What does a 36-year-old mother face when she works for a big Internet company? The author’s husband refers to their children as “Internet orphans,” referring to the absence of companionship from their parents who work in Internet giants. Being a mother, a wife and a daughter doesn’t cut it in the face of being an employee of an Internet giant. She worried, blamed herself, but there was nothing she could do. On that one and only day, after I was sick, “I found a hotel and stayed there for a whole day. I didn’t take my children and family members with me, and I spent a whole day building a Lego of 2000 yuan. I am not a wife, a daughter, a mother, or an Internet worker. I am just myself, silent and focused, passing the day.
01
At 10:30 p.m., I finished work. When I opened Didi, 163 people queued up in front of me. At this moment, the day in Houchang Village began to come to an end, and then it went on and on until after midnight. Finally, I gave up the fierce competition of the express train and took a special one. The driver came up to me after a ten-minute traffic jam. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. I said, “It’s okay. This intersection is like this every day.”
In less than a year, I’ve seen the evening rush at 11 o ‘clock, the anxiety at 1 o ‘clock and the cold at 5 in the morning.
At this moment, my mobile phone WeChat message pop up, is my mother sent: the baby is asleep. The milk is in the microwave, come back and drink it.
I replied: I got a cab and will be home in 20 minutes.
This is my life. I am 36 years old. I have a son who is less than 3 years old and a lover who is also in an Internet factory.
In the car, I turn on the podcast, which is one of the few hours I have to myself in the day — except sleep, and then an hour on the commute. Discussing Haidian mother chicken baby in the program, I can not help but worry up, to my work intensity, is unable to go all out chicken baby. Although Haidian Huangzhuang is only a 15-minute drive from my home, there is no way I would have had time to pick him up or audit those math Olympiad classes when he was in elementary school. But then I thought, the child has three years to go to primary school, these three years will have how much change no one can say. Maybe out of work? But I don’t want to lose my job.
02
I used to be a very casual person who didn’t care about unemployment. My husband did the same. At 26, he left four years of writing code to cycle to Nepal alone to think about life. When I met him, he had just moved to Beijing and was working in a “small but beautiful” company doing what he loved. We had plenty of time to go to movies and shows together and had a quiet, steady love life. Until one day his company announced the start of a wolf-sex strategy, and his annual leave to run a marathon in Hawaii was brutally denied. He chose to resign, thinking that life can not be swallowed up by 996. Of course, I am very supportive, after all, the free soul can not be imprisoned a little bit. I had just finished a career in entrepreneurship and had returned to work at a retired Internet company. I was 31 years old, and my job was trivial but not busy.
For a long time, we felt that there was nothing wrong with this mindset. We didn’t want to give too much, and we didn’t expect more from our work. We got married, and although the issue seemed a little difficult for both of us, it worked surprisingly well, presumably because it didn’t put pressure on each other. We got married when he was 28 and I was 32.
Six months later, I was pregnant, four years past the rumored golden age. This was another unplanned experience, but because of my husband’s natural love of human cubs, we decided to upgrade ourselves to parents. In addition to the prolonged morning sickness during pregnancy, I was very worried about the rest. The baby grows regularly inside, but I’m still active and energetic. I even had some big projects launched during pregnancy, and I thought maybe the so-called career curse wouldn’t fall on me. It wasn’t until eight months into my pregnancy that my father died.
He had never been well, but I never thought that hospital stay would be the end of his life. To this day, when I pass by the hospital where he died, I still have to confirm the truth of this matter. In fact, from the day he died to now, I have not stopped missing him for a day. I always think, do I make him satisfied and relieved now? The question recurred to me late at night on the way home, but, as usual, I couldn’t give an exact answer.
When my father died, I had no time to grieve, not even to cry, before my child was born. So in 2017, I was born and died, and I completely became an “adult”.
Growing up wasn’t about getting married or having kids. It was about losing a loved one. It felt like your rock had collapsed and you had to take the C position in your family, making all the decisions about yourself and everything in your life. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to live like an adult. I thought, at least, I want to live more. I should be more aggressive, more positive, more proactive, let others think that I am “good”. I decided to make these my goals after my maternity leave.
At this time, my wife has been working in a large Internet factory. When I was pregnant, he sent out resumes to some big companies, and one day after the offer was received, he said to me sadly, “I’m about to start my life in 996.” It was clear to me that this was the compromise of life by a teenager who once had his way. I told him: “pay attention to your health, you rest assured to work overtime, I am in the current company, should be able to take care of my family.” Since then, we have been unconsciously, little by little reality changed our intentions. But this, I believe, is the instinctive and voluntary desire to live — to give up our selves, and our freedom, for the common cause of raising our young.
During the maternity leave, I arranged a day’s schedule with the neuroticism of a new mother, strict and meticulous, and kept a record of the time when the child was fed and went to bed on time. After taking a bath at night, I insisted on touching and massaging the child without falling behind. It was a total of ten minutes, no more or less than one minute. My mother looked at too nervous I said: “go on like this, even make the child will follow the tension.” I said; “Ah, where do you understand, early education is the most important, can not muddle through, while I can take him personally, had better take care of him a little better.”
Now that I think about it, even though I was a little nervous at that time, what I said was not unreasonable. At least that time was one of the few times I got along with him.
03
When I got to work, I was transferred and started doing things I wasn’t good at. Because I was breastfeeding, my job was more leisurely and I didn’t have a team to take with me. I spent a lot of time breastfeeding and child-rearing. I was surrounded by colleagues who talked to me mostly about the children, and despite all the good intentions, I was not comfortable with the gradual loss of identity. Yes, I can give up my self for my children, but I cannot give up certain clinging identities, such as a distinct individual and intense discomfort with the life I have been given. I think after breastfeeding, I will definitely leave here. This struggle continued until my child was nearly two years old, and I finally received an interview call from Dachang.
