Life Update: Being a Mother

There is a scene from my high school days that remains very vivid in my memory to this day.

I attended a Catholic all-girls high school, and it was the first week of school, a very unique and exciting time when I was getting to know new friends, teachers, and the nature of the school. I had been giddy all week, I came from a co-ed junior high and no one else from my old school had transferred there. Those first days were filled with introductions and new friends. I was a chameleon, a teenage girl trying to match how she acted and what she talked about to whichever group she was with.

The first class that day was geography. The teacher walked in, and the class said their greetings. She wrote her name on the whiteboard, turned to face thirty-some teenage girls who were eager to learn (but were looking forward to recess even more), and opened the class with an introduction, and that is what has stayed with me ever since:

“When I woke up this morning, I realized I have an important job. My job is to teach the students sitting in front of me today. And sitting in front of me are future mothers”

She went on about how, as future mothers (or “calon Ibu” in her own words), we would be the ones caring for, nurturing, and educating the nation’s next generation. Therefore, the future of this nation is in the hands of its future mothers.

I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, what a quote.” It was only 13 years later, when I gave birth to my firstborn son, that I truly understood the weight of that statement.

Early this year, I finally became a mother. It was through a process that ended up taking less time than expected (my son was born early term at 37 weeks) yet at the same time felt really long. I worked throughout my entire pregnancy. In the workplace, I spent roughly three quarters and two performance reviews being pregnant.

It has been almost 7 months since then and I’ve had the privilege of caring for my baby full-time (both with and without external help) during my 4-month maternity leave as well as returning back to work and became a mother who is also working a corporate day job.

It has been a transformative experience, to say the least. There is the inexplicable joy that everyone talks about, and my husband and I have had the privilege to experience it firsthand. There was also the rollercoaster of emotions driven by postpartum hormones and a stream of worries that keep changing as time passes.

Shortly after he was born, we found out that our son had prolonged jaundice. Jaundice is very common in newborns, and for most babies it goes away within the first couple of weeks. However, when jaundice becomes prolonged, doctors typically worry about the possibility of congenital diseases and rare genetic conditions. To rule them out, my son had to go through a series of blood tests (many of them) as well as ultrasound scans. We visited three different pediatricians during that period for consultations.

In those early days, I remember crying so many times as I looked at my son wrapped in the home phototherapy blanket. It broke my heart to imagine how uncomfortable it must be for him to be wrapped in such a hard, plasticky cover as I watched his skin peeling from the blue light.

The hospital trips to draw blood were also difficult. I held his small arms down to prevent him from wiggling as the phlebotomist drew blood from his tiny heels. I cried a little bit in those cramped blood collection booths as my son screamed when the needle went in. Sometimes they couldn’t properly find his veins, and he had to be poked multiple times in a single session.

After two months of back-and-forth hospital trips both in Singapore and Jakarta, he was declared recovered from jaundice. The prognosis was physiological jaundice, caused by the immaturity of the liver, and it was cured simple by time as his liver matured. For my son, the hyperbilirubinemia finally cleared after two months. My husband and I, together with the rest of our extended family, breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Apart from the jaundice, my main source of worry and anxiety during those early days was breastfeeding. I took it upon myself that I had not prepared enough to face this challenge that turned out to be much greater than pregnancy and labor itself.

My sister, who was my only role model as a first-time mom hadn’t faced many challenges breastfeeding my niece. When she gave birth, I flew out to the city she lived and stayed for a week. I watched her as she fed my newborn niece and express using an electric pump. Her milk came easily even during those early days. I had never thought of a possibility that it doesn’t happen for all mothers.

After giving birth, while I was resting and recovering in the ward, the nurses came in every three hours to bring me my son and teach me how to breastfeed. They helped me position him to latch, and I also learned how to hand-express. During the first night, nothing really came out. I only remember seeing a tiny speck of colostrum on the second day, after a desperate, frantic attempt at hand expression.

On the second night, the nurse came into my room with a recommendation from the pediatrician to give my son formula due to signs of dehydration. My husband and I weren’t set on exclusive breastfeeding. We agreed we would try our best, but also wouldn’t rule out formula completely. At dawn, while my husband was asleep on the companion sofa bed, I signed the form to allow the hospital to feed my son formula.

The challenge of breastfeeding and the guilt that I felt of not being able to exclusively feed my son breast milk truly only hit me after we came home from the hospital. As the algorithm figured out that I’m a new mom, my feeds were full of content of other mothers pumping liters of milk every day. I’d also go on Threads where it felt like Indonesian mothers were guilt-tripping each other there by saying things along the line of “There is no mother with no milk, only those who don’t try hard enough.”

