The guilt trip: returning to work after maternity leave

Emotional whiplash of maternity leave

No one prepares you for the emotional whiplash of maternity leave. You step away from the working world, believing you’ll re-enter it after a short pause, yet when you return, the landscape feels entirely different, and so do you.

I’d imagined time at home with my baby as restorative. A chance to breathe, to bond, to simply be. But it was also a time of reckoning. Maternity pay barely covered the basics, and beneath the warmth of early motherhood sat a quiet anxiety about what came next, the logistics, the costs, and the invisible pressure to keep up with a system never built for mothers in their 40s.

The search for somewhere safe

Finding a nursery became my full-time occupation. I approached it like a research project, lists, calls, site visits, until it began to feel less like childcare and more like a test I hadn’t studied for.

Each conversation was the same: long waiting lists, full capacity, polite apologies. Somewhere between exhaustion and determination, I realised that parents were booking places before their children were even born. By comparison, I was years behind.

When we finally secured a space for Cyrus, I cried, part relief, part guilt, that something so essential could feel like winning a lottery.

Reality intrudes

Halfway through my leave, I got a call from my boss. At first, I thought it was a friendly check-in, a way of keeping me in the loop while I navigated life with a newborn. But the conversation quickly shifted. Two of my colleagues were being laid off, and the subtext felt like my job wasn’t immune.

The pressure to return early settled in before I’d even found my footing as a mother. It was subtle but suffocating, the kind of pressure that seeps into your thoughts during night feeds and nap times. I found myself rehearsing how to sound composed and capable when, in truth, I was still learning how to leave the house on time with a baby in tow.

Moving, adapting

As if motherhood itself weren’t enough upheaval, we moved house during that first year. No fixed address, no routine, and a sense of drifting between one version of life and the next. It was quiet disorientation.

The days blurred into one another, boxes, bottles, calls with estate agents. It’s a strange thing, to rebuild the practical parts of life while still learning how to be someone’s mother.

The guilt 

When the time came to return to work, guilt appeared in every shadow. Guilt for leaving. Guilt for wanting to go back. Guilt for finding parts of myself again that had gone missing somewhere between sleepless nights and steriliser cycles.

“You can love your child deeply and still long for your old rhythm. That longing doesn’t make you less of a mother; it’s a reminder that you are still a person.”

There’s a quiet truth no one mentions: you can love your child deeply and still long for your old rhythm. That longing doesn’t make you less of a mother; it’s a reminder that you are still a person.

The threads that hold us

Motherhood has taught me that love and guilt often share the same space. It isn’t about balance, not really. It’s about weaving something steady from the frayed edges.

And maybe that’s the real lesson of returning to work, not learning to do it all, but learning to live with the tenderness of trying.