That moment you realize the logistics were the easy part.
An essay about returning to work after parental leave — and what you find there.
Before I went back to work, I thought the hard part was going to be leaving.
I was wrong. The leaving was painful, yes. But the part I hadn’t prepared for was the arriving. Walking back in. Sitting at my desk. Opening my laptop. And realizing that while everything around me looked exactly the same, something about me did not.
Nobody warns you about this. The logistics get discussed in detail — pump schedules, childcare transitions, manager conversations, return-to-work plans. There are checklists. HR has a process. The pump bag gets packed.
What doesn’t get planned is what happens to the person who walks back in.
Parental leave ends and you return. But you do not return to who you were before. You return as someone who has been through something — something that rearranges your sense of yourself in ways that take months, sometimes years, to fully understand. You are a mother now. You are also still everything else you were. And those two things do not always know how to occupy the same body gracefully.
What I noticed, in my own return and in the returns of the women I’ve worked with since, is a specific kind of disorientation that doesn’t have a name in most workplace conversations. It isn’t postpartum depression, though sometimes it coexists with that. It isn’t regret about going back. It isn’t grief, exactly, though it contains grief.
It’s more like: you know how to do all of this, and something about the doing of it feels different now, and you cannot find the thread between who you were before and who you are today.
You go through the motions — and the motions are fine, actually. You do your job. You pump in the 12-minute windows between meetings. You answer the “how was your leave?” with the acceptable version. You plan the dinners and the drop-offs and the pickups. You perform readiness.
And inside, in the quiet moments, you wonder: is this what it’s going to feel like now?
It doesn’t have to.
What helped me — and what I’ve watched help the women who’ve done this work — wasn’t more logistics. It wasn’t a better system for the morning. It was actually stopping long enough to ask: who am I going back as? What do I want to feel like in six months? What do I need that I haven’t named yet?
These aren’t soft questions. They’re the most practical questions there are. Because a woman who knows what she needs and has a plan to meet those needs returns differently than a woman who white-knuckles it through the first year and wonders why she’s depleted.
Empower Your Return is the course I built to hold those questions. Fifteen lessons at your own pace. The childcare plan and the identity work. The rights you have that nobody tells you about. The home logistics and the inner ones. And underneath all of it — the question of what it means to go back as yourself, not just as the person they were expecting.
If you’re in this moment now, or you’re heading toward it — the course is at imhmo.com/empower-your-return.
And if you want to talk first, about where you are and what you’re carrying — the Chemistry Call is 45 minutes and free. No pitch. Just a real conversation.
You don’t have to figure out who you’re going back as alone.
— Coral