FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS : Tears and Fears on Return to Work

Here, seven new mothers share diaries detailing the adjustments, stresses and joys they found in their first days back on the job:

‘I Feel Guilty’

“I find myself holding onto him more as he drops off to sleep and not wanting to put him down,” Martha Duffley writes on her first day back. “There are fewer hours that I am with him and I hoard them.”

By 9 a.m., Duffley’s pals down at the post office are saying: “Gee, it’s great to see you back on the job.” They ask after her 5-month-old son, chat about motherhood, coo at the new mother’s battery of baby photos.

By 10, things have quieted down. People drift back to their work and Duffley, a Boston post-office supervisor, tucks the pictures away in her wallet. No point in displaying them on her desk: They only remind her of Brian’s sparkling eyes, and the way her own eyes swell when she cries, like she did last night at the thought of leaving her son in someone else’s care.

“I feel guilty,” Duffley writes. “He is still so young. I don’t know if he is cognizant of what my role is in his life. I rush home . . . to remind him who I am.”

The guilt lingers. The morning goodbys grow no easier.

Duffley, 33, doesn’t choose to work. Between her husband’s job as caretaker at the cemetery in their hometown of Milton, Mass., and her work at the post office, the couple makes $42,000 a year.

“I always thought I would be able to emulate (my mother) when and if I had children,” Duffley wrote after going back to work this summer. “She was at home for us when we were young.”

But mortgage payments and upkeep on the Duffley’s home run $8,000 a year. Add car payments and utilities: $11,400. Food and gas cost about $7,500. Day care is $9,300 a year. The budget is tight.

“I’m frustrated because I always wanted to stay home with my children and I always knew I wouldn’t be able to,” she says. “I’m supposed to be the main person in his life, the one he loves.”

Instead Duffley wonders whether her son knows that Mary, his day-care provider, is not his mother. She tries not to miss Brian too much, at the same time secretly hoping he misses her just a little.

“Somewhere deep inside I keep wanting to hear he misses me, he feels a void in his life, he is not chuckling all the time,” Martha writes. “Just so I know I mean something in his life.”

‘Harder to Leave’

“She’s asleep when I leave--no regrets about leaving. Excited . . . at the prospect of being back again,” Amanda Wallis writes. “A lot of my friends cried the first day they left their babies. I feel badly that I didn’t.”

The new mother is glad to be behind a desk after 13 weeks away from her job directing Bank of America’s private banking office in San Francisco.

The routine helps. Wallis is up at 4:30 a.m. to feed and play with Katie, who is fast asleep again by 5:45 a.m. “This gives me time to exercise, shower and dress and be out of the house by 7,” she writes.

Wallis’ parents and live-in nanny make the days “a lot more manageable,” while her husband “is wonderful with Katie and . . . has made juggling motherhood and career possible.”

But it’s easy to drop a ball, lose the balance.

“Katie was up and playing when I left this morning, which made it harder to leave!” Wallis writes on Tuesday. By Friday, she writes: “As time progresses I miss Katie more. . . .”

Wallis’ eyes drift more and more frequently to the newly framed photograph of Katie. She wonders whether to check on things at her ranch-style home in suburban Burlingame, where her daughter might be crying or sleeping or smiling. At 37, Wallis was ready for motherhood. She and Richard Blue, her husband of nine years, had discussed the decision. They’d pondered the inevitable, and substantial, changes a baby would bring.

It’s the smaller daily changes that sneak up. Wallis’ heated rollers have been cold for months because coiling her blonde hair into a bun saves at least 10 minutes in the morning. An evening out with her husband is rare; evenings out with friends rarer still.

“What I realize has now disappeared from my life is any free time for myself,” writes Wallis, whose staff of 24 caters to bank clients with account balances of more than $5 million.

“I go to work, come home, play with the baby, put her to bed, put myself to bed, and then I wake up and do it all over again.”

‘It’s Overwhelming’

“Arianna wakes up during the night--but that’s OK. I can give a few more hours of sleep,” writes Cynthia Sartin, whose focus day and night is on others.

Time with her 3-month-old daughter, Arianna, is wedged between erratic shifts at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, where Cynthia nurses AIDS patients and other strangers.

Her first day back on the job begins when the baby wakes at 3 a.m. on July 2, and ends around midnight: “Tired. Scratchy throat. Sleepy.”

Chronicling her life in a child’s miniature diary, Sartin fills the pages with sentence fragments and third-person observations:

“Arrives at work. Butterflies in stomach. . . . Calls home. Dad reading newspaper to baby. Wishes to be home. Continually shows pictures to friends. Arrives home. Kisses baby over and over again.”

Arianna is everything to Sartin, a stern Cajun woman determined to be the mother she wasn’t able to be as a single 20-year-old. When she gave birth to her now-teen-age son, Sartin’s eight siblings and parents had to help out while she finished up nursing school.

Today, she says, “It’s a whole different ballgame. It’s overwhelming . . . but I’m more mature. I can perceive so much more about what her needs are.”

Though she’d like to take care of Arianna on her own, Sartin relies on her husband and 16-year-old son. The two men, whom Sartin refers to as her “other babies,” have overcome their fear of crushing the tiny girl while cradling her to sleep.

Sartin feels fortunate. She knows many mothers don’t have such support. Still, she writes: “My feelings are those of inadequacy. My only hope is that things will get better with time and, maybe, I will not miss Arianna so much.”