At the interview, the interviewer asked me, “Do you already have kids at this age?” I said, “My baby is almost two years old.” The interviewer smiled and said, “I don’t have any other meaning. I just think that mothers are more tolerant. After all the pain, what else should I be afraid of?” Later I got the offer, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I was more qualified or more tolerant. But at that moment I was happy, I saw the fresh and huge unknown, which made me excited, and the moment I pressed the offer confirmation button, I felt I could do it again.
I started my job while telecommuting, and with the excitement of a new employee, I started my life in Dachang with my colleagues in the same group. After everyone welcomed them with memes in the work group, they plunged into all kinds of data. After a month, I had my first anxiety. I felt that everyone was more efficient, clearer and able to stay up late than I was. Over time, this anxiety would come at me from time to time, and I told myself it was because I wasn’t good enough.
I constantly push my limits and spend more time “making myself better.” Sometimes it’s desperate because you don’t know when you’re going to catch up. But at the same time, I’m happy when I’m working full time. The identity of a 36-year-old woman who is committed to her job resonates more with me at that moment than “the mother of my children.” It’s not that I don’t like being “mom to my kids,” it’s just that I don’t want that to be my only label.
Not long after, I received a new project, immediately pack the kind of business trip, only booked the ticket to go, which means the return date is uncertain. I didn’t call my child for 15 days. I was afraid he would be crying on the phone. And most of the time, I was so busy I forgot I had a child.
When I got home, my mom scolded me for not checking in with her so much. I told her that I never really had a moment to stop for a phone call, except when I used the bathroom. Later, when I shared this confusion with my colleague, she told me with a wry smile that she was like a missing person on a business trip. Not only could she not remember to call home, but she even hung up on various video invitations from her family.
I work so hard that my husband becomes a parenting hero. During the day, my mother and aunt took care of the baby’s daily life, and in less than a year, my demands for them went from a precise schedule to “just breathe.” In order to spend more time with the children, my husband leaves work at 8 o ‘clock on time every night, and 8 o ‘clock is usually the time for big factories to show their talents. So far, I dare not ask him what kind of pressure he bears when he leaves his desk. Only when I take a break occasionally, we can take the kids to early education classes together. This is usually the happiest time for our family, when the kids realize they are still parents and my mom can watch TV at home.
In one of our rare conversations, my husband called my child an “Internet orphan”. It suddenly made me realize that the child was growing up quietly and I was absent from his life. He became a little anxious and did not have the same trust in his mother as before. He tried to make sure she still loved him in all sorts of unreasonable ways, such as smashing toys when I was at home, being picky about what I ate, and then peering out of the corner of my small eyes to watch my expression.
Kids are wary of me changing in the morning, always asking, “Are you going to work? My answer is usually yes, and then he flattens his mouth, ready to cry. The next ten minutes, it is time we tear each other, but in the end we all discovered an interesting thing: if he was sitting on the balcony, can see me from downstairs after, so now, before I go out, he would pick a favorite snacks sitting on the balcony waiting for me, see me walk through go to, just yell mom, and I was standing in the downstairs shouted his name. Our next-door neighbor had a myna, and over time, the myna learned to call itself “mommy.” So now every day when I walk downstairs, I can hear my son and myna calling one after another.
04
I put too much meaning into this job. After all, the first half of my life left me few opportunities, and Dachang’s relatively sound system also makes it not so difficult to do a screw; With the rapid development of the company, I have acquired some professional abilities “not to be abandoned by The Times”, and I even gained the recognition of the sense of value. But most of all, I wasn’t sure what kind of possibilities my 36-year-old self had to maintain a semblance of stability. Sometimes it may seem like a lot of choices, but in the end there is only one way to go.
I understand that any decision in life requires trade-offs, but sometimes I still feel confused about the trade-offs behind rapid growth, which cannot be measured by data, metrics, or OKR. It’s like I’m really becoming an adult here. A man whose face is calm even when his heart is broken.
If I see an Internet woman my age on a corporate campus, I feel the urge to pull her down and ask her how she’s balancing work, family and herself. But after I calmed down, I thought, this problem is too personal, we face the same environment, but the individual background and the problem is very different. The experience of others is almost impossible to replicate in my own life, and whether this experience is a magical experience in my long life or determines the beginning of some fate, now I have no way of judging, only experience and feeling. Even if it is painful and helpless, it also constructs the life experience that belongs to me and my family.
As the interviewer predicted, I did manage to juggle work and family roles with extraordinary resilience. However, due to stress and anxiety, I lost 10kg within a week. I went to the hospital for an examination and was told that I needed an immediate operation to eliminate the cancerous change. The second week after the surgery, I was able to sit up and rest, so I found a hotel by myself and stayed there for a day. I didn’t take my children and family with me, and I spent one day building a 2,000-yuan Lego. I am not a wife, a daughter, a mother, or an Internet worker. I am just myself, silent and focused, passing the day.
The final conclusion was positive. I went back to work. On the morning I returned to work, I suddenly remembered the question I had in my 20s: I was in an Internet company at that time, and the work intensity was far less than that of today, but there were few colleagues over 35 around me. And I thought, where have they all gone? Maybe because of not enough effort and can not catch up with The Times. Now I’m at the right age to answer that question: these people have a lot of responsibilities that make them seem uncool, but they still try to live their lives, for family, for work, for themselves, and they have to be alive.
The author afterword.
The last few days of 2020 were meant to fool around, but ended up getting involved in short story writing. This article was written in a few days during the New Year holiday. It can show the triviality and helplessness of 2020 in this way, which can be regarded as input and output. Thanks for Sandwich, thanks for Man and Fat Grains, and anyway, Happy New Year.
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