed a healthy fetus and felt like overcoming an enormous hurdle. Our hearts gradually opened up as we saw the word “unremarkable” on more and more of our ultrasound reports. In fact, the final routine procedure — the 20-week anatomy scan — was completed at the very end of 2022, with the sonographer congratulating us and thanking us for taking care of our baby. What a huge relief and beautiful gift going into the new year! We never got this far with our daughter.

Unfortunately, an unexpected complication occurred just days after the new year. I was well into the second trimester, supposedly the most enjoyable three months of pregnancy with the risk of miscarriage drastically decreasing. The sudden onset of the complication was so frightening that I remember wailing, “Not now… I can’t lose this pregnancy now! This is so unfair…” I thought it was something I did or that I had been too stressed at my job. Two overnight hospital stays later, no one could reach a diagnosis, but everyone did conclude that the baby was healthy. At the emergency follow-up visit, my OB Dr. S checked me, talked through the complication, and finally asked, “How’s your work?”

“High stress.” I replied instantly.

Dr. S proceeded to express how she worked so much that she barely slept or saw her three kids, and hadn’t taken a vacation in a decade. (My OB is a rare kind, a gem of a doctor in many ways. She is a straight shooter, and delivers all her patients’ babies herself. This is unusual in the U.S., and of course stretches her extremely thin.)

“I don’t want you to repeat my mistake.” She cautioned.

Tears immediately streamed down my face.

“With a high-risk pregnancy like this, I strongly suggest that you start taking leave now. Think of it as you’re carrying three babies instead of one. Just start the maternity leave now.” She concluded, signaling the level of precaution I needed to take. She told me to think about it, and her staff could handle the paperwork if I decided to move forward with the leave.

At that point, I couldn’t stop weeping, and my head was spinning. “I don’t want to lose another baby” was the first thought that came to mind. Work burnout two years ago amid the chaos of my first high-risk pregnancy and the loss of my daughter flashed in front of my eyes. I no longer wanted to make the same mistake.

Savoring this story? Become a member of Fieldnotes from a Watcher and access more creative nonfiction essays exploring life's timeless moments that are as personal as they are universal.

Subscribe

Of course it wasn’t that straightforward. I quickly became quite torn and nervous about the prospect of taking disability leave so early in the pregnancy. The day after seeing my OB, I felt snapped back into reality: Performance review cycle, looming layoff, kickoff of a critical project, long hours at work… My body and mind had been full and anxious. At that cross road, decades-long habit of working hard and pushing through, oftentimes with pain, was naturally hard to break. In the midst of a “top level initiative” in Q1, a return-to-work date in early September seemed unimaginably far into the future. I’d essentially be out for the majority of 2023. I’d never taken this long of a break from work before! De-stressing and caring for my health and pregnancy full time, for months, seemed unnatural and alarming, as if I didn’t learn my lessons from two years ago at all. Even more ironically, as if I didn’t learn any lessons from years of advocacy for mental health and training in counseling psychology. There indeed can be a stark contrast between awareness and behavior.

I would have kept full speed ahead if it wasn’t for the unexpected turn of event, for nothing else but inertia, a health insurance and paycheck for both myself and my family, and admittedly a narrow sense of self-worthiness. If giving my former self some grace, I would honestly say that this was a valid mix of reasons. With voices in my head murmuring for years “If you aren’t working on something, you aren’t worth much,” I forgive myself for being torn and even guilty back then. One of my family friends who works in tech, while urging me to start the leave right away, also validated, “Of course it’s hard to let go. We put in a lot of hard work, sweat, and tears into the job. When I quit my last job, it also took me a while to adjust.” I appreciated that degree of understanding, because the truth is, parts of our identities are tied to our jobs, even if oftentimes unwillingly.

Conversations with friends, family, and an incredible community of moms working in the tech industry (I owe Moms in Tech a debt of gratitude) “set me straight” rather quickly. Deep down, I knew what the right thing to do was. The collective wisdom of loved ones amplified that intuition and brought me to a place of true worthiness. “30 years from now, you won’t remember the projects you worked on or most of your coworkers. Neither will they remember you. But you will remember your family, your kids. You probably won’t regret taking the leave for your own and your baby’s health, but you might regret continuing to work till the due date,” two parent friends of ours shared.

