Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Unger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and ninety seven, which is airing May eleventh. This episode is all going to be about returning to work. We have a great guest, Kurrent shifle Bin, which I say it right in the interview, but I'm not sure I just sat it right there. I need her coaching me through it. Sorry about that current. She had a illustrious career as an engineer, she took some time out with her kids or unfortunately her late husband developed through a serious illness. She also had the time that she was caring for him before he passed away, and then as a widow, she re entered the workforce with two kids, and so she's going to talk all about her strategies for doing that, what worked for her. What the rest of our listeners who have either taken a career break or are pondering doing so, should know as they are going about this process too. And we're really thankful for everyone who's sent in their ideas for an episode about this. I know we had a lot of interest in this sort of thing, as many people do take career breaks or would like to or have at some point. So we got a few other tips from listeners. Sarah, you wanted to share some of those. Yeah. One of our longtime listeners and blog readers, Chelsea, wrote a great tip because she had some experiences to share and I'm just going to read her comics. I thought it was a great one. She said. The first thing I would say is to feel free to be choosy about the position you take. I think it can be easy to worry that you have to jump in any job off or you get because you are less than other candidates. But as Laura said, you still have very desirable skills. In the day and age, lots of people have interesting or weird resume gaps. Because they say, try to start their own business or worked at a startup that didn't actually start up, and it's not going to come across as unusual as you might fear. The second is to not fear that your workload is going to go up proportionally to your paid time. I found that working full time is not four times as much work as teaching one part time class. In some cases, it's not even two times that much work. I was so used to hustling so hard that honestly having a full time job feels like a breeze moost days. Sarah, I thought that was a great confidence on the margins. The extra hour may not require the same sort of startup and transition costs as the initial hours of work, So yes, there may be some economies of scale of working forty versus working fifteen. Yes. And we also had a separate comment from another listener named Laura who shared another resource that we just wanted to have you guys be able to check out if you're interested, called the Mom Project, which is it looks like a company basically dedicated towards building returnships and paid internships for mothers, specifically re entering the workforce after a break, and it looks like they have a number of partnerships with a lot of corporate entities. So if that, you know, describes what you are looking for getting to go back into a sort of a corporate or company situation, then that might be a really cool place to look into starting. Yeah, there's also a nonprofit I think it's a nonprofit called a Path Forward that specializes in mid career internship programs to ease the transition of professionals returning to work. And I mean that's not just moms, but there is definitely a mom element of that. You if you have particular skills, there are certain companies that will place you for say a six month stint that's like an adult internship, and that's a way to get your foot in the door and get a little bit of extra experience as you are on the job market. I mean a lot of these people wind up hired by the company where they had the internship, but you know, even if you didn't, that would be you know, six months of professional work experience somewhere. So yeah, those are great. We will probably cover this topic again because as we all know, careers are not linear, particularly these days, So let's go ahead and dive right in to hear what Kurran has to say. Well, I am so excited to be here interviewing current Chiefelbeint, who is a software engineer who has a great story about returning to work after an extended absence. And we had many people ask us to feature topics like this, and so I'm really excited to talk to Kurent about her story and what she thought mattered, because she has some great tips that she wants to share with all of you. So, Kurran, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, thanks for joining us. So tell us all just real quick about what you do professionally in your family. Sure, I'm a software engineer. I graduated from college in two thousand and two with the master's and computer science and started a job at a research lab of near Boston, and that's where I'm at my husband, and after we had the first son, I stepped back a little bit. I kept working part time for a couple of years, and then son number two came along and I basically said, I love you all, but I'm going to go work for my kids for a few years. And I'd always planned to come back to work at some point when they were in elementary school, either part time or full time. We would see how things went and had some happy years connecting with other parents in our local Family Network group ACT in Boxborough Family Network, did some volunteer work with them, volunteered with the preschool. And then in twenty seventeen, as we were starting to have some real conversations about when I might go back to work, my husband was diagnosed with stage four melanoma, which put a whole new light on things, and we had three more years together. And then when the kids were in kindergart in preschool, sorry, when the kids were nine and six, so the youngest was in kindergarten and the older one was in second grade, he did pass away from melanoma. And so that following fall, I did go back to work part time. Happened to be at the same place where I was employed previously, But I also looked around and intributed around, and I would be happy to share whatever it might be helpful to your listeners about that process and what I brought to it and what worked for me. Yeah, so what was the total length of time that you were out of the workforce then? But it wasn't like there were volunteer projects in there, and like you said, you were part time for part of it. Yea, So maybe what was the length of time between full time job to full time job and then sort of what was the breakdown? And sure, so full time job to full time job was about nine years, and then at the beginning of it, I worked about two and a half years very part time forty percent, and towards the end of it, I worked part time for my son's preschool actually, and then when I went back to work, it was actually at sixty percent, so I think of it. I was thinking of it as full time when I went back after my husband died, because it was like all my cycles, yes o, instead of getting the kids to and from school. But I did go back at sixty percent, and then that was twenty eighteen, and then in twenty twenty I ramped up to full time for a few months, brought it back down to eighty and now I'm at full time again. So it's been quite a journey of different employment options, and wonderfully at the same employer who's been able to accommodate all of that, which was a great first choice for you. Then out of school to get that. Yeah, so you had, you know, you and your late husband had this plan that you would wind up going back to work when your kids started school, and you wound up pretty much sticking with that timeline then, Yes, yeah, but that was sort of uncertain then toward the end, because you were in a care giving role for him. Yes, definitely, I didn't really want to commit to a workplace when when we didn't know how long his health would be lasting. Melanoma is not a friendly type of cancer to get, and I was when he was first diagnosed. He was very, very sick, and so I was managing appointments for him and managing medications and everything, and you know, we did mostly get our old life back for a few years, but we knew that this was coming down the pike again, and I wanted to be able to focus on his needs when it mattered. And so, you know, if I was going to work part time at all, it was going to have to be something where I'd have flexibility and where people would be understanding. