How do I survive the next few months until maternity leave?

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Dear Hera,

I’m about 10 weeks pregnant, and I need to stay in this job, but I really, really hate it. Well, hate maybe isn’t the right word, but this job makes me feel dead inside. Gut-sinking, mind-numbing, cross-eyed boredom (with just enough stress to keep me on edge). 

I was about to quit, after several attempts at trying to Make Things Better. But this happy baby news snuffed out that plan, and now I’m looking down the barrel at six months of 9-5 pure meh.

I have a strong guilt complex around doing the bare minimum, and work has been so much a part of my identity for so long that I’m not coping with the idea of coasting. 

Have you got any tips on how to survive a few more months before I can pregnancy leave the heck out of here (and not come back)?

Lots of love,

Pregnant and Pining for the Fiords

Dear Pining,

First of all, congratulations!

This letter arrived two weeks ago (three by date of publication), which means you’ve already whittled your remaining time down to five months and one week. If you were walking from Paris to Tehran, you’d already be approaching Bavaria by now.

Obviously, in a non-gestational scenario, the ideal solution would be to find a job that doesn’t make you feel dead inside. But this is one of those circumstances where gritting your teeth and bearing it is probably the best strategy.

Five months is tedious, but feasible. It’s only slightly longer than Shackleton and his crew spent stranded in Antarctica, sleeping under overturned lifeboats and eating seal jerky. Plus, there’s a baby at the end of the tunnel!

However, I imagine being pregnant makes an already excruciating job feel even more excruciating. No unpleasant job is ever improved by periodic nausea, mental fog and colleagues asking unbearably nosy questions.

It’s hard to give specific advice on how to muscle through, because “skive off by occasionally doing the crossword or listening to podcasts” only works if you have the sort of job where you can get away with sitting at a computer, pretending to be filing monthly expense reports. It doesn’t work so well if you’re operating a crane or extracting children’s teeth. But it sounds like you’re struggling with the concept of coasting, not looking for ingenious time-wasting methods. So here’s my version of whatever the opposite of a pep talk is:

There are some jobs you really ought to give a shit about and which it would be hard to morally justify half-assing, especially if you work in a field like emergency medicine or education or air traffic control, or anything where the stakes are higher than meeting your company’s KPI’s.

There are other jobs where putting in minimal effort is entirely appropriate, given the dismal hourly wage. You can’t expect minimum wage employees to be giving 110% at their after-school supermarket bakery job, even if you call them “gluten technicians.” If you’re barely getting paid enough to live, you should legally be able to daydream on the clock.

And then there’s everything else in between.

You say you have a guilty conscience about doing the “bare minimum.” But bare minimum is an odd term when you think about it. You are there to fulfil the obligations set out in your employment contract, and as long as you can accomplish your goals to an acceptable standard in a reasonable time frame, you are both legally and morally meeting expectations. An employer can buy your labour, but they don’t own your soul, and can’t prevent you from brainstorming obscure Middle English baby names while filing paperwork, until Bezos develops a mandatory neural-link productivity chip.

Unless your job is of profound social and philosophical importance to you, your job is to do your job. Growing a human inside your body is physically and emotionally stressful, and it’s important to prioritise your wellbeing. This means having strong boundaries in place, such as trying not to think about your job outside of office hours, refusing to take work home with you, or saddling yourself with unrealistic amounts of work. You are selling your labour to the people who pay your salary, and as long as you are meeting your basic contractual obligations, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Anything else is just corporate sentimentality.

Spending less energy on work might feel like a blow to your identity, but bringing new life into this world will probably necessitate a much larger and more profound dismantling, so you might as well surrender to it now.

It’s hard to know what specific advice to give to get you through the remaining days. You could always ask your employers if they’d be willing to let you work from home one day a week (unlikely, but always worth a try) or drop a day in preparation (if you can afford it). If you need all the money you can get, my advice is to do your best to leave your work at the office, take luxuriously long bathroom breaks, motivate yourself with a countdown calendar, and try to make sure that your life outside of work is pleasant and relaxing as possible, whatever that means to you.

Having never been pregnant or had a real corporate job, I’m hoping that some of the commenters who have been in your shoes may be able to offer anecdotal advice and tips on how they made it through.

But don’t feel guilty about prioritising your health and sanity. At the end of the day, a job is just a job, and unless you are diffusing bombs or performing brain surgery, you do not need to be giving 110% all the time.

Remind yourself that the time will pass. It’s what time does. When all else fails, think of Shackleton in an overturned dinghy, spatchcocking a penguin and trying not to die of exposure.

Best of luck with the baby!