This thought exercise solidified the decision to begin the leave. I broke the news to my boss and coworkers, and arranged work transition in a week. In the meantime, I swiftly researched disability leave in the context of pregnancy, my legal rights, and sources of income to help support myself financially during a vulnerable time. In this process, I learned a ton about federal and California laws that govern an employee’s right to different types of job-protected leave and the right to pay during leave. Soon enough I became familiar with all the acronyms like CA PDL, CAFR, FMLA, CA EDD SDI, SFPPLO, and how these laws interact/overlap. I felt good to have aligned my understanding with Legal Aid At Work as well.

90% certain of my decision, I began my disability leave in late January 2023. Ironically, my feeling of guilt disappeared after a week. Benefiting from full time care of my own health and my baby’s health, I recovered from the complication over time. I realized it was okay, and even kind of nice, to take my foot off the gas.

My son was born four months later, very thankfully, alive and healthy. We couldn’t have asked for a better labor and delivery outcome. I’d like to think that the rest I took and research I did during disability leave on how it all works, medical interventions, and self advocacy helped quite a bit. I’m incredibly grateful for my husband, an amazing team of labor and delivery nurses, and my OBGYN for everything they did. So many friends, family members, and support people (from my Postpartum Support International peer mentor, to those participating in our “alternative” hand-me-down baby registry and meal train, our night doula, and a group of wonderful mamas from a baby loss support group) formed our village. Even months later, we are still often in awe of the fact that our second child and first living child is here with us, and how much it took to bring him here.

Very soon after my son was born, both my husband and I realized this agonizing conflict between an instinctual desire to be with our boy for as long as possible and the need to separate from him, go to work, and provide for him. We both struggled over this impossible balance most acutely when my husband returned to work after only seven weeks postpartum. (His thought process at the time was to break up his 12-week paternity leave into two parts, and reserved a few weeks for when our boy turns six months old.) Even with the immense support from family and our night doula, seven weeks for us still felt way too short. Both of us resented that timeline and wished he’d taken all 12 weeks together. My husband exclaimed how unnatural and almost cruel it felt to return to the office for the first time, having to separate from his newborn so soon. He expressed how he wished he could quit his work and take care of his son full time.

That was when one of the first challenges of being working parents really dawned on us. Even during pregnancy, messages around skin-to-skin contact, room sharing, breastfeeding (and the inherent physical closeness that comes with it), etc. are frequently communicated to expectant parents. Human babies have been constantly carried, held, and nursed from the start of our species. During early postpartum days, I learned about Jean Liedloff’s continuum concept that posits that one of the required experiences for human babies to thrive physically, mentally, and emotionally is “constant carrying or physical contact with other people (usually their mothers or fathers) in the several months after birth, as these adults go about their day-to-day business (during which the infants observe and thus learn, but also nurse, or sleep)”. In short, earlier humans were able to head to work carrying their babies.

Drastically different now for many of us, we have to separate from our infants, work, in order to provide for them. The more I talk to other parents, the more I learn that we’re not alone in struggling with this conflict. “It’s really so hard to decide between staying home or returning to work, and there’s no perfect answer,” a mama shared in my parenting after loss support group. Parents talk thoroughly about their options to decide on all kinds of configurations: Who will stay home, who will work, what kind of work (full time, part time, contract, remote), career concerns, financial concerns, child care, self care, etc.

Seven weeks in, we found ourselves scrambling to grab bits and pieces of time to process and still hardly scratch the surface of these themes. We had no conclusion or even a glimmer of direction, only an outpouring of emotions. Given a slow recovery, I couldn’t walk much still. Feeding and exclusive pumping pains persisted. The ensuing sleep deprivation felt excruciating. We had just started to grasp the multilayered who, what, why, when, and how of being new parents to a living child. But the moment we thought I’d figured out a pattern, it changed again, rendering all the “Why does this happen?” type questions useless, squashing my habitual need to know for a vague sense of control. (Even to this day, I’m still learning to just surrender and stay right in the moment with my son.) Disoriented, we thought the bewildering newborn phase would be permanent, even though each day went by extremely fast. And just as we were so close to surviving the wild ride that was the fourth trimester, I got laid off from my job, shortly before my son turned three months old. I had a month left in my maternity leave, and my husband had just returned to work for two weeks.

