What does a 36-year-old mother face when she works in an Internet company? The author’s husband refers to their children as “Internet orphans,” meaning the absence of their parents who work in an Internet factory. A mother, a wife, a daughter, these identities are overwhelming in the face of being an employee of an Internet company. She was anxious and blamed herself, but there was nothing she could do. The only day she relaxed was one day after she got sick, “I found a hotel and stayed there for a day, without my children and family, just me, and spent a day putting together a 2,000 piece of Lego. This day I am not a wife, daughter or mother, nor an Internet factory worker, I am just myself, spending the whole day in silence and concentration”.
01
At 10:30 pm, I got off work. When I opened the drop, there were 163 people lined up in front of me. The day in Houjian Village began to draw to a close at this moment, and after that, one after another, it stretched into the latter part of the night. I finally gave up the fierce competition from the fast cars and got a special car. The car came to me after ten minutes of traffic at the intersection, and the driver said, “Sorry for the long wait. “I said, “It’s okay, this intersection is like this every day. “
In less than a year, I have witnessed the evening rush hour at eleven o’clock here, the anxiety at one o’clock late at night, and the cold at five o’clock in the morning.
At this moment, a message popped up on my phone WeChat from my mom: The kid is asleep. The milk is in the microwave, you come back and drink it.
I replied: I got a car, I’ll be home in 20 minutes.
This is my life, 36 years old, with a son less than 3 years old and a lover who is also in a big internet factory, living with my mom because I can’t take care of my kids.
In the car, I opened the podcast, which is one of the few hours of the day I have to myself – apart from sleeping, it’s the hour on the way to and from work. The show discusses the Haidian mom’s chicken baby, and I can’t help but feel anxious that with the intensity of my work, I won’t be able to do my best to chicken the baby. Although Haidian Huangzhuang is only a 15-minute drive from my house, there is no way I could have the time to pick him up and drop him off at elementary school or sit in on those Olympiad classes. But then I think about it, the kid is still three years away from elementary school, and how much will change in those three years is anyone’s guess. Maybe I’ll lose my job? But I don’t want to be unemployed.
02
I used to be a very casual person who didn’t care about being unemployed. So was my husband. When he was 26, he ended his 4-year coding job and rode to Nepal alone to think about life. When he met me, he had just moved to Beijing and was working at a “small but beautiful” company doing what he loved. At that time, we had plenty of time to watch movies and performances together, maintaining a calm and stable love life. Until one day, his company announced the start of a wolf strategy and his annual leave to run a marathon in Hawaii was ruthlessly rejected. He chose to resign, believing that life could never be swallowed by 996. Of course I was very supportive, after all, a free soul cannot be confined a little. At that time, I just ended a period of entrepreneurship, back to the Internet company has retired to the second line of work, 31 years old, work trivial but not busy.
For quite a long time, we both felt that there was nothing too wrong with this mentality, neither wanting to give too much to anything, nor expecting the work to return us more. We got married, and although the subject seemed slightly difficult to both of us, it went surprisingly well probably because we didn’t put pressure on each other. The year we got married, he was 28 and I was 32.
Six months later, I got pregnant, four years past the legendary prime pregnancy age. It was another unplanned experience, but because of my husband and I’s natural love for human fawns, we decided to upgrade ourselves to parents. The pregnancy was very hassle-free for me, except for the protracted pregnancy sickness. The baby grew inside me on time, and I remained mobile and energetic. I even completed some big projects on line during my pregnancy, and at that time I thought that maybe the so-called workplace curse would not befall me. It wasn’t until I was eight months pregnant that my father passed away.
He had never been in good health, but I didn’t think that hospitalization would be the end of his life. To this day, when I pass by the hospital where he died, I have to make sure that this is true. In fact, from the day he died until now, I have not stopped thinking about him, and I always wonder if I am satisfying and reassuring to him today. On the way home late at night, this question came back to me, but as usual, I couldn’t give a precise answer.