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so as you were then, you know, contemplating getting back into the workforce, then after he passed away, you were sort of making that decision. You you were. You said we were talking earlier that financially you didn't have to immediately. Not amazing it thought psychologically you actually did want to. Yes, yeah, that was important to me. I didn't want to go back instantly because it was you know, it takes time to get used to such a big change in your life. But I didn't know that. I wanted to be back at work in some fashion before the first anniversary of his death, because I just figured that would be it would be healthy for me to have some structure around me, have people around me. Single parenting is very lonely, and I wanted to have You know, obviously my kids are a wonderful reason to get out of bed in the morning, but I wanted to have some additional supports and bulwarks there, and for mental health and for being part of something bigger than just the three of us that were left. And what did your kids think about that? How did you talk about it with them? They were used to me working for their preschool part time. I've got this picture. I should frame it. My son's in preschool. It was around Mother's Day. My mother fill in the blank. You know, my mother likes to he puts work and there's a picture like a picture of a stick figure with a stick laptop on the left. But you know, you know, when they wanted to know why, why do you have to do this on the computer right now? Mommy? For the preschool, I'd say, I'm doing this for your teachers, and they could understand that that I was the work I was doing was supporting their teachers. And so when I went back to work more hours of the week and they needed to go to before care and aftercare at school, you know, I would explain a little bit about the type of project I was doing and the people that we were trying to help. And so since they could grasp that part of the bigger picture at least a little bit, you know, they would complain about having to get out of bed early, but this is what we do now, right, Nobody likes to get out of bed early. Yeah, so they were able to adjust to it. They were able to adjust. Yeah, they had had practice adjusting to things by that point, it sounds like they did. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to be back with Kurrn's advice for our listeners who are looking to reenter the workforce or are pondering taking a break how they might be able to ease their way back in. Well, I am back here with Kurran. We are talking about managing time out of the workforce and getting back in. So, then, when you did decide that you were looking for full time work or at least to ramp up eventually to that take more of a career oriented thing back into your field, how did you go about doing that? Sure? So, yeah, I was thinking about it years before I knew i'd be going back, because you've got a lot of time to think when you have small children and you're just making sure that they don't eat the thing they shouldn't eat, et cetera. So some of the things that I did were just sort of lucky, meeting the right people, being asked to do something that I was qualified for but felt like a stretch for me. One of those things was taking on a volunteer chairperson role in the family network that I mentioned earlier. A good friend was the chair at the time, and she said, you can do this and I need your help, and I said, I'm not sure, but I'll try. And it turned out to be the right thing at the right time. For me to build some build some of my softer skills with team leadership and project management. And then I also decided to apply for the chairperson role at the cooperative Preschool, which from the IRS's point of view is an employed position because we were getting a tuition credit and the chairperson at that school is jointly responsible with the director for the day to day operations of the school. So for me, it was not a full time job, but it did involve things that were relevant to a resume anywhere, any kind of job. We were doing budgeting, I was helping with hiring and writing contracts, we were doing fundraising, looking for sponsors for the school auction. You know, they say don't put anything that says mother or parent on your resume, but I chose. You know, I thought about it pretty hard and I chose to put that right there in the employment section. On parallel with my technical work. I took my job there seriously, and the message that I wanted to send to people who were looking at my resume was, you know, I took this work seriously. You should take it seriously too. This is a job. And as it turned out in one of my interviews in a technical interview. One of the interviewers brought it up and said, you know, my wife is doing that thing right now. I see how much work it is. Tell us what it was like for you, so you know it was it was it paid off for me, I found. Yeah, and then you also reached out to your former contacts. I mean, as yes mentioned, so you had this job out of school for a couple of years. You had been out for a while, but many of the people who had been doing this were in their careers, and that was something that I had read about happening. I was also reading while I was out. I was also considering a shift of career, switching to technical writing or science writing. I just loved the book about Henrietta Lax and thought, my god, if I could write like that, that would be a job I would love. I thought about freelancing, either as software or something else, and the return to work books that have been written for moms and other parents who've been out for a while tend to encourage you to reach out and to not just think about your professional networks, but to think about the folks who you know socially and talk to them about professional work. Just sort of think outside the typical career box. And one of the things that also was highlighted that resonated with me was that the folks who are in your traditional career network while you're out, they may have been promoted, they may have gone to other places. And so my network, even though I'd only worked at one company, I found when I really wanted to start talking to people and doing informational interviews, my network was a lot broader than when I had stepped out of the workforce. And it also had gotten a lot a lot higher within my old company because people have been promoted into places where they could either choose to hire me or recommend to someone else to hire me. And so you wound up back at your old employer, although you've had other places you were interviewing, you did, you had other offers. What led to you then coming back to your old employer? How exactly did that happen? Yeah, I was I was trying to push myself a little bit because I didn't want to just, you know, pick