I took a 7-month maternity leave from my Google engineering job. Coming back to work was the hardest thing I've ever done.

• Shruti Dhumak navigated maternity leave amid Google's AI industry shift and layoffs.

• She split her leave to maintain visibility and manage family support from India.

• Dhumak focused on self-improvement and open communication to regain her work efficiency.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Shruti Dhumak, a cloud customer engineer in Google's Boston office who gave birth in February 2023. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her employment history.

Before I had my son, I always doubted how I was going to manage being this overly ambitious person with motherhood.

I've been with Google for about four years. I had my first child in February 2022 and split up my maternity leave in three phases to make the most of temporary support I had when my family visited.

Between Google's policy of six months of maternity leave, one month of prepartum leave, and one month of paid time off, I had a total of eight months of time away from work. I knew I was fortunate to have this time off because it is rare in the US, but going on leave and the anxiety of being replaced while I was away was one of the hardest things I have dealt with.

I'm a customer engineer, and a large part of my role revolves around managing relationships with our cloud clients. If someone takes over for me, the customers end up being closer to that representative and I risk losing my accounts to someone else.

I was also paranoid that my absence or my performance below my peak, once I returned, would make me more susceptible to a layoff. Two weeks before my delivery, Google announced its biggest, 12,000-people layoff. As someone on an H1-B visa, a layoff would mean I would have to find another job in a matter of weeks or risk having to move back to India with a newborn.

When I came back to work, I was not a hundred percent myself — not as a person and not as an employee. I was not a hundred percent efficient. I've had my moments where I broke down and lost my train of thought during a call.

Despite my efforts, some other senior people were preferred by the business partners for some responsibilities. To add to it, Google was entering the artificial intelligence industry. Being away months felt like I was behind by many years.

But I was able to turn my performance around. In 2024, I got awards for my performance, and it's just the opposite of how last year went.

There were four things I did to make the transition easier on myself:

1. Split up my leave

Google offers employees the flexibility to take their maternity leave for up to a year after the baby is born. I broke up my leave into three stages, which allowed me to come back to work periodically to ensure I was visible and my work was not forgotten.

I took my first break a month before the baby was born. I returned in my third month after the delivery and went back on leave in the months of September, November, December and January. It was designed based on who was there to help me with the child throughout the year — first my parents and then my in-laws.

2. Highlight my work

Nobody is going to talk about me until I do, which is something I have struggled with in my previous companies.

I made sure to speak up when things weren't going right and made sure to collect evidence of my efforts and achievements.

I took advantage of the help I had and spent evenings and weekends taking exams and completing certifications to upskill myself and show others that I was coming up to speed.

3. Have open, honest conversations

What helped me through the year was my manager. She saw what was happening when I missed things because I've been a good performer all these years.

I shared everything with her openly during one-on-ones, which helped because she understood my challenges. She also helped me maintain visibility with upper management, because Google is strict with grades and the ratings you get.

It made a world of a difference to have a female manager and a work culture where men could empathize, too. My job involves a lot of talking and explaining, and I suffered from shortness of breath during my third trimester. My male counterparts recognized this and asked me to take breaks and go off-camera, which helped me work until the day I left for leave.

I also built my network and spoke to women who are managers in other teams in the company. Women who have been outperformers shared their experiences crying secretly after they became parents, and nobody said they had it all sorted out. Now, I share my journey with others.

4. Taking it one day at a time

During the wave of tech layoffs in 2022, I had at least three close friends who were laid off from Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which lingered on my mind and made me paranoid about my own situation.

The stress and postpartum depression is not behind me, but I decided to take it one day at a time.

I decided to be laser-focused and do things as they come up. There have been times I feel like delaying a reply but do it anyway, because I know it could lead to more tasks that I can add to my annual review.

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