Before you plan your comeback, understand your pause
Reflection series — part 1: Returning to work after motherhood
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a conversation about career breaks and returning to work. It left me reflecting on my own experience of stepping away from my career to embrace motherhood and full-time parenting, and on some of the things I learned along the way.
Parenting is more than a full-time job. And motherhood, particularly in those early years, adds layers of complexity that I don’t think we fully appreciate until we experience them ourselves.
For first-time mothers, there is so much we are unprepared for.
We enter motherhood with an idea of how beautiful this phase of life will be. And it is beautiful, in many ways. But there is also the postpartum experience, which doesn’t necessarily end after the first few weeks or even the first year. There are hormonal changes, physical recovery, sleepless nights, learning how to keep a newborn alive, and the enormous emotional responsibility of caring for another human being.
Somewhere in all of this, we are also trying to figure out who we are.
We have spent decades building our identities, pursuing an education, establishing careers, becoming financially independent, and developing a sense of ourselves. And then motherhood introduces an entirely new identity that we have to learn to coexist with. One that can be deeply fulfilling while also challenging us physically, mentally, and emotionally in ways we never anticipated.
And for mothers welcoming their second or subsequent children, the complexities don’t necessarily become easier. You’re nurturing a newborn while also caring for an older child, who may still be a toddler with their own enormous emotional and physical needs.
Get Prisni R’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So when you eventually begin thinking about returning to work, where do you start?
I think the first step is not updating your résumé or applying for jobs.
It is recognizing and understanding the circumstances that led you to take a career pause in the first place.
Was it a conscious choice to spend more time with your child? Was it the absence of adequate childcare or family support? Was it your own physical or emotional recovery? Or was it a combination of circumstances that made continuing to work difficult at that point in your life?
There isn’t one right answer. And you don’t need to justify your decision to anyone.
I borrowed the term career pause from Neha Ruch’s book The Power Pause, which I would highly recommend to mothers navigating this phase of life. I appreciate the distinction because a pause doesn’t have to mean an end to professional ambition or identity.
For me, understanding my own circumstances was an important part of figuring out what I wanted next. It also meant taking a closer look at the support systems I had around me, what I needed from them, and what I was willing to accept.
Before we begin thinking about how to pitch ourselves to a prospective employer, perhaps we need to spend some time understanding our own stories first.
Because how we understand our pause shapes how we eventually talk about it.
In my next reflection, I want to talk about something that was surprisingly difficult for me: learning to lean on my support system, after spending much of my adult life learning how to be independent.