the safe option. I knew the place and I liked it very much, but I didn't want to just sort of take that for granted. It had a better benefits package all told than the other offers that I received, especially when it came to paid time off, and as a single parent, that was really important to me to know that if I needed to take sick time for myself or to care for someone else, that that wasn't going to cut into the other category of paid time off. I also it was just a little bit of loyalty. You know, my husband had worked for the same place, and they had been very classy about his sick time and things like that, and part of it was just the caliber of the people that we worked with. So and one of the things we had mentioned earlier, you know, we often talk about like keeping up your skills, and I sort of naively was like, well, software, it sounds like a will that would taint quickly. And then Current informed me that note they were still pro I mean, it does brands of it. Yes, it's such a big field, right. Yes, the industry that I'm in still uses C, still uses Java, some people still use Fortran. I personally am not one of them. There is certainly adoption of newer things, but I knew that the skills that I already had would still be valuable if I wanted to go back to that. And the other thing about about that particular environment and workplace is I've done a lot of prototyping systems, and we're expected to learn new skills on the job. So I knew that, you know, even if I tried to brush up on whatever was the hot new thing in year three of my pause, by year five of my pause, it might not be as relevant anymore. And so that was why I decided to consciously focus on the skills that would transfer from other things and be usable anywhere, like business skills, leadership skills, people skills. Yeah, because those were the things that would always be useful. Yes, And then you would brush up whatever new technical things you needed to exactly. And when I went back, I ended up learning Android, which I hadn't ever done because it wasn't really a thing so much when I left. Yeah, it was there, you go, now it's a thing. Yeah. So how has it been, Like? Do you like being you know, back full? I mean, because now you're back full time and not for a while, but back back full in Yeah. The pandemic made things even more interesting. We were actually scheduled to go and do a field test at the end of March twenty twenty that obviously was canceled and replanned and done in a different way locally. We did that in July and it went well. Doing things over zoom has both you know, I like to see people in person, but on the other hand, we've been able to reach more people and work more effectively with folks who were spread around to the country or you know, one of my supervisors moved to Germany this year, and yet we can still talk face to face as much as anybody who would have been in the next office in normal life. So it's been easier to go back to full time work because I also am co parenting again. I'm engaged. There are now four kids in the picture because my fancy is widowed and he brought two kids. I brought two kids. We sold two houses, moved in together in the pandemic, and just sort of things go day to day, sometimes in terms of scheduling, but we make it work. And we are also very fortunate to have excellent childcare who comes to our house five days a week and also makes dinner nice. Yeah you worlds here. I did, in fact, when Dave and I got engaged, not I mean, not the moment we got engaged, but within a couple of weeks, I gave him a copy of Tiffany Dufouz Dropped the Ball Excellent. So yeah, he's He's very involved in the community locally as well. He's the one who goes to school committee meetings, town meeting things like that. I handle the cub scouts side, he handles soccer. So we make a pretty good team, I think, and that because that is really like I have to give him and our nanny a lot of credit because being able to focus, like you can only make so many decisions in a day, right, and because I don't have to make decisions about what's for dinner and all of that junk every single day, I can make the decisions that I need can I can have those decisions available for work. So it's not just hours in the day, but it's also like brain cycles that have been freed up by by having a partner again. And for that I can't be grateful enough. It's pretty impressive that you managed to find time for dating as well with all that going on. I have very good friends who are very support of Yes they well no, they didn't set me up. We actually met at our children's support group. But when I said I needed a sitter so that I could go to a concert with someone from my support group. They were like, they were lining up to babysit. So that is awesome. That is awesome. So just if you think back to when you were first scaling down and pondering leaving the workforce for a while to focus mostly on caring for your children, is there anything you wish you would have done differently, or anything you would have altered as you went through this now that you know how things would turn out, That is a good question. I had just been people were just starting to ask me to take on more of a leadership role on my projects. So I felt while I was out, I felt and wondered a little bit if if maybe my timing had been off. But in retrospect, it didn't hurt at all because those same people who had recognized my potential for doing that were still available to me as contacts and as friends when I wanted to step back in. Okay, yeah, and I would say, I would say, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Okay, if you if you know what you're capable of, and you can and you can convey that to people in an interview and you can you can present that and present yourself well. The time that you take out is is still time that you're growing and maturing and learning, even if you're not doing it in an office. And so when you when you want to come back, you take the time to think about the strengths you have developed or the strengths you want to develop while you're out and work on that and then and make sure to convey that to people as you're preparing to come back in because that will pay off. Think about your answers, think about how you are presenting yourself. That's what I'm hearing. Yes, yes, and take like when you're out, you have the gift of time to think about things. You don't have to make a career decision this month or next month. You know, when you're out, necessarily you can be thinking about it for years and think about what you want to be doing, and think about what you might want to do to strengthen gap or what you might want to step away from and try something new. You have time to try something new without it being high profile. Yeah, now, that's what I thought was really interesting you had mentioned, is that I mean in terms of the timing because if you're out for six years, it's be fine if you're out for seven, right, if you're out for if you're out for eight. So it's not that you have to once you decide you want to go back into the workforce, if your family has set things up so that you do not need to immediately find a job that if that's not required, then you have the gift of time to be able to really think about what you want to do, what would be good, and then what might be available, and you don't have to say immediately, like the first thing that's there is, of course you could just go back to your old employer, as I think people, Yes, and so you guys had made that certain decisions and certain plans that enabled you to take that time to a degree, yeah, yeah, And