After having a baby, there is no "normal" way to RTW
What I tell new moms about the impossible changes we're told to absorb.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a long call with a friend. She just returned to work from her first maternity leave, and nothing felt right. I listened for a while, because sometimes just naming your circumstances is cathartic, and I wanted to create that space for her. But I also remember what it felt like to be on that island.
There are things you need to hear. Things I wish I heard.
So, I said, this is a movie millions of mothers have starred in before us. In the United States, women take an average paid or unpaid maternity leave of just ten weeks, which is a woefully deficient amount of time to spend recovering from childbirth, recalibrating your family’s lives, and bonding with your newborn.
There is no reason to feel normal when you return to work after having a baby. And the earlier you transition back, the harder it is to isolate and identify the challenges you’re experiencing. When you aren’t afforded that chance—as many new mothers aren’t—the obstacles crash down on you as one undifferentiated weight. One feeling of sinking overwhelm. Because so much changes at once, it can feel impossible to identify what’s driving your hardest moments.
Is it the job?
Is it the people around you?
Is it the new version of yourself you’re still trying to figure out?
We’re reaching the end of May—the month of celebrating mothers. Though I won’t be able to close the gender pay gap, solve the caregiving crisis, or subvert the assault on women’s reproductive rights here today, I can at least offer something to a new mother trying to find her way in a world that blames her for not knowing the way sooner.
When you don’t break it down, you can’t begin to address what’s really bothering you. Instead, you start to sell yourself on messages that simply aren’t true, like that you’re a bad employee, a bad mother, or you don’t belong in the workforce anymore. It’s incredibly common to conflate organizational and systemic issues as your own personal deficiencies, especially at a vulnerable time like when you first return to work. These aren’t little feelings. They run the risk of profoundly impacting your career, finances, and family planning decisions.
Think about the following RTW challenges and what you can—or can’t—do about them. Then, you can begin to identify a path that acknowledges the facts, honors your feelings, and positions you for a way forward.
The Institution
Organizations can go through radical change in just a couple of months. Departments can get restructured, reporting lines can move around, and team goals can shift. If the timing aligns with your leave, you might come back to a place that’s incredibly different than how you left it. You might even return to a new boss, a new team, or find that a project you poured yourself into before leave has already wrapped without you.
It sucks. It all sucks, because in most cases, these macro changes have nothing to do with you, but they impact you all the same. I’d argue, they may impact you more than some of your colleagues, because you’re being asked to jump right into a new environment without the notice, context, or runway that they have had to get up to speed.
This happened to me following my first maternity leave. A department-wide restructuring took place while I was out, which resulted in me returning to work with a new manager and SVP. I had spent so much time earning the trust of my former managers, and that afforded me a lot of latitude and autonomy in the way I worked. You need that trust when something seismic is happening in your personal life.
I know it wasn’t personal, but still, it felt unfair. Coming back as a new mother truly felt like starting over. Looking back, I would have internalized the experience a lot less had there been someone to help me find my place again. I really loved that job—enough to work for the organization a second time several years later under my mentor, who always had my back. But at that time, I wish there was another mother in my orbit to help me reclaim my footing (more on this below). Instead, I fell through the cracks of the reorg.
Institutional changes are not personal, but they sure can feel that way. Please understand it’s not your fault: the timing, the implications, the challenges that come with adapting to them. They’re very hard. They are hard even if you aren’t out on leave. Don’t conflate any of this with your personal capabilities. These are circumstances bigger than you.
Should you want to leave, look at the big picture first. Are the changes hard because they’re new, or because they’re untenable? Do you still align with your employer’s values and mission, or have they distorted beyond recognition? Are you facing an organizational roadblock, or have you truly reached a dead end?
The People
Here’s some more tension at the center of this experience: many of us don’t know what we want from our colleagues when we return to work. We don’t know if we want them to see us as new mothers, or as the same people we were before we left. If you’re not working with other mothers who have experienced this, it feels impossible to reconcile.
My strategy after Hazel was born was to try and pretend like she didn’t exist at work. I feel horrible about this, but I don’t think I even brought a photo of her to put on my desk for a while. I was so desperate for no one to view me differently that I wanted to completely bifurcate my life into two.
But everything had changed; I was just hiding it. Instead of being fully present through seven straight hours of calls and meetings, I was hanging by my phone waiting for texts from our nanny. Waiting for a photo of Hazel’s afternoon outfit change or a report on how many ounces of formula she drank. I wanted to scream for everyone to understand, while simultaneously hoping no one would notice. I always hated when colleagues treated me as “the mom” in a group, leaving me out of the last-minute happy hours or not inviting me to important events outside the workday. But I also wanted my personal circumstances acknowledged when I genuinely needed some grace. New mothers don’t need a “get out of jail free” card, but some empathy for a young parent doing her best would be nice.
Not everyone around you can be the same degree of helpful during this time. You can’t reasonably expect them to, especially if it’s not something they’ve lived through themselves. But this is why your professional peer group matters so much, too. You might have to cast a wider net than your close teammates or the mentor who guided you before you had a baby. You need people who can help you soften the impact. Who can help you realize you’re one person with two dimensions now.
Which is not to say that everyone who fails to understand you should be let off the hook. New mothers face workplace discrimination, harassment, and retaliation all the time. There are colleagues and managers who view you as a liability and will work to subvert you, diminish you, and will you out of organizational existence. Your job is to learn the difference between those people and the ones who simply don’t get it.
If you think you’re dealing with the former, keep receipts. Save emails. Put it in writing. Protect yourself. Don’t assume someone else will.
You
Before I had kids, I had a colleague who we all judged for phoning it in. She didn’t socialize much. She spent a lot of time communicating with her nanny or shopping for her baby online. Most of the time, her lack of commitment to the job had no impact on us. But I remember once telling her, rudely, that I couldn’t imagine not caring enough to stay late at work. In my twenties, I loved staying in the office late. I wore it like my whole personality.
She told me she’d feel sorry for me if I never changed my mind.
When you become a mother, you are what changes the most. Not your institution or the people within it. And of course you have. You’ve given a piece of yourself to someone else.
Out of everything, I think your relationship with time is what shifts most. Before having a baby, your life can be static for long stretches of time. You can be more predictable in your schedule and routines. You can be reliable for the people and things that count on you (most of the time). But as parents, we don’t get to stand still. Things are always changing by the day—by the hour—requiring you to cancel, readjust, pivot, and compensate. It’s an existential mindset shift to not be bothered by this and embrace that it’s what the job of parenthood requires.
Our society does not accommodate the fluidity we need to raise a child. Not just from a caregiving standpoint, though that is an enormous piece of the puzzle, but from an emotional one. We are only now beginning to have honest conversations about showing up as our whole selves at work and what that requires from everyone around us: our partners, our bosses, our families and whatever “village” we cobble together. Everyone.
We have a long, long way to go.
Until we get there, I think it’s our job to support as many new mothers as we can with conversations like these. To offer ourselves as that friend, colleague, or person who has been there.
I am happy to be that friend for you. My door is always open.
What did you find hardest about returning to work as a new parent? Let us know.
You Up?
You up? Good, because we’ve got a question for you. This mini-series mixes conversation prompts from Money Together with fresh ones we’ve been thinking about, all designed to spark real, honest money talks with your partner. Apropos of this week’s newsletter, ask your partner:
What do you need most from me to feel supported right now?
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