Eight years ago this month, she went back to work. Eleven weeks postpartum. Eleven. (I still wince typing that.)
I want to tell you about three versions of me, because honestly they’ve all been crowding my head lately.
The first one was pregnant, and she had a plan. (Q2 2018)
A really good plan, she thought. A launch plan, actually. She was a marketing leader in tech, helping millionaires make even more millions (yep), on the fast track with a great job, and so wrapped up in her ambition that she couldn’t tell where it stopped and she started. So of course she planned her return like a campaign: twelve weeks off, then bounce back. Done. Next.
She wasn’t naive. Well, maybe she was. She thought she’d become a Magical Mother the moment she gave birth. During work hours, her Working Woman Extraordinaire would be present. When the baby was around, her Magical Mother self would be present. And the real challenge, she thought, was managing the logistics. That was the part she worried about most.
The second one arrived in October 2018.
She went back to work on maybe four hours of sleep a night, and had been doing so for three months. She had barely stopped bleeding. She was smack in the middle of postpartum with zero idea that an identity collapse was already in motion. She cried between meetings, and then during meetings, and one day she was nursing on a Zoom call during a quarterly business review, trying to mute her tears, and all she could think was wtf. Who the F am I. Why am I like this?!
She loved her child, absolutely. She was also already burnt out from the grind. Her Magical Mother self wasn’t who she expected. Her Working Woman Extraordinaire was completely absent. She was completely lost to herself.
What she’d understand later is that it wasn’t a disruption, it was a fucking disintegration.
Her employer, this wonderful, benefit-filled, hipster tech company she’d loved working at for the past four years, had nothing for it. No transition plan, no playbook, no precedent, nada. Because - she learned about a 6 months too late - she was the first birth parent in leadership in its ten-year history. Ten years! So the support existed on paper but not in practice nor in culture, and somewhere in that gap it hit her that this wasn’t a personal failing, it was a systemic failing.
Still, she started questioning everything: her career, her identity, her ambition, all of it. She didn’t want the life she’d hustled so hard for, but she didn’t know what she wanted instead. Going back in time wasn’t an option. Now what? Eventually, she learned the word for her experience: matrescence, the psychological, hormonal, emotional and social transformation of becoming a mother. Present her wonders: Why the fuck did it take literal years for her to be introduced to this term?! Somehow everyone knows you get cleared for sex at 6 weeks, yet the biggest transition a woman can experience isn’t even societally acknowledged. Hell, even spellcheck doesn’t know it’s a word.
What came next was a long, slow unraveling of what she’d believed about herself. In coaching, she got to be held without performing, which she’d honestly never experienced. In therapy, she figured out her hustle had been a mask the whole time. And then the pandemic hit and everything stopped, and in the pandemic pause, as she stopped trying to force the societally expected bounce back, she finally made space to listen to herself. She heard her gut and heart say, Coach. Support moms. This is the work.
The third one is me, now. (October 2026)
Upon realizing it’s eight years to the month, my first thought isn’t “Wow. It’s so true that the days are long but the years are short.” Nope. It’s actually more like, “shit, how I’ve grown.” And then my second thought is “shit, how much growing I have left.”
Both are true. I have so much insight now, and so much gratitude, and have made so many mistakes, and I have a visceral understanding that hindsight really is 20/20, and I still catch myself spiraling into the if I’d only known then what I know now thing. I am learning to hold the regret and the gratitude together, and not let one cancel the other, and, honestly, some days I’m better at that than others.
If the woman on that Zoom call could see my Thursday, it wouldn’t be the tidy home or the well-behaved children (lol, they are not!) or the Magical Mother (who never did arrive, btw) that stopped her in her tracks. It would be the person living it: her wisdom, her strength, her clarity. And that woman in Oct 2018, still muting her tears, doesn’t know yet that she gets to become this.
At 11 weeks, I was only allowing myself to think with my head. I silenced my gut and my heart, and gosh, it cost me. Now all three of them get a seat at the table. Sometimes one takes the lead, but they all get to check in, and I make an intentional choice about who shows up when, and why.
On an ordinary day it looks like this. I’ve got a never-ending to-do list. I’ve got an important client meeting to prep for tomorrow. And something feels off. So I stop and give myself a minute, even twenty seconds, and what comes up tells me how to spend my time. Maybe it’s a workout. Maybe it’s prepping for the meeting. Maybe it’s a nap. Whatever it is, I chose it on purpose and it’s nourishing, which, funnily enough, is exactly why it’s productive.
And sleep, oh my god, sleep. At 11 weeks I was totally sure four hours was all I needed, that I could survive on it. I was so wrong. Sleep is my MIT, my most important thing, and I now protect it ruthlessly.
I’ll also say the part that story leaves out: I miss the independence pre-kid me had. Of course I do. And I can acknowledge that my independence grows every day, every week, every year And now I get to have that independence alongside my kids, and that is more rewarding and more fulfilling than I could have known back then. And ugh, I also still catch myself wanting to bounce back physically. The postpartum body, especially after two, just doesn’t. So I practice gratitude instead, gratitude for BodyPump and running and FRC, gratitude for my health, for getting stronger, for aging with grace.
If you’re 11 weeks postpartum right now, here’s what I want you to know:
I know it’s hard as fuck. Everything feels conflicted, everything is TOO BIG, the transitions are TOO MANY, and the judgment, good or bad, is TOO much. I know. And I know you can do this. Make space to listen to your heart and your gut. Make space for you. Nourish you, so you can -if you want to - nourish others. <3 <3
Resilience isn’t bouncing back. It’s burning down what no longer fits and rising into what does. I didn’t go back to who I was, I became someone new, and I am still becoming her. For that, I am incredibly grateful.