Milked to Death: What My Maternity Leave Taught Me About Holistic Value

They told me to take all the time I needed.

But they only offered 40 hours of maternity leave. The rest I had to patch together with PTO I didn’t really have—because my pregnancy had been brutal. Constant nausea, debilitating heartburn, and missed workdays just to stay upright. By the time my six weeks were up, I was out of time. Out of energy. And about to walk back into the same toxic environment I had barely survived before.

The project I returned to? The one with the client who yelled at me and made my team miserable. I had to jump back in immediately, like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t just gone through one of the most physically and emotionally intense transformations of my life. I lasted just long enough to find another project to escape to—because I couldn’t stay in that environment and be a new mom at the same time. Not without breaking.

And that was just the beginning.

All three of my pregnancies were hard. All three of my babies had feeding issues. My first and third were both failure-to-thrive babies. My first had reflux so bad he’d throw up almost everything he drank. He cried for hours—so I rocked him for hours, desperate to help him sleep. My second had an upper lip tie and tongue tie. My third had upper and lower lip ties, a tongue tie, and cheek ties. We thought we knew what to expect by then. We didn’t.

At nine months old, she still wasn’t sleeping through the night. I was beyond exhausted. Then COVID hit—and with it, a small blessing: I was offered another 3 months of short-term disability. That time was a lifeline. She was still failure to thrive, and we finally discovered she had a milk protein allergy. Those extra three months gave me a fighting chance to help her.

But my boss? He didn’t see it that way.

When I told him I was taking the leave shortly after returning from maternity leave, he asked, “Yeah, but you can work while you’re gone, right?”

No. I was on FMLA. Working during that time wasn’t just inappropriate—it was illegal. But from that moment on, his perception of me shifted. He was annoyed that I’d choose my family. Like it was a character flaw. Like having priorities outside of work made me unreliable.

To make matters worse, the General Manager (who had given me red flags from my initial interview), randomly stopped me in the office one day to ask me if I was back on my A game now that I didn't have pregnancy brain anymore. Like excuse me? And he did it with multiple witnesses including another coworker who was also a mom. She looked horrified when he said it, but neither of us challenged him given he signed our paychecks.

This wasn’t just an isolated case of insensitivity—it was a window into a system that values performance over people, and punishes anyone who dares to be human. A culture where motherhood is treated like a liability instead of a life event. Where silence becomes a survival tactic.

And let’s be clear—it’s not just parents who suffer under these systems. People without kids are often expected to pick up the slack, work longer hours, or deprioritize their own well-being just because they don’t have children at home. As if they don’t deserve balance, too. As if choosing rest or joy or boundaries means they’re “less committed.” Everyone loses when humanity is treated like an inconvenience. And I know this experience isn't suffered by moms, since dads equally have to weigh performance over being present both for themselves and for their families.

That’s what happens when we define value by output and ignore the humans behind it.

So how do we begin to build something different?

Implementing holistic value isn’t about creating new frameworks. It’s about unlearning the old ones. It starts by recognizing that value isn’t just what we deliver. It’s how we deliver it. And what it costs the people involved.

Here are a few places to start:

1. Name what’s broken. You can’t change what you refuse to see. If your team is burnt out but praised for "getting it done," say it out loud. Reflect on it in retrospectives. Challenge it in planning. Speak up when the reward structure promotes self-sacrifice over sustainability.

2. Redefine success. Start measuring value in terms of sustainability, trust, and well-being. Did the team finish the sprint and stay emotionally intact? Did they feel respected? Safe? Empowered? Add those metrics alongside velocity and OKRs.

3. Slow down for reflection. Build in space to process what happened—not just what got done. Weekly check-ins. Debriefs. Anonymous pulse surveys. Human-centered 1:1s. Time to ask, "What did this work cost us?" and "Was it worth it?"

4. Design for dignity. Filter decisions through this lens: Does this respect the humanity of the people involved? If not, redesign it. From PTO policies to project timelines to how you run meetings—build systems that care as much as they create.

5. Model the change. This one’s hard. But it matters. If you’re in a leadership role, your behavior is the culture. That means taking your own time off. Protecting your team’s boundaries. Being honest about what’s not working. And refusing to praise performance that comes at the cost of someone’s health.

Implementing holistic value starts with telling the truth: about what work demands from us, what it takes to do it well, and what happens when we pretend that people are just delivery machines.

If we want a more sustainable, more human, more innovative future—we have to start creating it. One decision at a time.