An honest look at returning to work after maternity leave - the daycare guilt, changed priorities and impossible choices nobody prepares you for.
Why Does Nobody Prepare You for Returning to Work After Maternity Leave?
First, thank you for finding this little corner of the internet and for staying longer than the three seconds we’ve apparently all been allocated before someone points at floating text and tells us to “wait for it.” But all these short form videos are not enough time to talk honestly about returning to work after maternity leave or how you can want to go back, need to go back and feel sick about going back, all at once.
That’s why I started writing here.
I don’t have motherhood perfectly organized. I wanted somewhere we could talk properly, without pretending a color-coded routine will solve the emotional crisis happening in the daycare parking lot.
The support disappears when returning to work after maternity leave
When I had my first son, there was information everywhere. Friends and family shared advice about feeding, sleep, nappies and the umbilical cord stump. People checked in. Everyone had a tip, whether I asked for it or not.
Then it was time to return to work and the support seemed to vanish.
No one explained how to leave a crying child at daycare and then drive to work like a functioning person or manage a morning when my husband left early, my son had a moral objection to pants and I had an hour-long commute.
Before becoming a mom, I had spent years moving up the corporate ladder. I was driven. I cared about doing well and proving myself. I never imagined I would become nervous about going back to a workplace I already knew.
But after a year away, I wasn’t the same person walking back in.
We needed my income. This wasn’t an abstract decision about “having it all.” We had a mortgage, groceries, childcare fees and the rude ongoing expense of being alive. I had to drop my son off and arrive at work looking like I hadn’t completed an emotional triathlon before 8:30 a.m.
The mornings made me feel like a mom I didn’t want to be
On office days, I might barely see my son. By the time I got home, the evening disappeared into dinner, bath and bed.
So naturally, I wanted our mornings to feel loving and connected.
Instead, I was following him around with one sock, staring at the clock and saying, “We need to go,” with increasing levels of unhinged desperation. He was being a toddler. I was expecting him to understand peak-hour traffic.
I would get stressed, then short-tempered, then guilty. Nothing starts the day beautifully like snapping at your child to hurry up so you can drop them somewhere else and spend the drive feeling terrible.
Our limited time together started to feel rushed. I wasn’t only grieving the hours I would miss, but the mornings I had imagined we would have.
It didn’t mean I was failing. Our old routine no longer fitted our new reality.
Then came the daycare drop-offs
I genuinely thought childcare would be fine. He would play with other children, try new activities and learn things I would never think to teach him because my home curriculum was mostly “please stop licking that.”
Then we had the trial day.
I sat outside the room while he cried and cried. During the next few half-days, it happened again. He reached for me while I handed him to educators who were kind but still strangers.
Walking away felt wrong in every cell of my body.
I sat in the car feeling sick and called to check on him. Once I was gone, he often settled and played. That helped, but it didn’t make leaving easy.
It took weeks, or if I'm being honest probably closer to months for him to settle in. It was way longer than the breezy timeline I’d hoped for.
We didn’t have family nearby. There wasn’t a secret third option. Daycare allowed me to work, and work paid our bills.
Still, I sat in that car asking questions I know many mothers ask: Why is life set up this way? Why do I have to make money when my child is crying for me? Am I doing the right thing? Am I fucking him up?
The internet will happily make the guilt worse
Modern motherhood comes with more information than any brain should process. The algorithm says children need their main caregiver, daycare is harmful, staying home is best, working is best, children need independence, children need attachment and if you get it wrong, they’ll discuss it in therapy in 25 years.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to remember whether daycare asked you to bring two pairs of spare clothes or three.
When your child cries at drop-off, every frightening headline you’ve scrolled past feels like evidence against you.
But families aren’t making decisions in a laboratory. We make them within the cost of living, available childcare, work, mental health and the support we actually have.
I also need to say something that can feel uncomfortable: I didn’t want to stay home full-time.
I loved my son. I also struggled with the repetition and isolation. Cook, clean, change a nappy, pick something off the floor, put it back, watch it return to the floor. Repeat until bedtime, then prepare to repeat it again tomorrow.
I missed being challenged, adults and tasks that stayed finished longer than nine seconds. I admire stay-at-home moms because it is relentless work. Knowing it wasn’t right for me does not mean I loved my child less.
Wanting to work and wanting your child are not opposites
Before motherhood, I couldn’t have predicted how dramatically my priorities would change. Work had once taken up so much space in my head. After my son, it still mattered, but differently.
That shift was confusing. I wondered where the driven version of me had gone. Over time, I realized she hadn’t disappeared. She just had another person to consider now, and much less tolerance for meetings that should have been emails.
Friends returning after children described the same fear. Even women I met randomly said they didn’t know how they would do it. Capable, experienced women were questioning whether they could manage jobs they had done for years.
That told me this wasn’t a personal weakness. It was a transition we were leaving women to figure out largely by themselves.
And while mothers are in that vulnerable place, the internet targets us with another promise: Don’t return to work. Start this business in 5 easy steps. Join this pyramid scheme and make money during nap time. It’s easy!
But a normal job isn’t failure, and financial freedom probably isn’t hiding behind a $997 course and three Canva templates. Most mothers will return to paid employment. They deserve support, not another reason to feel they chose wrong.
This is why Reborn & Returning exists
I’m not here to convince you that returning to work will be wonderful. Some mornings will be awful. You might cry after drop-off, forget your password, wear the only shirt without banana on it and wonder why everyone is speaking in corporate acronyms.
I’m also not here to tell you to be grateful, think positive or “soak up every moment.” Some moments are lovely. Some involve wrestling a screaming toddler into a car seat while sweating through your work clothes.
I created Reborn & Returning to offer the honest, practical support I couldn’t find from someone who has sat in the car after daycare drop-off, felt sick with guilt and still had to drive to work.
In this series, I’ll talk properly about childcare drop-offs, the morning rush, rebuilding confidence, changed ambition, the mental load and those first strange weeks back at work. We’ll take them one at a time, because each deserves more than three seconds.
If you’re anxious, guilty, torn or secretly a little excited to use your brain in a different way again - you belong here.
You are not doing motherhood wrong because you need to work. You are not doing it wrong because you want to work. And you are definitely not the only mom who has sat in a daycare car park wondering how everyone else seems to be handling this better.
They aren’t. We’ve just needed a place to say it.
Need help with daycare drop-off?
Download the free Daycare Drop-Off Survival Guide for reassuring, practical strategies to make separation easier for you and your child.
Not using daycare or looking for support with the whole return-to-work transition?
The Going Back to Work After Maternity Leave workbook guides you through the emotional and practical parts of returning, including confidence, workplace conversations, routines and your first two weeks back.
For more honest, practical support with the parts of returning that rarely make the polished posts, follow Reborn & Returning.
