My 'return to work' experience in Nov 2010, after two years of bringing up ds (2yrs) was a nasty shock and something I find very hard to put behind me.
People have encouraged me to write about it.
Just to put you in the picture I loved the last job that I had. Unfortunately it went into administration while I was on maternity leave with ds in 2008.
Before that I had worked for 10 years in the BBC. I have had exciting and interesting work most of my life and it was a shock to suddenly be a ftm to dd (6yrs) and ds (2yrs). I am 39yrs old.
I heard of the job (A PA and Office Manager) through a friend whom I had met when I was on postnatal classes with dd. She was a friend of the Chief Executive of the company (the guy who would be my boss if I got the job). He was looking for a PA.
I hesitated at first because as a trained journalist I have no PA experience and I was not sure if the job was for me.
However I was restless to return to work. I felt frustrated at being a ftm and I thought it would be a good step back to work after taking two yrs out to raise ds. I also have lots of transferable skills that I felt would help me on the job.
After an introduction to the Chief Executive from my friend via email and having sent my CV to him, to my surprise I got an interview!
In the interview with the Chief Executive I was honest and frank about my abilities and truthfully asked him, if given the job, for a few weeks to ''settle in'' in order to learn the job effectively. He agreed with me, seemed amiable and I honestly felt I could work with the guy. He assured me that he felt I could do the job and when he asked: "What salary do you want?" and then "When can you start?" I was jumping with joy!
I had a week to go from ftm to a 40 hr working week! I rushed to organise breakfast and after school club for ds, nursery and childminders for dd, had a fab hair cut, spent money on new shoes and an expensive new bag and before I had a minute to register what was happening and with my job contract signed for a perm job, my first day of employment arrived!
I waited outside the office at 9am(as specified on my contract) in the pouring rain. I had no keys. No one arrived to let me in until 9.40am!
Once everybody had arrived nobody in the office spoke to me. I mean it. Nobody opened the mouth once. They all communicated to each other through Skype messages. There were no telephones on the desks. Yes, within the office, even sat next to each other, colleagues messaged work related 'messages' to each other on Skype 'team chat' and non work related messages to each other on Skype 'London chat.'
I was not explained a thing and I had no written or spoken handover and no training. I wasn't introduced to anyone and not one person approached me. They all sat silently at their desks not flinching from 9am to 6pm.
The previous PA, I soon discovered, had been my boss's wife. She had come in to do the job one or two days a week for the past 5 months.
My boss sat directly opposite me and on the first day he gave me his email login and told me to reduce his emails from 1,000 to none! I didn't have a clue!
I was not only PA to my boss but also to the part time Finance Manager who came in only two days a week and was 6 months pregnant and she was not going to be replaced when she went off on Maternity Leave. I was also PA to the co-founder of the company. He was situated in Scotland and I never met him.
The only other woman in the company was a lesbian She went off on maternity leave the week after I started work as her 'wife' had given birth to twins!
On my second day of employment my boss informed me that he was going to the US that afternoon for a week.
Once there he emailed me loads of meetings to arrange all of them I was supposed to somehow know he wanted in English time not in US time on his Google Calendar. (I had not been trained on Google Calendar and I had about five mins to understand it.) I didn't even know if he had already met these people or how he wanted to meet them. I only had their email addresses. Not even their full names.
On the third day of employment (with boss in the US) I had to become a fire-warden and organise the office fire-evacuation. 
On the fourth day I was asked to fix the problems of the blocked toilets. 
The last day of my first week in employment I arrived at the office to discover that no one else was coming in. I was on my own all day in the huge office.
It got worse. On the second day of the second week after returning from the US my boss sent me another "catch up" invitation on Google Calendar. How strange to send an electronic invitation when seated opposite someone I thought. However I proceeded to ''accept invitation'' and at the specified time I went to a room where my boss informed me: "the pressure will get much worse" and he said he could give me: "more work now" but that I would "buckle!"
After a month of the same silent atmosphere I began to feel desperately unhappy and paranoid that people were being hostile on purpose. When I rustled a plastic bag as I left the office one day I was angrily reprimanded 
and told to "Shhhhhhh!"
One day at lunch my colleagues posted a soup menu on my Skype 'team chat' and preceded to 'chat' about their soup choices they wanted me to buy them. My boss would do the same, typing out his soup choice for me to go out the office and buy. He threw a fiver across the desk to me without raising his eyes to meet mine. I felt anonymous.
The final straw came after a month when the boss's wife phoned me to go to Oxford Circus the next morning to buy 15 picture frames oh and A4 size. Not easy in the Christmas rush and anyway alarm bells were ringing I just knew something was up.
I arrived exhausted in the office with the picture frames and like Cruella de Vil my boss's wife stood waiting for me. It was the second time I had met her and I wondered what she was doing in the office. She glanced nervously at me, pulled out the picture frames and told me they were the wrong size. The shop assistant insisted they were A4 size and they had looked that to me.
.
The atmosphere after a month was worse than ever. I sat at my desk and decided to give my boss a taste of his own medicine and for the first tme sent him a "catch up" message. He quickly "accepted" and before I knew it I was sat in a meeting room with my boss and his wife.
"You're not going to like what I am going to say," he said. My heart sunk. I had tried so hard in this job and had felt alone from the start. I was in shock. To my knowledge it was obvious I was not happy in the job but hey who can wonder why?
"We are not going to renew your trial period," he said " and normally it is a 2 month trial period and a 2 week notice period but if you want you can leave now."
"Why?" I stuttered. "Please tell me why?" I was fed up. I had given so much to trying my best and I felt they had done nothing to help me settle in, learn the job or support me after two years away from work. I don't expect to be spoon-fed but especially after being truthful about my situation in the interview I did expect some form of induction and training that I never ever got.
My boss's wife started to speak and he told her to "shut up." I insisted: "Let her speak, after all you have called her in to dismiss me!"
And that was it. He refused to give me any explanation and after several attempts to find out some reason he said he just wanted to "draw a line under." With that I went back to my desk. My boss stood over me while I started to close my systems and asked: "What are you doing?" I was so indignant I shouted out: "Why, are you going to stand over me and watch me while I get all my stuff together?"
So that is it. After a month in employment, my first job after giving birth to my son two years earlier and since my last full time job, and I was literally shown the door.
How do I move on from a situation like that please? As you can imagine I feel hurt and angry about this last experience. Also back to being a ftm I feel so frustrated. I want to work again but I feel so confused.