After my father’s death, I didn’t have time to grieve or even cry before the birth of my child. So birth, old age, sickness and death were all completed in 2017, and I became an “adult” once and for all.
Growing up is not about getting married or having children, but about losing your closest relatives. The feeling is like a mountain of support suddenly collapsing in your heart, and you have to take the C position in your home, deciding everything about yourself and your life. I spent a long time thinking about how to live like an adult, and I thought, at least the desire to survive should be stronger. I should be stronger, more aggressive, more proactive, and make people think that I am “awesome”. I decided to make this my goal after my maternity leave.
At this time, my lover was already working in a big Internet company. During my pregnancy, he submitted his resume to some big companies, and on the day he took the offer, he said to me somewhat sadly: “I’m probably going to start a life of 996. I knew very well that this was a compromise of life for a teenager who used to do whatever he wanted. I told him: “Take care of your health, don’t worry about going to work overtime, I should be able to take care of my family at my current company. “Since then, we all unknowingly, by the reality of little by little to change the self intention. But I believe that this is the instinctive and voluntary desire to survive – for the common cause of raising human young, we can give up self, and freedom.
During my maternity leave, I was a strict and meticulous new mother, keeping track of when the baby was fed and slept, and after the evening bath, I insisted on a touch massage, not missing a single movement, a total of ten minutes, not a single point more or less. My mother looked at me too nervous and said: “If this goes on, I’m afraid that the child will also be nervous. “I said;” Hey, where do you know, early education is the most important, can not muddle through, while I can personally take him, it is best to condition him a little better. “
Now think about it, although I was a little nervous at the time, but what I said is not without reason, at least that time, was one of the few times I spent with him.
03
After I started work, I was transferred and started doing something I was not good at. Since I was breastfeeding, I had a much lighter schedule and no team to lead. I spent a lot of time carrying and parenting, and the people around me and I talked about the baby the most. Even though everyone was well-meaning, in the end, I wasn’t quite comfortable with my self-identity gradually being overshadowed. Yes, I could give up my ego for the baby, but I couldn’t give up certain insistent identities, such as a distinct individual and a strong discomfort with the established life. I guess after breastfeeding, I must have left the place. This agonizing continued until my child was almost two years old and I finally received an interview notice from a large factory.
During the interview, the interviewer asked me, “Do you already have a child at this age? I said, “My child is almost two years old. The interviewer laughed and said: “I don’t mean anything else, I just think that people who have become mothers are more tolerant, they have come through so much pain, so what are you afraid of? “Later I got the offer, but I can’t say whether it was because of the ability to match more, or more tolerable. But I was happy at that moment, I saw the vivid and huge unknown, which made me excited, and the moment I pressed the offer confirmation button, I felt I could do it again.
I was onboarded while telecommuting, and with the exuberance of a new employee, I started life in a big factory with the same group of colleagues. After everyone was welcomed with emojis 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 than me, thought more clearly than me, and could stay up later than me. Over time, this anxiety would hit me from time to time, and I told myself that the anxiety was because I wasn’t good enough.
I kept pushing my limits and spending more time “making myself better”. Sometimes this is desperate, because I don’t know when I’ll catch up with my peers. But at the same time, when I’m working full time, I’m also happy. Being a 36-year-old woman who is fully committed to her work is more identifiable to me than being a “mom to my kids” at that moment. That’s not to say I don’t like being a mom, but I just don’t want it to be the only label I have.
Soon after, I received a new project and immediately packed my bags for a business trip of sorts, only booking a ticket for the outbound trip, which meant that the return date was uncertain. I was afraid he would cry on the phone, and more often than not, I was so busy that I forgot I had a child.
When I returned home, my mother began to chide me for contacting her too infrequently, and I told her that except for bathroom breaks, there really wasn’t a moment when I stopped to make a phone call. I later shared this confusion with a colleague, who told me with a bitter smile that when she traveled, she was like a missing person who not only couldn’t think of calling home, but would even hang up on the various video invitations she received from home.
