This is perhaps a huge thing I’ve failed to mention so far, but the largest motivating factor to my career change was the coming changes in my personal life; namely, motherhood. In fact, at the time of this post publishing, I have an infant at home.
Because this site is dedicated to my journey and position as a publishing professional, I’ll note only that the closer I came to motherhood and what later became concretely clear during pregnancy, is that academia would not be able to accommodate the type of desires and expectations I had for family life.
It doesn’t hurt to mention that a number of my colleagues have spoken easily and confidently about their decisions to leave their own corporate positions to pursue agenting in line with the arrival of their first children. To add to this, being that my agency is technically based in Canada, I have to reckon with the knowledge that they receive a year of maternity leave, while I am here being both shamed for my frustration with our three month maternity leave and pressured to return sooner than I would like (nothing like immoveable semesters!). And as a cherry on top, as an agent that does prioritize international rights, I have been in conversation with colleagues on two and three and four year long maternity leaves! The only thing I could think about is how this is just another thing inherently wrong with how things work here in the US.
But to stay on topic, hearing my peers speak to their own journeys navigating agenting while mothering, it has made me realize that the malleability of this field is ultimately the attractive nature of the job. You can work whenever and however you’d like – it is completely up to you. Your business grows and sleeps as you do. So in theory, you can be working at night, while your child is asleep and whenever you have intermittent moments available to you. You could choose when to over and under work. You could choose how many clients to take on, and how many submissions to send out, and what sort of assistant support you’d like to take on, if you need to.
For myself, I am just returning from maternity leave as I write this, but for my own intentions, I’ve implemented a “ramp,” starting slowly then building incrementally back up to a full-time load. In addition to this, I already have all of my Fall submissions in order – I coordinated them all before I left. So, in line with everything I’ve shared so far, I am in control, and this is what I like best.
