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Three weeks ago, I popped my sweet, 7.5 month old baby into nursery with her brother, boarded the Thameslink and pootled off in to work for the first time since December. The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster – not necessarily in the way that I was expecting. The last time I went back to work from Mat leave it was to a new job, so going “back” to the same job was a new experience for me.
I was really excited to be returning to work – I love my job, it’s hard, I work with some difficult people, I work with some brilliant people, I work with some just-plain-lovely people. I love that it’s hard, I love that I use my brain, I love that I get challenged, and have to make difficult decisions, and have to work. Work work. Work at a desk work. I know parenting is also work, believe me, I know it is work, and that is another reason I was so excited to be going back to work – I am not, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, a natural “stay at home mum”. I have the UTMOST respect for women who can look after children all day, keep them stimulated, fed, clean(ish) and safe. I am not one of these women. I am a “pay someone else to look after my kids” kind of woman. And that is okay.
So it was with no small amount of glee that I made up a packed lunch, put on some tights, and bought my train ticket (okay, not the tights bit, I still hate tights). Week one was brilliant – filled with happy welcome back greetings, “oh my god – you look so great” (no kidding, last time you saw me I had a 4kg baby in my belly, and couldn’t see my giant swollen ankles!), it was so nice to be back, to feel like I’d been missed, to see my work friends and to hear all the gossip of the year. I got to show off pictures of the kids, and respond to the ubiquitous questioning about who was looking after them. Everyone seemed to assume that I would be back part time, which is something I still don’t really understand… don’t they know how much a St Albans mortgage costs?! I even had one of my colleagues ask if I would join her in approaching our shared boss about doing part time hours – which shouldn’t have bothered me but it did. I don’t quite get how STILL it seems such a novelty for a new(ish) mother to work 5 days a week. It seemed like most things had stayed the same even though some people had changed jobs, which gave me a degree of comfort that I knew what was going on. Thameslink screwed me over three times in the first week, and my baby needing to be breastfed in the morning screwed me over another time, so I was late basically every day, which was pretty annoying. Other than that, I was feeling great. I had had such a wonderful maternity leave so I was rested, which helped. I even had newfound initiative to actually do a healthy packed lunch every day (something which did not last into week 2).
Week two sucked. Fully sucked. Sucked really really hard. My god it sucked. By the end of the week I really was wondering if I should just jack it in and do the stay at home mum thing. Any comfort I had felt in week one about things being the same disappeared. I cried when I turned up to an important meeting in the wrong building (it had moved while I’d been away). I forgot the technical word for something that is pretty basic, and realised that baby brain doesn’t go away. I felt like a total failure when I realised I hadn’t done laundry for so long that my baby had run out of trousers. Baby girl started getting a wobbly bottom lip at nursery drop off, having been a trooper up to this point, so I was feeling like a shit mother. Husband was struggling to adjust to having to take two to nursery every morning (“can you please just get them dressed before you go?”), so I was feeling like a shit wife, too. Meanwhile at work, I realised why everyone was so keen to tell me how much they had missed me; because they had. My maternity leave cover had been… well… they’re not me, so they had done things in a way that I wouldn’t have done things – and there were plenty of things that hadn’t been done at all. It was really hard to come to terms with that. I had made a whole human child in the last few months – how on earth could my mat leave cover person not have even got through to item 3 on the to do list that I spent so long compiling for her?! So people started asking me to do the things that should have been done 6 months ago, and they were frustrated that they hadn’t been done, and I was frustrated that they hadn’t been done, and I was annoyed that the frustration was being sent in my direction, but I had to get on and do some of the things, which meant working really hard.
Week three was better: it didn’t hurt that my children chose this week to remind me why I did not want to be a stay at home mum – they were uncharacteristically foul, and it really helped give me the energy to get onto the train on Monday morning. It took until this week (baby’s week 4 of nursery) for the inevitable nursery lurgy to hit the house. I had hoped that having an older brother might give her a mighty immune system, but no. She got it, I got it – the boys got off scott free. With the lurgy came some clarity. My job is hard, and that’s why I love it. Over the course of my maternity leave, some parts of my job had got harder, some parts of my job had got easier and on balance it probably netted out to be about the same level of hard, but I had not realised quite the effect that being away for 9 months would have on me. I have had to relearn the job, almost from the ground up. But the rest of the world doesn’t realise that – you don’t get (or I certainly didn’t get) the same kind of allowance that a new person would get when you have to ask stupid questions. I feel really exposed by not knowing everything that is going on, I feel like my grip on the job is not as tight, but I feel like every day I get a little bit closer to being good at my job again.
So my top tip for going back to work? Lower your expectations. Way low. Of what you’re going back to, and of yourself, and of your family – this is a change for them too. Don’t expect everything to have been done the way you would have done it. Don’t worry if you only have energy to warm up a tin of tomato soup for tea at the end of the day. Don’t be surprised when your kid gets a cold (although maybe dose yourself up on Echinacea and Vitamin C). Don’t expect your co-parent to find this any easier than you do. Don’t worry if the house is so messy that there are cobwebs between the un-washed dishes. Don’t worry if you can’t remember a word you haven’t used in a year. You’ll re-learn it; the word, and the job. I said I would give myself 3 weeks to get back into the swing of things, and I’m going to give myself another 3, because I think I was being stingy.
Good luck to all my fellow returning to work mums, remember that you are setting a great example to your children… and that (if you’re anything like me) you’ll love them a little bit more because you have the chance to miss them.
