Any moms here? What’s your experience been like?

I’m an electrical engineer at a large company you’ve probably heard of. I’m originally from America but I moved to Germany for my masters and decided to stay. I am incredibly fortunate that my company is part of a strong union that has negotiated exceptionally good benefits (35 hour work week, great pay, only two office days a week, etc). The culture of my team is also exceptional and everyone, including the leadership, stresses the importance of work-life balance. In general, the company is very family friendly and most of the people on my team have kids, though they’re all male.

In my entire career, I’ve never met a full time engineer who is also a mom. Of the few women engineers I’ve worked with, they were either childfree or part time. There are only a handful of women in my office but we’re all pretty young (under 35) and AFAIK childless. My plan is to really lock in for the next two-ish years and see what I can accomplish before my husband and I start TTC. I’m just really scared because a) having a baby is scary and b) I feel like I’m in wholly uncharted territory. I’m expecting that it will be really hard but I’ve done hard things before and I’m not that worried about it. What I’m more worried about is the isolation, since it seems like I’m going to be completely on my own. When I’ve done hard things before, I may have been in the minority but I wasn’t literally by myself.

Being a SAHM would be my personal nightmare and I can’t imagine myself taking more than six months of maternity leave (the standard in Germany is a year). Obviously I’m not going to say a peep to anyone at work until I absolutely have to.

If there are any moms in the group, how are you holding up? Has anyone managed to continue moving forward in their career after having a baby or is it (professionally) all downhill from that point?