The intensity of my work makes Mr. the main character of childcare. During the day, the children’s daily routine is represented by my mother and aunt, and in almost a year’s time, my demands on them have changed from a precise schedule to the children “just being able to breathe”. In order to spend more time with the children, Mr., every night at 8 o’clock on the dot, and 8 o’clock, is usually a big factory people show their skills, so far I dare not ask him when he left the work station to bear the pressure of what. Only on my occasional breaks, we can take our children to early childhood classes together, which is usually the happiest time for our family, when the child realizes that he still has both parents, and my mother can watch TV shows at home.
During a rare conversation, my husband referred to the child as an “Internet orphan”, which made me suddenly realize that the child was growing up silently and I was absent from his terrible 2, he became a little anxious and didn’t trust his mom as much as he used to. He tries to make sure that mommy still loves him in various unconscionable ways, such as dropping toys when I’m home, deliberately picking at his food, and then squinting his already small eyes to secretly observe my expressions from the corner of his eyes.
The child is wary of my changing clothes in the morning and always asks, “Are you going to work? My answer is usually yes, and then he flattens his mouth and is on the verge of tears. The next ten minutes were spent tearing each other apart, but eventually we both discovered something interesting: if he sat on the balcony, he could see me pass by downstairs, so now, before I left the house, he would sit on the balcony with one of his favorite snacks and wait for me, and when he saw me go by, he would yell out for his mom, while I stood downstairs and called his name. Our next-door neighbor has a pachyderm, and over time, that pachyderm learned to call “mom”. So now every day when I walk downstairs, I can hear my son and the pachyderm calling each other.
04
I give too much meaning to this job. After all, the first half of my life has left me very few opportunities, and the relatively sound system of the big factory has made it less difficult to be a screw; the rapid development of the company has given me some “not abandoned by the times The company’s rapid development has given me some professional ability to “not be abandoned by the times”, and I even get a sense of value recognition as a result; but most importantly, I am not sure what possibilities I still have at the age of 36 to maintain the apparent stability of my life. Sometimes it seems like a lot of choices, but there is really only one path to take in the end.
I understand that any decision in life requires trade-offs, but sometimes I still get confused about what needs to be exchanged behind the rapid growth, which cannot be measured by data, metrics, or OKRs. Just as here I did become an adult. A person who still has a calm face even if he is broken inside.
In the company campus, if I see an Internet woman of my age, I have the urge to pull her up and ask her how to balance work, family and self. But after I calmed down, I thought, this question is too personal. We face the same environment, but our individual backgrounds and problems are very different. The experiences of others can hardly be replicated in our own lives, and whether this experience is a fantasy experience in a long life or determines the beginning of some destiny, now I have no way to judge, only to experience and feel. Even if it is painful and hopeless, it builds the experience of life that belongs to me and my family.
As the interviewer predicted, I did exert an extraordinary ability to resist stress to constantly jump between the roles of work and family. But because of the stress and anxiety, I lost 10 pounds in a week, went to the hospital for a checkup, and was told I needed immediate surgery to rule out cancer. The second week after surgery, I was finally able to sit up and rest, so I found myself a hotel for the day, without my kids or family, just me, and spent the day putting together a $2000 Lego. This day I was not my wife and daughter or mother, nor was I a worker in a big Internet factory, I was just myself, spending the whole day in silence and concentration.
The final slice of the conclusion was benign, I returned to the company to continue to work, the morning of the resumption of work, I suddenly remembered the 20s is the question: at that time I was also in the Internet company, the work intensity is far from today, but around me there are few colleagues over 35 years old. At that time, I thought, where have they all gone? Maybe because not hard enough to catch up with the times. Now I am just the right age to answer this question: these people carry a lot of responsibilities to make themselves look a bit uncool, but they still try to live, for family, work and self, and have to be alive and well.
Author’s Afterword
The last days of 2020 were intended to muddle through, but ended up involved in short story writing instead. This article was drafted during the New Year holidays, and it is a good way to show the trivialities and helplessness of 2020. Thanks to Sandwich, Yimian and Fatty, and happy new year anyway.
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