So I did.

I was pumping every three hours, sometimes even every two. With the confinement nanny taking care of my baby and everything else around the house, my sole focus was trying to produce milk. We spent hundreds of dollars trying out different breast milk boosters. I scheduled and sat in consultations with a lactation counselor. When I did my second month of confinement in Jakarta, I also got a home lactation massage.

There were many days when I’d just bawl my eyes out because I was expressing such low amount of milk. It is said that stress is a primary inhibitor of milk flow, so what social media and my own mind were doing to me just made things worse for my breastfeeding journey.

After darkness comes light. For some mothers, after trying pumping, lactation massages, and spending money on so-called ‘boosters,’ they see an increase in their supply. It didn’t happen for me. Though the ‘light’ for me was simply acceptance.

Even though I wasn’t (and still am not) producing enough milk for my son, he did a great job latching. When he was almost two months old, I finally gave up on pumping to boost my supply. I made peace with the fact that we’d have to top up with formula if he was still hungry after a feed, and I decided to just breastfeed my baby on demand.

That decision lifted a massive mental and physical burden that had been weighing me down. I realized how stressful pumping was and how milk output is truly beyond our control. As breastfeeding mothers, our control only extends to what and how we eat and drink. We cannot control how much milk we produce. The internet and the lactation industry (which I think capitalize on new-mom guilt) make us think we can.

Contrary to the popular belief that giving your baby formula will eventually deplete a mother’s supply and put an early stop to breastfeeding, I’m still breastfeeding my son, who is almost seven months old now! I’m really happy with how the journey has gone so far, finally.

The final source of anxiety I wanted to share from this season of new motherhood is the transition back to work.

During my maternity leave, my team’s scope was handed over to another team in the US. Meanwhile, my team was rearranged and given a new scope. This new scope was bigger and more customer-facing than the previous one.

I came back from my leave to a completely different team. It had also been decided that I would become the tech lead. Put it all together: I returned to work as a mother to a four-month-old, expected to lead a team I had zero context about.

Mind you, I had also never been a tech lead before. It wasn’t a complete surprise, as my manager and I had discussed me stepping into a leadership role before my maternity leave. What I didn’t expect, however, was the scope change. While I would have felt confident leading the old team, I had zero confidence with this new one.

If you’ve made it this far, you might have realized that I’m someone who cries a lot. I cried over my son’s jaundice, over my lack of milk supply, and over the difficulties I had transitioning back to work. That last part happened during a team offsite roughly a month after I returned.

That week marked the first time I had to leave my baby at home during the day for a few days straight. I was still sleep deprived as he was waking up 3 to 4 times a night to feed. I had to sneak out of meeting rooms every 3 hours to pump during the day, and and during our technical discussions, my brain simply checked out.

I came home exhausted, and as I told my husband what happened during the day, I was already crying. I stuttered during presentations and couldn’t find the right English words to use in simple chats. My brain checked out during technical discussions, and I couldn’t understand what my teammates were saying. Sprinkled on top of those feelings was the added pressure of having to operate at the capacity of a tech lead. It was quite overwhelming,

and I felt so, so stupid.

Those days was when I finally understood what other mothers meant when they talk about postpartum brain fog. The nervous system of a new mother goes through a rewiring that primes the brain for caregiving, mainly driven by the hormonal changes. The brain deprioritizes what is deemed unnecessary for baby’s survival (for example, everyday working memory) and reallocates its neural resources for things like understanding baby’s cues.

That being said, I’m happy to also tell you that this change is not permanent. Being a mom does not make you indefinitely dumber. As my son has started sleeping better at night, I feel that I’m able to regain back my focus and technical thinking ability over time.

Going back to work after a long break and observing how people operate in the current era of software engineering made me realize there is something far more dangerous to the thinking mind than postpartum hormones or neural rewiring of new mothers’ brain: AI. Though that could be a story for another post.

If I can leave you with one takeaway from becoming a new mother, it’s this: you’ll likely always be worried about something, and that worry simply changes shape over time. Through all that worrying, I rediscovered what mattered at that stage of my life, which ended up being a valuable exercise despite the stress.

It’s not that the things that used to matter no longer do, but your priorities shift toward whatever needs your focus and attention in the moment. Once I accepted that perpetual worry is simply part of my reality, I finally felt at peace.

I create this little space on the internet to write my thoughts and reflections on being a human, a woman, and a software developer.