Departure from Maternity Leave: The Duality Within
Duality: an instance of opposition or contrast between two concepts or two aspects of something.
There is a tug of war at times within.
I want to return to work. I don’t want to leave my kids.
I want to leave my kids to pursue my passion. I feel like staying at home in our cocoon.
Does one feeling negate the other? Do they have to be in opposition, or can both be true at the same time?
Image description: a baby is snuggled up in a warm, soft blanket, white with gold stars. The baby is bundled in a fluffy white snow suit with a hood with bear ears. Their left hand is raised above their head and they’re sleeping.
Hello Village!
I’m a mom of two kiddos. My eldest is four and a half and my youngest just turned one.
I’ve done this once before. I took eleven months off a full-time position and when I returned and dropped Stella at day home for the first time, my heart literally broke. I wailed.
I dropped her off, got in my car, and processed my grief by crying all the way to work. At times I moaned like a wounded animal. This eventually passed, but it was a good few months of this very difficult transition.
It was my goal to be able to return to something part-time this time around.
I’ve been thinking about going back to work for months now. What does that look like now that I am a mother of two, especially in the face of so much change?
I’m the kind of person who needs time. Think a little…let it sit. Ponder, marinate, ruminate for a while. Forget about it, come back to it. I digest the foreshadowed change in waves.
Insight and wisdom rise for each of us when we give a decision time to breathe. See how it changes – see how the feelings shift. And then, voila! Ideally an epiphany will come – clarity. That is what I’ve been hoping for.
I am a birth worker now. A birth doula. It lights me up because being witness to families in a sacred transformation is ultimately the greatest honor I’ve known. It’s humbling. It’s incredibly challenging. And afterwards I always feel lit up. Birth work is my fire.
Everyone’s journey preparing to return to work looks different. I took the following steps to prepare this time around.
Visualization
I’m an extremely visual person, so it helps me to visualize going back to work. I find this step extremely helpful.
It feels like I have a sneaky time machine to drop into the future and give myself a visceral experience of what I might be doing: how does it feel going back to work? how does it feel being away from my kids for a given time period?
I try to walk myself through the tasks of my role:
Scheduling and interviewing with potential families over zoom or in person: how does that feel?
Being on-call for a birth: how does that feel?
Responding to my clients’ needs over text, email or phone: how does that feel?
Being called out to a birth to support: how does that feel to be with a family for a few hours or potentially a day or two?
Visualization is a powerful thing. I find I can override my overly active and analytical mind and let my body give me signals of knowing, sensory observations, experiential insights as to what might be a challenge returning, what’s going to be a sheer delight, and everything in between.
Ok – so visualization has happened several times. And I was given the nod by my body. This feels right.
The next thing to consider is how do I logistically set up my life to support being a part-time working mom?
Asking For Help
I am fortunate I can schedule birth education with families around what works for our children, my spouse, and my doula partner and her family. This might look different for you if you have standard hours to keep.
But because of this flexibility, I know that a certain amount of my role is predictable and a certain amount is not.
The next question I ask myself is “What do I need to set up? What framework and support from my village and network can be there for me if my husband is not available?”
For me, a doula partner is important. Someone I can share call time with, someone that can back me up if necessary and vice versa. Someone I can bounce things off of, debrief with, learn from.
Is there a colleague that can support you? Is there a possibility of sharing workload or is there a colleague you trust that can be there for you and you for them. I think it’s important to not feel alone in your work.
My next consideration would be “Who are those folks I can call that can be on-call for me when I am on-call for my families?”
I think part of being able to enjoy my role as a birth worker is knowing that if I have to leave at a moment’s notice, my children are safe, with people they know who can respect and facilitate their lifestyle.
I find this step both challenging and rewarding. It can be challenging to ask for help because I can be stubborn, proud, and lazy at times. Sometimes the sheer effort of asking for help can feel exhausting.
But we all know that SOLO is not a fully sustainable approach. I have much more endurance when I ask community to be there for us.
People want to help. That short list of folks willing to rise to the occasion should we need it, is important.
Accepting the Emotional Journey
I’ll remind you, this process is fluid. I’m not always exactly sure what I’m doing, but I know I’m preparing to return to work.
My postpartum brain is different that my pre-baby brain. I think most birthing folks would attest to this.
I’m lucky, because I was able to dip my toe back into work before making my final decision. I attended a birth a month ago. I think I understood my brain and capacity would be different because my mommy friends told me the second return would feel different.
My ability to hold space is different. I observed a more holistic approach as a birth worker this time around.
I observed a bit more humanness as well. I’m not as hard-edged as I once was. A softening has taken place and I think my heart is a bit more accessible now.
It is requiring some patience and some self-compassion as I see that I need a bit more support coming back from births, a bit more assistance debriefing, integrating my experience, processing.
This is a newly wired brain now and nothing is static. Everything is changing. This is the journey of fluidity and impermanence: recognizing that our familial needs might change from day to day.
There’s this movie called “Hector and the Search For Happiness”.
Image description: Simon Pegg (playing Hector in “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) is sitting in a small room. The walls are dark brown wood paneling. He’s wearing a grey t-shirt and an unbuttoned, dark grey, long-sleeved shirt over top. There’s a watch on his left wrist. He’s adjusting a helmet on his head that is covered in wires and electrodes.
#SpoilerAlert: at the end of the film he’s hooked up to this brainwave emotion detecting device to contribute to a happiness research study. He ends up having an intense conversation speaking heart-felt truths to his beloved on the phone. As they reunite and go through the vast array of intense emotion reconciliation brings, his brain lights up like a rainbow.
Image description: a still from the movie “Hector and the Search for Happiness”. There are multiple images of brain scans, lit up in many colours. The rest of the screen is filled with medical information and data about the brain scans.
Every emotional centre in the brain lights up and they all flash at once. No real duality.
We get to feel all of it: the light and the dark, the courage and the doubt, the momentum and the stillness.
I think that rings true in my experience of returning to work once you have kids. It’s not either/or. Feel all the feels.
You don’t need to have one nice tidy independent emotion all tied up in a bow to have the clarity to make a move and be a mom who also works outside of the home.
It can be messy and you can feel it all, all at once.