The truth is, I wasn’t surprised by the layoff itself or the fact that I was impacted. Even just a week before the news, I expressed my doubt about my role to a coworker. In an email to him, I wrote, “Honestly I’m not even sure if they still want to keep me... Like is there even a need for [my role]?” My employer had conducted multiple layoffs and reorganizations, matching the overall tech industry trend in recent years. And I knew the company probably wasn’t the biggest fan of an employee who’d been absent for several months. Of course, I learned that the area I worked on was also de-prioritized; many colleagues in the same function were let go as well. Cognitively, it all made sense.

Emotionally, deeper layers of grief underneath this job loss began to reveal themselves, hitting me one at a time over the following days and weeks. Invisible to my employer and its cost-cutting business needs was a deeply personal context in which the separation occurred.

Right when I mustered up enough courage to negotiate with work for partial work-from-home arrangements due to postpartum medical needs, I lost the job entirely. Weeks of pondering “How on earth do I balance being with my son and working?” now felt futile and stupid. My usual anxiety-fueled fighting for (the illusion of) control couldn’t accept the reality for weeks. Questions of “Who am I if I’m not working?” and “How do I survive without an income?” were now combined with “What kind of mother am I if I’m not providing for my son?”

The seriousness of these questions was not completely rational or rooted in the present. My husband still has a job. He and I had also been adhering to a frugal lifestyle together. While both of our income gradually grew after we got married and effectively doubled this year, our savings rate grew over time as well, as we kept our spending relatively steady and avoided lifestyle inflation. This is especially crucial living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the cost of living is notoriously high. But none of these efforts eases the scarcity mindset that’s been almost ingrained in my DNA since childhood.

The often desperate need to provide, to earn, and to work hard was my parents’ and grandparents’ generational norm back home in China. Historical poverty forced a way of being and parenting that focused primarily on putting food on the table and a roof over head. As parents, to provide economically is to provide wholeheartedly. There wasn’t any physical or mental bandwidth for much else (such as paying attention to the child’s emotional states during teen years). Hard-earned money comes with sweat and tears, but also hardship and even trauma.

I was born in a pivotal late 1980s when China’s economy began to soar. The generational habit to provide economically no matter what was naturally hard for my parents to break. The nation-wide economic surge at the time (after decades of poverty and turmoil in the 20th century alone) also amplified the persistent need to earn to not just enough, but more. For my parents, the thing about having been poor growing up is that they never want to go back to poverty anymore — not only for themselves, but also for their family. And they want to make sure of that, especially when economic environment is promising.

Almost 35 years later, my first living child was born in the United States, because I came to this country 16 years ago for college, something that wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for my parents’ financial support (which, in my parents’ minds, equals their wholehearted support). In many ways, it was a wild and almost incomprehensible leap to go from being born in the late 1980s in China to attending college in the U.S. in a span of merely 18 years. But during these past 16 years of life experiences in the U.S., removed from home and observing it from a distance, did I grow conscious of many unconscious norms of my childhood under the veneer of rapid economic growth. (These norms are often uncomfortable, such as how prevalent domestic violence is, or how much Trauma with a big “T” just one and two generations above me had silently endured but never healed from.)

In my mid to late twenties, I reckoned a lot with my upbringing and relationship with my parents. Through inevitable heartbreaks and clashing cultural identities in a foreign country, I became acutely aware of how much I relate to myself and others (anxiously) was shaped by the tumultuous dynamics of my family and culture of origin. Attempts to heal and break the inter-generational cycle led to a fair amount of inner conflict, as well as a desire to live and parent differently. Instead of a chaotic home, I vowed to seek a peaceful and psychologically safe marriage. Instead of focusing my parental love on long hours at work to bring home as much money I can, I promised to balance more, get to know my child, and hold space for him/her.

Even with all these conscious, years-long efforts to do things differently, this layoff seemed to erase all of them. I didn’t realize how deeply rooted the need to work is to me as an individual (more on that in Part II; see preview below). That individual need is now translated to the deeply rooted need to provide economically as a parent. I so cherish this time with my son, constantly observing and catching up to him as he grows up so fast. In the meantime, I still wrestle with this period of perceived “idleness” without a job, even though the postpartum season of life is anything but idle. But I do wonder if I’m already enough for now as a provider to my now eight-month-old son, perhaps in a very different way.