• Becca Selah took a job as a senior UX designer at Amazon months after having a baby.
• Asked to lead a major project, she was determined not to let being a new mom define her at work.
• A year later, as the pandemic began and she reevaluated her career, she quit her job.

The first time I interviewed at Amazon, I was still on maternity leave.

I remember feeling prepared but nervous about the whiteboard exercise. I worried that when I stood up to draw boxes and arrows, my shirt might ride up and expose the elastic waistband of my maternity pants, revealing how recently I'd had a baby.

When I joined Amazon as a senior user experience designer in April 2019, my daughter was 5 months old, though I sometimes padded her age to colleagues to make her seem less like a liability. I dropped her off at day care on my way to the Seattle office, determined not to let being a new mom define how people saw me at work.

I was 30, and I'd been in tech long enough to know motherhood could count against you if you let it.

For a while, I thought I had it all

From the start, I kept photos off my desk. I avoided mentioning daycare logistics, pediatrician appointments, or the low-grade panic of being responsible for a very small person while trying to appear fully available to everything else.

My boss onboarded me slowly, and for a while, I thought I had it all: a prestigious job, good pay, and the elusive work-life balance.

Six months in, I was asked to lead design for a review with Andy Jassy, the head of AWS at the time. It was the kind of project that could lead to a promotion, my boss told me.

I hadn't been thinking about promotion. My husband, who also worked at Amazon as a software engineer, said it could take years, if it happened at all. I took his word for it.

I was new to Big Tech and had spent most of my career in startups, where promotions often felt arbitrary. I'd once gotten promoted only after putting in my notice; it came with a $20K raise and more stock.

But when someone hands you a blueprint, it's hard not to imagine the house.

My job grew more intense

Meetings began appearing on my calendar. Weekly check-ins became twice a week. Then every day.

We were pitching Andy on a new product that would require dozens of engineers and millions of dollars. As the designer, I was responsible for shaping the narrative and preparing a handout that walked through the future experience.

Normally, my designs were based on user research, but this project was top secret, so I couldn't talk to anyone.

Instead, I designed for Andy — or rather, each person's version of him. Everyone on the project seemed to have an Andy story. The way people spoke about him made me feel like he was a minor deity: brilliant, capricious. It became clear that we needed to grab his attention immediately, frame the product in terms he cared about, and be ready for anything.

I rehearsed with a project manager who played the role of Andy, interrupting me mid-sentence. "What's this?" he'd ask, tapping the screen. I'd start to explain, and he'd cut me off again. It felt less like a design review than endurance training.

While my mind was elsewhere, my daughter was growing up

My life narrowed. My husband and I commuted in together. Some days I didn't leave the building. At 5 p.m., we rushed to day-care pickup, popping ibuprofen on the way.

At home, I'd be reading "Little Blue Truck" to my daughter, but my mind was elsewhere, wondering if Andy would prefer radio buttons or a dropdown on the second screen.

Slowly, I outsourced my life. Other people watched our daughter. Someone cleaned the house. Grocery and meal deliveries appeared on the porch.

I told myself it was temporary. By then, it had been about four months of intensity, and the truth was that mostly, I liked it. I felt energized, important, almost chosen.

At home, though, I was tired, and it was getting harder to ignore that my daughter was growing up while I moved through it all in a haze.

Bath time was the only thing that snapped me out of it. That's when I first noticed the bite marks on my daughter's back.

"There's a biter," the day-care staff told us, careful not to use gendered pronouns. "They're targeting the little ones."

I was horrified. I felt like I was failing her. I imagined someone else trying to comfort her while I sat at my desk. I met with the head of the day care, who told me they were trying to keep an eye on the biter.

"But these biters are fast," she said, as if that was comforting. I cried in front of her, then went back to the office and pushed it down.

I told myself this was what someone at the next level would do.

The big moment finally arrived

By the day of the meeting, months of work had been distilled into a six-page document and a supplemental handout I'd obsessed over for weeks. I arrived early and sat behind my boss' boss. It began the way meetings always did at Amazon: in silence, as everyone read the document we were still editing an hour earlier.

Andy knew the details of our product better than I expected. He pushed on the tradeoffs until people revised themselves mid-sentence. When he made a joke, people laughed too quickly, too loudly.

Ninety minutes later, we had our funding. I hadn't said a word.

As people gathered their things, I dropped my handouts into the recycling bin on the way out.

By all accounts, the meeting was a win. It should have felt like a peak. Instead, it felt flat, like I'd spent months sprinting toward something only to arrive at the starting line of another race.

I started to think more clearly about my career

The next day, we left for Maui on a family vacation we'd booked months before. I kept my phone inside most of the trip, grateful to be free of it.

We walked the beach early, before the crowds and the sharp midday sun. Our daughter, now a year old, found a set of measuring cups in the Airbnb kitchen and spent long stretches absorbed in them.

It was the first time in weeks that my mind felt quiet. And in that quiet, I started to think more clearly about my career, about how much space work had taken up, and about what, exactly, I was getting in return.

I could see why people stayed at Amazon. It colonizes your mind and pushes everything else to the edges. It makes you feel important, right up until you get what you were chasing. Then it doesn't feel like much at all.

I shared my theory with my husband, who nodded knowingly. He was coming up on his five-year anniversary.

"It's a drug," he said, picking up his phone to check his email.

Then, the pandemic hit

Two weeks after we returned to Seattle, COVID hit. Within a month, we lost our childcare, our cleaning lady, and the careful scaffolding we'd built around our lives. My boss got a new boss, who brought in her old team, and the project that had been framed as my path to promotion was quietly handed to someone else.

There is a date every Amazonian knows: their next stock vest. As it approaches, people grow reflective. You start asking yourself whether you can do it for another vest, and what you're willing to trade for it.

Mine was a month away.

As I watched myself in the corner of the video screen, muting and unmuting as my daughter prattled just off camera, I wondered: Was I really going to do this for another year? In the middle of a pandemic? With a small child?

The answer felt obvious.

A year and two days after joining Amazon, I quit.

I worried about what I'd say if people asked about my career

My exit was unceremonious: a recurring meeting repurposed as a send-off, a prepaid shipping box sent for my laptop.

I stayed home with my daughter. Without the structure of meetings, the days began to blur.

I worried about what I would say if someone asked what I did for work. I decided that if they did, I'd say, "I used to work at Amazon, but I quit." I liked how it sounded.

But no one asked.

Becca Selah is a freelance product designer who writes about design, tech, and what it's like to work in both on Substack.

Do you have a story to share about a turning point in your career? Contact this editor, Debbie Strong, at dstrong@businessinsider.com.