you have the emotional distance from the day to day of work also to be able to reflect on what you liked about it and what you didn't think about if you want to change things. So, yeah, has there been anything that's been challenging getting back in, anything that was harder than you thought it might be other than the making the six pm pickup at an elementary school on the other side of the conquered Rotary en route too, and if anyone is in Boston, they know what I'm talking about. Seeing things take a little while to guess it was bad. No. The other thing is, you know you can you can count on your kids. Also, my kids have they complained about getting up early, and they complain about not necessarily you know, having the lego set that they wanted or things like that. But you know, if you if you are I'm not even sure how I want to say this. If you want to be able to count on your kids to step up, you show them a little bit of confidence in them at a time, and they will start to have that confidence in themselves. And I felt that, you know, when I when I went back to work and I needed them to be able to be just ten percent more patient because of something that was out of my control or out of their control. I felt that they were able to deliver that most of the time. Not all the time, but it's felt like it felt like when I went back to work, they were you know, they were on my team. So that's one it was. That's a good feeling. They sound amazingly resilient, so that's a ghost of the time. This has been a trying year up for all of us. Yes, we always end with a love of the week, as you best of both world glisser, you know that. Yeah, is there something that has been exciting for for you of late? Sure? My love of the week would be, Uh, we have at the moment all of the flowering trees, all of the flowers. We moved into a house that is lovely and historic and had been landscaped to the teeth, so there, you know, there are nice shrubs, but there's not a lot of a lot of flowers. So I have been going to Low's and Aguay and I missed my old garden, so I've been I've been planting a lot. That is my love of the week. And it's exciting to see things blooming in the neighborhood and now blooming in my own yard too. Oh that's good. And a historic house that didn't need too much work. You have, how much time do you have? We could, oh, my lord, whole podcast. Yes, that's a whole other podcast where we talk about our historic home renovations and what needs to be done. But yeah, we've been buying like crazy from this place, like fast growing trees. I think it's the website, and I love the ornamental trees in my current yard, and the new yard has some of them that we're moving to with our renovation, but not quite as many and not quite as carefully landscaped in certain ways. So we've been buying ornamental trees and you know, if we're going to be there for many years, they should grow. And also those are slated to go in after all of the HVAC replacements. That's true. I mean I were pacing ourselves finances of all this too. HVACS one of those things that nobody ever wants. It's not a love of the week. Nobody wants to call me on that. Yeah, but it is. It is the project of the air and window restoration. Oh gosh, don't start me on that. That we finally passed Historic Commission muster on that. Yes, yes, all right, well, Current, thank you so much for joinding as we really appreciate it. Thank you for all the podcasts because they have made my commute so much better. Here's teers to that day care. All right, Well, we are back after that interview with Current that was very inspiring. Our question is from a teacher who is about to transition back to full time working hours, Si, Sarah, you want to want to read that one? Sure? Okay? So our listener writes in that she is a teacher about to transition to working full time regular hours Monday to Friday after maternity leave. And this person happens to be in a non US country, so I think she had a little bit of a longer leave. She says, my son is currently almost a year old. We cannot afford daycare or a nanny, but my husband has the more flexible, lower income job, so he reduces hours down to two nights a week and Saturday is nine to five. My son goes to bed around seven thirty and I follow around nine forty five. I wake up about six am, and she writes, I need a weirdly long amount of sleep. I used to only need seven and a half hours, but since giving birth, my sleep needs have changed, and so does my son. With that being said, what do you recommend for us so that my husband and I can get some alone time and together time at some point each week? So I'll share my little comments first, and the first is that I don't think eight point two five hours is like a super weird amount of sleep, because that would be nine to forty five to what time does she get up? Six? Yes, that's eight hours and fifteen minutes. That's not crazy. And then the second thing is that you know, on paper the schedule actually sounds really really nice because you're getting two hours to yourself after the kids' bedtime every night, Like, let me tell you that to me sounds like heavenly because I get about fifteen minutes. And you are going to have some solo time automatically because your husband is going to work two of those nights, so going to be on your own and maybe, if you know what sounds like would be missing would be I don't know, a solo night for him, perhaps since he's either working at night or he's with you, So maybe creating some sort of a trade off or a night if you wanted to actually leave the house and go out, you would have to kind of orchestrate a trade off in that way too. And I think that sitting down on one of those nights after your son goes to bed, when he's not working and creating kind of an ideal week template might be a great idea so you don't fall into default modes that you don't like. Yeah, I mean, it does sound to me like the schedule still allows for plenty of time, and particularly with his sort of more limited hours. It's not like some couples who are trying to do both full time jobs trading off hours, in which case it can get a lot harder to see each other. But yeah, if he works Tuesday and Thursday nights, you automatically get those nights yourself post kid bedtime. Then you could say Wednesday and Friday night, or a couple nights after the kid's bedtime Monday. You each do your own things so he has his own time too, with you sort of as the on parent if your son wakes up for some reason or you know, so he can have his alone time as well. And then on Sunday, really treat Sunday as family time, right like that, if that's the day you all have together, then focus on making the most of it. And I mentioned that there are some families doing childcare swaps who you know, wind up in this mindset of like, well, we have no time with us all together because we're doing that. And if that's the case, you might decide to make childcare a financial priority so that you can have some time together and sometimes that is the best family solution, even if it requires trading off other things. But in this case, I mean, you have all Sunday, so make the most of it. You know, have that as family time and don't tell yourself the story that you have zero time. And I second Sarah's idea of creating a schedule for the realistic, ideal week so you can make sure that everyone is getting the time that they have for the things that they want. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We have been discussing returning to work with our great guest Current talk about how that works. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.

Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Unger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and ninety seven, which is airing May eleventh. This episode is all going to be about returning to work. We have a great guest, Kurrent shifle Bin, which I say it right in the interview, but I'm not sure I just sat it right there. I need her coaching me through it. Sorry about that current. She had a illustrious career as an engineer, she took some time out with her kids or unfortunately her late husband developed through a serious illness. She also had the time that she was caring for him before he passed away, and then as a widow, she re entered the workforce with two kids, and so she's going to talk all about her strategies for doing that, what worked for her. What the rest of our listeners who have either taken a career break or are pondering doing so, should know as they are going about this process too. And we're really thankful for everyone who's sent in their ideas for an episode about this. I know we had a lot of interest in this sort of thing, as many people do take career breaks or would like to or have at some point. So we got a few other tips from listeners. Sarah, you wanted to share some of those. Yeah. One of our longtime listeners and blog readers, Chelsea, wrote a great tip because she had some experiences to share and I'm just going to read her comics. I thought it was a great one. She said. The first thing I would say is to feel free to be choosy about the position you take. I think it can be easy to worry that you have to jump in any job off or you get because you are less than other candidates. But as Laura said, you still have very desirable skills. In the day and age, lots of people have interesting or weird resume gaps. Because they say, try to start their own business or worked at a startup that didn't actually start up, and it's not going to come across as unusual as you might fear. The second is to not fear that your workload is going to go up proportionally to your paid time. I found that working full time is not four times as much work as teaching one part time class. In some cases, it's not even two times that much work. I was so used to hustling so hard that honestly having a full time job feels like a breeze moost days. Sarah, I thought that was a great confidence on the margins. The extra hour may not require the same sort of startup and transition costs as the initial hours of work, So yes, there may be some economies of scale of working forty versus working fifteen. Yes. And we also had a separate comment from another listener named Laura who shared another resource that we just wanted to have you guys be able to check out if you're interested, called the Mom Project, which is it looks like a company basically dedicated towards building returnships and paid internships for mothers, specifically re entering the workforce after a break, and it looks like they have a number of partnerships with a lot of corporate entities. So if that, you know, describes what you are looking for getting to go back into a sort of a corporate or company situation, then that might be a really cool place to look into starting. Yeah, there's also a nonprofit I think it's a nonprofit called a Path Forward that specializes in mid career internship programs to ease the transition of professionals returning to work. And I mean that's not just moms, but there is definitely a mom element of that. You if you have particular skills, there are certain companies that will place you for say a six month stint that's like an adult internship, and that's a way to get your foot in the door and get a little bit of extra experience as you are on the job market. I mean a lot of these people wind up hired by the company where they had the internship, but you know, even if you didn't, that would be you know, six months of professional work experience somewhere. So yeah, those are great. We will probably cover this topic again because as we all know, careers are not linear, particularly these days, So let's go ahead and dive right in to hear what Kurran has to say. Well, I am so excited to be here interviewing current Chiefelbeint, who is a software engineer who has a great story about returning to work after an extended absence. And we had many people ask us to feature topics like this, and so I'm really excited to talk to Kurent about her story and what she thought mattered, because she has some great tips that she wants to share with all of you. So, Kurran, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, thanks for joining us. So tell us all just real quick about what you do professionally in your family. Sure, I'm a software engineer. I graduated from college in two thousand and two with the master's and computer science and started a job at a research lab of near Boston, and that's where I'm at my husband, and after we had the first son, I stepped back a little bit. I kept working part time for a couple of years, and then son number two came along and I basically said, I love you all, but I'm going to go work for my kids for a few years. And I'd always planned to come back to work at some point when they were in elementary school, either part time or full time. We would see how things went and had some happy years connecting with other parents in our local Family Network group ACT in Boxborough Family Network, did some volunteer work with them, volunteered with the preschool. And then in twenty seventeen, as we were starting to have some real conversations about when I might go back to work, my husband was diagnosed with stage four melanoma, which put a whole new light on things, and we had three more years together. And then when the kids were in kindergart in preschool, sorry, when the kids were nine and six, so the youngest was in kindergarten and the older one was in second grade, he did pass away from melanoma. And so that following fall, I did go back to work part time. Happened to be at the same place where I was employed previously, But I also looked around and intributed around, and I would be happy to share whatever it might be helpful to your listeners about that process and what I brought to it and what worked for me. Yeah, so what was the total length of time that you were out of the workforce then? But it wasn't like there were volunteer projects in there, and like you said, you were part time for part of it. Yea, So maybe what was the length of time between full time job to full time job and then sort of what was the breakdown? And sure, so full time job to full time job was about nine years, and then at the beginning of it, I worked about two and a half years very part time forty percent, and towards the end of it, I worked part time for my son's preschool actually, and then when I went back to work, it was actually at sixty percent, so I think of it. I was thinking of it as full time when I went back after my husband died, because it was like all my cycles, yes o, instead of getting the kids to and from school. But I did go back at sixty percent, and then that was twenty eighteen, and then in twenty twenty I ramped up to full time for a few months, brought it back down to eighty and now I'm at full time again. So it's been quite a journey of different employment options, and wonderfully at the same employer who's been able to accommodate all of that, which was a great first choice for you. Then out of school to get that. Yeah, so you had, you know, you and your late husband had this plan that you would wind up going back to work when your kids started school, and you wound up pretty much sticking with that timeline then, Yes, yeah, but that was sort of uncertain then toward the end, because you were in a care giving role for him. Yes, definitely, I didn't really want to commit to a workplace when when we didn't know how long his health would be lasting. Melanoma is not a friendly type of cancer to get, and I was when he was first diagnosed. He was very, very sick, and so I was managing appointments for him and managing medications and everything, and you know, we did mostly get our old life back for a few years, but we knew that this was coming down the pike again, and I wanted to be able to focus on his needs when it mattered. And so, you know, if I was going to work part time at all, it was going to have to be something where I'd have flexibility and where people would be understanding. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so as you were then, you know, contemplating getting back into the workforce, then after he passed away, you were sort of making that decision. You you were. You said we were talking earlier that financially you didn't have to immediately. Not amazing it thought psychologically you actually did want to. Yes, yeah, that was important to me. I didn't want to go back instantly because it was you know, it takes time to get used to such a big change in your life. But I didn't know that. I wanted to be back at work in some fashion before the first anniversary of his death, because I just figured that would be it would be healthy for me to have some structure around me, have people around me. Single parenting is very lonely, and I wanted to have You know, obviously my kids are a wonderful reason to get out of bed in the morning, but I wanted to have some additional supports and bulwarks there, and for mental health and for being part of something bigger than just the three of us that were left. And what did your kids think about that? How did you talk about it with them? They were used to me working for their preschool part time. I've got this picture. I should frame it. My son's in preschool. It was around Mother's Day. My mother fill in the blank. You know, my mother likes to he puts work and there's a picture like a picture of a stick figure with a stick laptop on the left. But you know, you know, when they wanted to know why, why do you have to do this on the computer right now? Mommy? For the preschool, I'd say, I'm doing this for your teachers, and they could understand that that I was the work I was doing was supporting their teachers. And so when I went back to work more hours of the week and they needed to go to before care and aftercare at school, you know, I would explain a little bit about the type of project I was doing and the people that we were trying to help. And so since they could grasp that part of the bigger picture at least a little bit, you know, they would complain about having to get out of bed early, but this is what we do now, right, Nobody likes to get out of bed early. Yeah, so they were able to adjust to it. They were able to adjust. Yeah, they had had practice adjusting to things by that point, it sounds like they did. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to be back with Kurrn's advice for our listeners who are looking to reenter the workforce or are pondering taking a break how they might be able to ease their way back in. Well, I am back here with Kurran. We are talking about managing time out of the workforce and getting back in. So, then, when you did decide that you were looking for full time work or at least to ramp up eventually to that take more of a career oriented thing back into your field, how did you go about doing that? Sure? So, yeah, I was thinking about it years before I knew i'd be going back, because you've got a lot of time to think when you have small children and you're just making sure that they don't eat the thing they shouldn't eat, et cetera. So some of the things that I did were just sort of lucky, meeting the right people, being asked to do something that I was qualified for but felt like a stretch for me. One of those things was taking on a volunteer chairperson role in the family network that I mentioned earlier. A good friend was the chair at the time, and she said, you can do this and I need your help, and I said, I'm not sure, but I'll try. And it turned out to be the right thing at the right time. For me to build some build some of my softer skills with team leadership and project management. And then I also decided to apply for the chairperson role at the cooperative Preschool, which from the IRS's point of view is an employed position because we were getting a tuition credit and the chairperson at that school is jointly responsible with the director for the day to day operations of the school. So for me, it was not a full time job, but it did involve things that were relevant to a resume anywhere, any kind of job. We were doing budgeting, I was helping with hiring and writing contracts, we were doing fundraising, looking for sponsors for the school auction. You know, they say don't put anything that says mother or parent on your resume, but I chose. You know, I thought about it pretty hard and I chose to put that right there in the employment section. On parallel with my technical work. I took my job there seriously, and the message that I wanted to send to people who were looking at my resume was, you know, I took this work seriously. You should take it seriously too. This is a job. And as it turned out in one of my interviews in a technical interview. One of the interviewers brought it up and said, you know, my wife is doing that thing right now. I see how much work it is. Tell us what it was like for you, so you know it was it was it paid off for me, I found. Yeah, and then you also reached out to your former contacts. I mean, as yes mentioned, so you had this job out of school for a couple of years. You had been out for a while, but many of the people who had been doing this were in their careers, and that was something that I had read about happening. I was also reading while I was out. I was also considering a shift of career, switching to technical writing or science writing. I just loved the book about Henrietta Lax and thought, my god, if I could write like that, that would be a job I would love. I thought about freelancing, either as software or something else, and the return to work books that have been written for moms and other parents who've been out for a while tend to encourage you to reach out and to not just think about your professional networks, but to think about the folks who you know socially and talk to them about professional work. Just sort of think outside the typical career box. And one of the things that also was highlighted that resonated with me was that the folks who are in your traditional career network while you're out, they may have been promoted, they may have gone to other places. And so my network, even though I'd only worked at one company, I found when I really wanted to start talking to people and doing informational interviews, my network was a lot broader than when I had stepped out of the workforce. And it also had gotten a lot a lot higher within my old company because people have been promoted into places where they could either choose to hire me or recommend to someone else to hire me. And so you wound up back at your old employer, although you've had other places you were interviewing, you did, you had other offers. What led to you then coming back to your old employer? How exactly did that happen? Yeah, I was I was trying to push myself a little bit because I didn't want to just, you know, pick