Maternity leave is over and your return to work is finally here.
You’re probably having mixed emotions and thoughts about this. If one of those thoughts is “How on earth am I going to do this?!” – I’ve got you.
Here’s a day-by-day guide to your first week back at work when you return from having a baby.
The day before
You might be feeling the pressure to ‘make the most’ of your last day of maternity leave with your family. Remember to keep things in perspective and that you will have other family days together. Don’t stress yourself out trying to construct the perfect quality-time day.
Think of things that can make your first working-parent morning a bit easier to manage.
Have you thought about what you might wear?
Whether you’ll be bringing a lunch in?
Do you need baby’s bag packed for childcare?
Anything you can do in advance to grease the wheels on day 1 you will thank yourself for.
I won’t insult you by suggesting you get a good night’s sleep; you’re the parent of a young child so we all know that’s not going to happen.
Day 1
Celebrate hard when you make it to work today. Make that your 1 goal, the big success of the day. Don’t even include whether you made it early, on time, or late – just the fact that you’ve made it at all is something worth celebrating.
It may not seem like much, but you’ll be underestimating all the logistics you’ve had to sort out, and the emotional load you’ll have had to deal with to get there. (When you think about this, you’ll know what I mean.)
So just get there, and call that winning.
Day 2
Spend some time today on your boundaries.
Make sure that your work diary is clear on when you are and aren’t contactable. Block time out for your lunch break.
Set up any auto-response emails that confirm your working and non-working days if you need to. (Also set up reminders to turn on your auto responses!).
Create a standard response for when someone tries to schedule a meeting outside your working hours (it will happen) that you can copy and reuse.
If you have work apps on your phone, see if there’s a setting or a mode that can turn off notifications from those apps during your non-work time, so that you don’t get disturbed or tempted into work.
This works the other way around too – maybe you want to turn off your phone notifications from everyone other than your childcare contacts while you’re at work. This would let you focus on one thing at a time, and ensures you’d only get disturbed for emergencies when you are at work.
Set out your stall early on how you want your working parent life to look. If you blur the lines now, it’ll be harder to clear-cut them later.
Day 3
Today, make the most of easing back in. Your workload probably hasn’t ramped up significantly yet, so you’ll possibly have some time and headspace free. These periods don’t last long in my experience!
Take a few more minutes to enjoy having a hot cup of tea.
Revel in the fact that you can go to the toilet on your own, and take as much time as you need without worrying that your toddler will be chewing on an electrical item by the time you’ve finished.
Have a catch up with a colleague. Start to remember what it’s like to be you at work.
Day 4
Have you got new colleagues to start to get to know? If you’re having that ‘new kid at school’ feeling, the best way to tackle it is head-on.
If you haven’t already, start reaching out to your new colleagues today and see if they want to grab a coffee / have a virtual chat.
Make the first move. The sooner that you can get chatting to them and start finding out how they tick, the sooner you can build up rapport and the easier it will be to work with them further.
Also, remember they’re probably curious to find out about you, too; this person who they’ve heard about but not actually met yet. This is your chance to let them know who you are and what you’re all about.
Don’t be shy – you just had a baby, you can literally do anything.
Day 5
Have a check-in with yourself; how are you feeling?
You might be a bit exhausted. New routines are exhausting, so that’s normal.
You might be thinking that nothing much seems to have changed, but also a lot feels like it’s changed – that, too is normal. Work has carried on without you while you’ve been raising a baby, and so things can feel very different when you return. Try not to make any judgements right now about these changes. Just see what you notice.
Now that you’ve done a few days of the new routine, have a little review.
Ask yourself:
What has gone well? (Celebrate that – you probably made it happen!)
Is there a part of the new routine that you find stressful and need to tweak?
Are you clear or unclear on what is expected of you at work that you’ve returned from maternity leave?
Take stock today on what’s been good so far and what hasn’t felt good.
If there has been stressful or negative scenarios, have a think on how you could mitigate those in future. Let’s nip any of that in the bud asap, otherwise you can sleepwalk into just putting up with shit forever more.
I hope your first week as a working parent has gone well – and if it has, well done you! Like everything, you get more accustomed to it all with practice.
If it hasn’t gone well, see that as an opportunity, not a failure. What can you learn? What can you change?
Let me know in the comments if you found this helpful, or any other tips you’d give to working parents returning from having a baby!
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