| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Claire Suddath explains how return to office mandates are killing the work-life balance dream for moms. You can find the whole story online here. On days when Ellen went into the office, her mornings started around 6 a.m. She woke up with her 3-month-old baby and nursed him. Then she got him dressed. She got ready, too, and put on makeup. She packed a lunch, her breast pump, milk storage bags and anything else she needed. She said goodbye to her husband and son and drove 45 minutes in Austin traffic to get to her office. At work she scheduled meetings around pumping sessions. If a meeting ran long, and they always did, she leaked through her shirt and had to change. At the end of the day, she drove another 45 minutes to get home by 6. She nursed the baby again. Coordinated dinner with her husband. Put her son to bed at 7:30 and prayed that he slept through the night—which, of course, he didn't. She answered work emails, cleaned her pumping equipment, showered, prepared her son's bottles for tomorrow and finally went to bed. All told, it was a 16-hour day, not counting her son's middle-of-the-night feeding session. "It was nonstop," Ellen says. "I was so depleted as a person, as a mom. And I only had to do it two days a week." Like millions of other office jobs, Ellen's, in internal communications at Whole Foods Market Inc., had gone fully remote at the start of the pandemic and remained that way for more than a year. She was still working remotely when she went on maternity leave in March 2021, but by the time she returned 12 weeks later, in June, Whole Foods had called its corporate workforce back to the office.  Illustration: Liana Finck for Bloomberg Businessweek Ellen was already struggling with the idea of going back to work—leaving her baby when he could barely hold his head up filled her with guilt. Adding pumping and child-care logistics on top of that left her so anxious that some nights she couldn't sleep. Complicating things was that none of the local day cares had spots; she and her husband, who was still working from home, had planned to take turns watching their son until they got off a waitlist. That arrangement didn't work with Ellen in the office. They asked Ellen's mom to fly in from Indiana to watch the baby instead. "I honestly don't know how people who had kids before the pandemic did it," Ellen says. "Was everyone just miserable all the time?" (Answer: Yes.) Ellen had always been what she calls "career-focused." And while becoming a mother recalibrated her priorities, it hadn't made her less ambitious. So she figured out a way to transfer to Whole Foods' parent company, Amazon.com Inc., which offered remote work as well as better pay and benefits. Amazon's office was even farther from her home than Whole Foods'. "I told them, 'If this is ever anything that requires me to be in person, I'm looking at a two-hour round-trip commute. That doesn't work for me.'" Not a problem, Ellen says Amazon told her. She started her new job, also in internal communications, in July 2022. For a while, Ellen felt like she had it all. She was busy with a full-time job and, by now, a 1-year-old, but she wasn't waking up filled with dread. She and her husband eventually found a day care, and their family fell into a manageable routine of drop-offs, pickups and 5:30 dinners. Her mom went back to Indiana. Her husband traveled for work; it was hard when he was gone but not impossible. "There was this sense of stability," Ellen says. Then, in February 2023, Amazon announced that all employees would return to the office three days a week. Ellen tried to get out of it. She looked through her hiring documents only to realize that permanent remote work was never promised in writing. She appealed to her boss. She pointed out that her colleagues were in Seattle, Nashville and Arlington, Virginia, so their meetings would remain virtual no matter what. She applied for a remote-work exemption that the company was granting on a limited basis. "As a mother of a 2-year-old," she wrote, "remote work is critical." She highlighted her two-hour commute, how she'd have to extend her son's day care at $25 an hour and that Amazon's Austin office didn't even have a designated space for her—she'd actually been told to report to a WeWork 21 miles from her home. It didn't matter. Amazon denied her request. "I didn't know what else to do," Ellen says. In December she quit. (An Amazon spokesperson didn't address Ellen's situation but noted that "we gave our teams three months to prepare" to return to the office, "while also working to support people based on their individual circumstances.") A few months earlier, Emily Smith resigned from her position at a tobacco education nonprofit in Indiana. Smith, who'd been working remotely, said her boss wanted her in the office four days a week. She couldn't find child care to make that happen. "I called 60 day cares," she says. "No one had an opening."  Illustration: Liana Finck for Bloomberg Businessweek Around the same time, Whitney Whipple left her job as head of US brand moments for YouTube Advertising. Her 18-year career in marketing had culminated in a mid-six-figure salary, but that didn't make her three-hour round-trip commute, three days a week, between Westchester County and Google's Manhattan offices less painful. "I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom," she says. "I went to business school. But the reality is that I also have two children at home who need me. I thought, 'Something has to change.'" In Washington, DC, Lee Taylor-Penn, a senior program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, couldn't drop her daughter off at preschool early enough to make it to mandatory 9 a.m. meetings. Last summer her boss called her into human resources to discuss her chronic tardiness. "Actually, what they said was that I needed to find a better work-life balance—those were the words they used," Taylor-Penn says. "I said, 'I'm a single mom with a one-and-a-half-hour commute. I don't have a work-life balance.'" She quit, too. (The National Academies didn't respond to a request for comment.) As workers trickled and then streamed back to offices, highways re-clogged at rush hour and mayors declared their downtowns revitalized, working mothers asked: What about us? The pandemic had inadvertently prompted a massive experiment, with corporations rethinking how their employees worked and from where. For the most part, it was a resounding success for the environment (fewer commuters meant lower carbon emissions), employers (productivity did not generally decrease and in some cases rose) and employees, especially parents. After emerging from the fog of the early pandemic, mothers found that when working from home was combined with reliable child care, the dual demands of work and home were easier to meet. Moms who held demanding full-time jobs could suddenly achieve what had once seemed impossible: the ability to be a fully present parent without compromising their careers. It was a remarkable revelation. Now, with no compelling explanation beyond the nebulous benefit of in-person collaboration and the importance of office "culture," they were being told the experiment was over. Despite the corporate declarations of support for working parents during the pandemic—"parental burnout" was even treated as a mental health phenomenon in medical journals—with things returning to normal, or whatever passed for normal, those same companies developed collective amnesia and acted like everything was fine. For this story, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to nearly two dozen women who held jobs ranging from tech executive to administrative assistant at companies as large as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and as small as a mom-and-pop business in the Midwest. Some were single parents. Others were married with a high-earning spouse. All wanted to further their careers (which is why many of them asked to go by just their first or middle name or, in some cases, to remain anonymous). But when asked to give up the flexibility remote work afforded—to, as many of them put it, choose between their kids and their jobs—they decided they were done. Keep reading: RTO Mandates Are Killing the Euphoric Work-Life Balance Some Moms Found Also, read Businessweek's latest cover story: The House of Arnault | 
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