the safe option. I knew the place and I liked it very much, but I didn't want to just sort of take that for granted. It had a better benefits package all told than the other offers that I received, especially when it came to paid time off, and as a single parent, that was really important to me to know that if I needed to take sick time for myself or to care for someone else, that that wasn't going to cut into the other category of paid time off. I also it was just a little bit of loyalty. You know, my husband had worked for the same place, and they had been very classy about his sick time and things like that, and part of it was just the caliber of the people that we worked with. So and one of the things we had mentioned earlier, you know, we often talk about like keeping up your skills, and I sort of naively was like, well, software, it sounds like a will that would taint quickly. And then Current informed me that note they were still pro I mean, it does brands of it. Yes, it's such a big field, right. Yes, the industry that I'm in still uses C, still uses Java, some people still use Fortran. I personally am not one of them. There is certainly adoption of newer things, but I knew that the skills that I already had would still be valuable if I wanted to go back to that. And the other thing about about that particular environment and workplace is I've done a lot of prototyping systems, and we're expected to learn new skills on the job. So I knew that, you know, even if I tried to brush up on whatever was the hot new thing in year three of my pause, by year five of my pause, it might not be as relevant anymore. And so that was why I decided to consciously focus on the skills that would transfer from other things and be usable anywhere, like business skills, leadership skills, people skills. Yeah, because those were the things that would always be useful. Yes, And then you would brush up whatever new technical things you needed to exactly. And when I went back, I ended up learning Android, which I hadn't ever done because it wasn't really a thing so much when I left. Yeah, it was there, you go, now it's a thing. Yeah. So how has it been, Like? Do you like being you know, back full? I mean, because now you're back full time and not for a while, but back back full in Yeah. The pandemic made things even more interesting. We were actually scheduled to go and do a field test at the end of March twenty twenty that obviously was canceled and replanned and done in a different way locally. We did that in July and it went well. Doing things over zoom has both you know, I like to see people in person, but on the other hand, we've been able to reach more people and work more effectively with folks who were spread around to the country or you know, one of my supervisors moved to Germany this year, and yet we can still talk face to face as much as anybody who would have been in the next office in normal life. So it's been easier to go back to full time work because I also am co parenting again. I'm engaged. There are now four kids in the picture because my fancy is widowed and he brought two kids. I brought two kids. We sold two houses, moved in together in the pandemic, and just sort of things go day to day, sometimes in terms of scheduling, but we make it work. And we are also very fortunate to have excellent childcare who comes to our house five days a week and also makes dinner nice. Yeah you worlds here. I did, in fact, when Dave and I got engaged, not I mean, not the moment we got engaged, but within a couple of weeks, I gave him a copy of Tiffany Dufouz Dropped the Ball Excellent. So yeah, he's He's very involved in the community locally as well. He's the one who goes to school committee meetings, town meeting things like that. I handle the cub scouts side, he handles soccer. So we make a pretty good team, I think, and that because that is really like I have to give him and our nanny a lot of credit because being able to focus, like you can only make so many decisions in a day, right, and because I don't have to make decisions about what's for dinner and all of that junk every single day, I can make the decisions that I need can I can have those decisions available for work. So it's not just hours in the day, but it's also like brain cycles that have been freed up by by having a partner again. And for that I can't be grateful enough. It's pretty impressive that you managed to find time for dating as well with all that going on. I have very good friends who are very support of Yes they well no, they didn't set me up. We actually met at our children's support group. But when I said I needed a sitter so that I could go to a concert with someone from my support group. They were like, they were lining up to babysit. So that is awesome. That is awesome. So just if you think back to when you were first scaling down and pondering leaving the workforce for a while to focus mostly on caring for your children, is there anything you wish you would have done differently, or anything you would have altered as you went through this now that you know how things would turn out, That is a good question. I had just been people were just starting to ask me to take on more of a leadership role on my projects. So I felt while I was out, I felt and wondered a little bit if if maybe my timing had been off. But in retrospect, it didn't hurt at all because those same people who had recognized my potential for doing that were still available to me as contacts and as friends when I wanted to step back in. Okay, yeah, and I would say, I would say, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Okay, if you if you know what you're capable of, and you can and you can convey that to people in an interview and you can you can present that and present yourself well. The time that you take out is is still time that you're growing and maturing and learning, even if you're not doing it in an office. And so when you when you want to come back, you take the time to think about the strengths you have developed or the strengths you want to develop while you're out and work on that and then and make sure to convey that to people as you're preparing to come back in because that will pay off. Think about your answers, think about how you are presenting yourself. That's what I'm hearing. Yes, yes, and take like when you're out, you have the gift of time to think about things. You don't have to make a career decision this month or next month. You know, when you're out, necessarily you can be thinking about it for years and think about what you want to be doing, and think about what you might want to do to strengthen gap or what you might want to step away from and try something new. You have time to try something new without it being high profile. Yeah, now, that's what I thought was really interesting you had mentioned, is that I mean in terms of the timing because if you're out for six years, it's be fine if you're out for seven, right, if you're out for if you're out for eight. So it's not that you have to once you decide you want to go back into the workforce, if your family has set things up so that you do not need to immediately find a job that if that's not required, then you have the gift of time to be able to really think about what you want to do, what would be good, and then what might be available, and you don't have to say immediately, like the first thing that's there is, of course you could just go back to your old employer, as I think people, Yes, and so you guys had made that certain decisions and certain plans that enabled you to take that time to a degree, yeah, yeah, And