‘It Takes Teamwork’

“I called Mom to ask how the kids are doing,” Capt. Sheila Michelli writes after rejoining her Army unit for military exercises. “It’s a relief to know that they miss me less than I miss them.”

An Army logistics officer at Fort Lee, Va., Michelli is a woman who knows how to take control and get things done. But saying goodby to 6-week-old Connor is a tough order. He is the Michelli’s second son--the last child the couple plans.

“The most wrenching part about returning to work is giving up breast-feeding,” she writes at 5:53 p.m., after dropping the kids off with her parents and heading for nine days of crisis combat-preparedness training.

“Connor I’ll see in 11 days, but I’m done breast-feeding for good,” she writes. “It’s so final.”

Still, letting go of her newborn is easier the second time around. Michelli, 27, has finally decided to commit to a career with the Army, where she believes working mothers have it pretty good.

She received 28 days’ paid maternity leave with her first child and 42 days with Connor. Less than half of U.S. working women have access to such maternity benefits, according to the Census Bureau.

Shortly after returning to work last spring, Michelli was placed in command of a 300-member unit. The Persian Gulf crisis put pressure on the entire military, but the Michellis have not been directly affected.

Michelli is proud of herself, but the work is demanding. And her husband, Tom, is a semi-workaholic computer programmer for Virginia’s National Guard.

Because both are so committed to their careers, tensions arise. Sometimes the couple ends up locking horns. But Michelli knows she can count on her husband to help warm a bottle, wash a load of diapers or be there when it’s time to drive the baby-sitter home.

“It takes a lot of coordination and teamwork,” says Michelli. “We argue . . . but he supports me.”

And that, all the mothers agreed, is key.

‘I’m Pulled Both Ways’

“The first day back at work was nothing short of traumatic,” Pam Salazar writes after going back to her job reporting for television station WKEF in Dayton, Ohio. “The thought of leaving my baby brought me to tears.”

Although willing to cut back on hours at the office and forgo her morning anchor position, Salazar wasn’t prepared to quit broadcasting altogether.

“I guess I thought somehow the situation would magically work itself out,” she writes, after finding out how it feels to be caught between news deadlines and her 5-month-old daughter, Chase.

There are no magic wands when it comes to racing the clock. Salazar may roar home to relieve the baby-sitter after a late-breaking news story or reel into work after prolonged morning goodbys.

But breast-feeding is another story. Mother Nature won’t be rushed.

“I was extremely nervous,” Salazar, 28, wrote after her first disastrous attempt at expressing milk in an office bathroom. “Would I be able to master the art . . . would I manage to pump enough (milk) to feed my baby?”

It was only after several attempts and with a lot of coaching by telephone from her husband, Kyle Hickok, that Salazar was able to get the gadget to draw milk. The new mother felt like she was hogging the bathroom and, perhaps, embarrassing her colleagues and herself.

“But my co-workers are very supportive of my breast-feeding,” she writes. “The news director bends over backward to accommodate Mother Nature’s schedule, allowing me to only go out on short stories so that I don’t miss a pumping session.”

The majority of employers are not as supportive. Of 6 million U.S. companies, only a slim minority offer subsidies, referrals or on-site day care for working mothers.

Some working mothers read a message in the writing on the wall: They feel they are not valued members of the labor force. Down at the TV station, Salazar found the kind of support many women crave--and still there were tensions.

“Nursing is something I felt very strongly about, but I had my doubts about how professional it would be,” she reflects. “I’m pulled both ways . . . feeling guilty that I’m not doing either of (my jobs) very well.”

‘The Best of Both Worlds’

“My name is Vicki Sugarman and my game is the ‘Mommy Track,’ ” the new mother writes.

“I would be very upset if we were just a token, “ writes Janet Aikens, who with Sugarman shares a job managing promotions at Reebok International Ltd. in Stoughton, Mass.

Sugarman and Aikens each work three days a week, overlapping on Wednesdays. The co-workers hit on the increasingly popular alternative to full-time work and motherhood after each became pregnant about the same time last year.

Job-sharing has required some adjustments to ensure both women are working on projects suited to their skills. All concerned eventually decided it would be easier for Aikens and Sugarman to split their hours but work independently.

“I now have the best of both worlds!” writes Sugarman, 31. “I can maintain my professional status and still be with my daughter four days a week.”

But read between the lines: It wasn’t quite that simple.

The night before her first day back, Sugarman lay in bed staring at the clock and wondering how being both a mother and a manager would work out.

“It is 3 in the morning and I am still wide awake just wondering: Will the baby think that I have deserted her? Will the nanny take good care of her? What will it be like to be back in the office? Have I forgotten everything I’ve ever learned? When will I ever fall asleep?”

Aikens, too, has known fitful nights.

Before the birth of her son, she was working 10 hours a day and traveling at least a week out of every month. Her husband, Andy, was matching her hour-for-hour at his job as an engineer for Raytheon Co.

“I was determined not to let my pregnancy change anything, so I continued to work, work, work. . .” Aikens, 30, wrote after her first day back. “I wanted to be promoted to associate brand manager by year’s end, as scheduled.”

But things changed. Priorities shifted.

“The decision not to return to my career full time was a very difficult one for me. I had worked hard and long to get where I was . . . (but) there was Skyler,” Aikens writes.

“I can get my career back on track, but I can never recapture Skyler’s childhood.”