At the same time that I was in my first trimester in the fall of 2011, I was working on a consulting project that had me in a terrible office building in Hartford, CT that was surrounded by locked gates and security guards. I drove down on Monday mornings, flashed my badge to get through the parking lot gates, parked and locked my car, walked through a locked yard into the building, swiped my badge again and sat down in a gray cube. At the end of the day, the process reversed and I drove to a nearby suburb to a hotel in the middle of an office park. On Thursday afternoon, I drove home.
Being pregnant surely did not help, but it was probably the worst office location that I had ever been in. I felt cooped up, but this week, I was released. I told the firm partners that I wasn’t travelling anymore and I continued to work on the project, part-time from home. Not only was that much better for my mental health, it turned out for the best too since the pregnancy exhausted me and I needed to be able to work sitting on the bed with my feet up.