you have the emotional distance from the day to day of work also to be able to reflect on what you liked about it and what you didn't think about if you want to change things. So, yeah, has there been anything that's been challenging getting back in, anything that was harder than you thought it might be other than the making the six pm pickup at an elementary school on the other side of the conquered Rotary en route too, and if anyone is in Boston, they know what I'm talking about. Seeing things take a little while to guess it was bad. No. The other thing is, you know you can you can count on your kids. Also, my kids have they complained about getting up early, and they complain about not necessarily you know, having the lego set that they wanted or things like that. But you know, if you if you are I'm not even sure how I want to say this. If you want to be able to count on your kids to step up, you show them a little bit of confidence in them at a time, and they will start to have that confidence in themselves. And I felt that, you know, when I when I went back to work and I needed them to be able to be just ten percent more patient because of something that was out of my control or out of their control. I felt that they were able to deliver that most of the time. Not all the time, but it's felt like it felt like when I went back to work, they were you know, they were on my team. So that's one it was. That's a good feeling. They sound amazingly resilient, so that's a ghost of the time. This has been a trying year up for all of us. Yes, we always end with a love of the week, as you best of both world glisser, you know that. Yeah, is there something that has been exciting for for you of late? Sure? My love of the week would be, Uh, we have at the moment all of the flowering trees, all of the flowers. We moved into a house that is lovely and historic and had been landscaped to the teeth, so there, you know, there are nice shrubs, but there's not a lot of a lot of flowers. So I have been going to Low's and Aguay and I missed my old garden, so I've been I've been planting a lot. That is my love of the week. And it's exciting to see things blooming in the neighborhood and now blooming in my own yard too. Oh that's good. And a historic house that didn't need too much work. You have, how much time do you have? We could, oh, my lord, whole podcast. Yes, that's a whole other podcast where we talk about our historic home renovations and what needs to be done. But yeah, we've been buying like crazy from this place, like fast growing trees. I think it's the website, and I love the ornamental trees in my current yard, and the new yard has some of them that we're moving to with our renovation, but not quite as many and not quite as carefully landscaped in certain ways. So we've been buying ornamental trees and you know, if we're going to be there for many years, they should grow. And also those are slated to go in after all of the HVAC replacements. That's true. I mean I were pacing ourselves finances of all this too. HVACS one of those things that nobody ever wants. It's not a love of the week. Nobody wants to call me on that. Yeah, but it is. It is the project of the air and window restoration. Oh gosh, don't start me on that. That we finally passed Historic Commission muster on that. Yes, yes, all right, well, Current, thank you so much for joinding as we really appreciate it. Thank you for all the podcasts because they have made my commute so much better. Here's teers to that day care. All right, Well, we are back after that interview with Current that was very inspiring. Our question is from a teacher who is about to transition back to full time working hours, Si, Sarah, you want to want to read that one? Sure? Okay? So our listener writes in that she is a teacher about to transition to working full time regular hours Monday to Friday after maternity leave. And this person happens to be in a non US country, so I think she had a little bit of a longer leave. She says, my son is currently almost a year old. We cannot afford daycare or a nanny, but my husband has the more flexible, lower income job, so he reduces hours down to two nights a week and Saturday is nine to five. My son goes to bed around seven thirty and I follow around nine forty five. I wake up about six am, and she writes, I need a weirdly long amount of sleep. I used to only need seven and a half hours, but since giving birth, my sleep needs have changed, and so does my son. With that being said, what do you recommend for us so that my husband and I can get some alone time and together time at some point each week? So I'll share my little comments first, and the first is that I don't think eight point two five hours is like a super weird amount of sleep, because that would be nine to forty five to what time does she get up? Six? Yes, that's eight hours and fifteen minutes. That's not crazy. And then the second thing is that you know, on paper the schedule actually sounds really really nice because you're getting two hours to yourself after the kids' bedtime every night, Like, let me tell you that to me sounds like heavenly because I get about fifteen minutes. And you are going to have some solo time automatically because your husband is going to work two of those nights, so going to be on your own and maybe, if you know what sounds like would be missing would be I don't know, a solo night for him, perhaps since he's either working at night or he's with you, So maybe creating some sort of a trade off or a night if you wanted to actually leave the house and go out, you would have to kind of orchestrate a trade off in that way too. And I think that sitting down on one of those nights after your son goes to bed, when he's not working and creating kind of an ideal week template might be a great idea so you don't fall into default modes that you don't like. Yeah, I mean, it does sound to me like the schedule still allows for plenty of time, and particularly with his sort of more limited hours. It's not like some couples who are trying to do both full time jobs trading off hours, in which case it can get a lot harder to see each other. But yeah, if he works Tuesday and Thursday nights, you automatically get those nights yourself post kid bedtime. Then you could say Wednesday and Friday night, or a couple nights after the kid's bedtime Monday. You each do your own things so he has his own time too, with you sort of as the on parent if your son wakes up for some reason or you know, so he can have his alone time as well. And then on Sunday, really treat Sunday as family time, right like that, if that's the day you all have together, then focus on making the most of it. And I mentioned that there are some families doing childcare swaps who you know, wind up in this mindset of like, well, we have no time with us all together because we're doing that. And if that's the case, you might decide to make childcare a financial priority so that you can have some time together and sometimes that is the best family solution, even if it requires trading off other things. But in this case, I mean, you have all Sunday, so make the most of it. You know, have that as family time and don't tell yourself the story that you have zero time. And I second Sarah's idea of creating a schedule for the realistic, ideal week so you can make sure that everyone is getting the time that they have for the things that they want. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We have been discussing returning to work with our great guest Current talk about how that works. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.