Working mum career dilemma: stay or leave?

September was a whirlwind. Colleagues came back from their summer breaks with a vengeance, the kids went back to school, and I told myself I’d keep writing through all of it. I didn’t. Sorry about that.

August was the calm one. The office was quieter than usual, so I finally had room to think. I looked back over my first six months, personally and professionally, patched up the gaps and tidied my plans for the second half. At work, I laid the groundwork for my team to kick off 2027 planning. At home, my husband and I put our house up for sale. In this economy. Yes, I know.

Then September landed, and all that breathing space was gone.

Two growing kids isn’t only about needing a bigger home. Everything else comes with them. More activities to sign up for, more running around, tutoring times two, more money going out, and a to-do list that never gets shorter because there’s no time to get through it. People underrate how much children cost. I certainly did.

The outside world doesn’t make it any easier. Prices keep shooting up, yet we’re supposed to be thankful just to have a job, even one where the salary hasn’t moved in ages. Tenant rights have been strengthened, which means somebody has to give way. But what about people who seriously need to move with a growing family, instead of earning rental income? Bank rates are tightening while first-time buyers are being helped up the property ladder. Who the victims are in all this, I honestly can’t tell. What I do know is that mid-income earners like me are stuck somewhere in between without help.

Then there’s work. Thirteen years in the same organisation. I’ve had several job offers, the kind that feed your ambition, and I couldn’t take any of them, for more reasons than I can list here. Would a new employer give me the flexibility to collect my children on time? I couldn’t be sure. Childcare is what it is and we simply have to work around it. Were there firm policies to protect working mothers from being penalised for a late pick-up? Again, not sure. That’s just how it goes in a multinational, and I wasn’t prepared to find out the hard way.

There are so many moving parts, and we don’t get a say in most of them. We accept them because we have to. We have a young family but we aren’t young parents, and that changes things. There’s less room to wing it.

It doesn’t help that some of the younger colleagues around me don’t seem to feel any urgency, even with AI changing everything. They’re in no hurry to sharpen their skills but very keen to climb. A bit of praise can turn into an expectation of promotion by the next morning. Resilience doesn’t seem to count for much these days. Shortcuts do.

I’ve asked myself a million times. Have we made a mistake? Have we been taken for granted? How did we even get this far? Do we sit back and wait patiently for things to improve, and if so, how much longer? When does a better tomorrow actually come?

I don’t have the answers. What I have noticed is that I’m not as stuck as I feel on the bad days. Those offers weren’t for nothing. Someone out there thinks my thirteen years are worth something, even if I can’t act on it right now.

If you’re somewhere similar, here’s what I’d pass on. Use the quiet weeks. August is the only reason September didn’t completely flatten me. If you’re weighing up a new job, decide your deal breakers first. Mine is getting to school pick-up on time, so I’d ask about flexibility and working-parent policies straight away and try to get the answer in writing. And try splitting your worries into what you can change and what you can’t. I’m still working on giving the second pile less of my evenings.

August gave me room to think. September took every inch of it back. Looking at the two side by side, I can see what I’d do differently: I treated the calm as a lucky break instead of something I could plan for. So October gets a different job.

I’m not expecting it to be quieter. The school runs, the house sale and the to-do list haven’t heard about my fresh start. But I can borrow what worked in August, even in small doses. That means putting a little breathing space in the diary before the month fills up, and picking one thing to change instead of trying to fix everything at once. For me, that one thing is writing again. Not perfectly, just regularly.

The house is still on the market and the questions are still open. But starting a month with a plan feels very different from surviving one. If October is a reset for you too, tell me what you’re starting, or what you’re quietly putting down. I could use the company.