Back from parental leave: who you are now in the team and at home

“Just take it slowly, find your feet first.”

It was said kindly, over a cup of coffee, on the first morning after almost a year away. And yet it sounded like a door quietly closing. Because behind it stood something unspoken: while you were gone, we managed without you. Your desk is somewhere else now, someone else has your clients, meetings happen at a time you don’t recognise. Welcome back — and wait while we tell you where your place is now.

Returning after maternity and parental leave is almost always discussed as a logistical problem: who will pick the child up from nursery, what happens when they get ill, how to fit the timetable together. All of that is real. But when I talk to people who have gone back, I often notice that it isn’t the logistics that wears them out most. It is a question that is rarely said out loud: who am I now — in the team and at home?

Two returns at once

In marriage and family therapy we see people as parts of systems. A family is a system: it has roles, rules and a balance that settles in and resists change. You can read more about this in the knowledge base under the family as a system. A workplace is a system too. It has its roles (who handles crises, who calms the boss down, who knows where everything is), its unspoken rules and its camps.

When you go on maternity or parental leave, the person you used to be steps out of both systems at once — and a few months later someone different returns to both. Both systems have moved in the meantime. The team has shared your tasks out among others and found a new rhythm. At home, a new order has formed around the child, in which you — most often the mother, but increasingly the father too — have had the central role.

So going back is not a return to your old place. It is a negotiation in two systems at the same time, and at a point when you are sleep-deprived and as emotionally open as you will rarely be in your life.

The team has moved on

Systems don’t like gaps. When someone leaves, their role doesn’t stop and wait — someone takes it on. The colleague who covered for you may have had her first real chance to show what she can do. Your manager got used to taking questions to her. The team developed new jokes, new habits and perhaps new alliances. All of this is perfectly healthy — it is how a system survives an absence. But when you come back, your old role is no longer free.

This is where a triangle we know well from families often forms: you, the person who took over your work, and the manager who has to decide who gets what. If that decision isn’t stated clearly, it gets carried by small signals — who receives the email first, who sits next to the manager in the meeting, who is told to “take it slowly”. You can read more about how tension between two people gets passed on to a third under triangulation.

Added to this is something less comfortable, and well documented. In a 2007 study, the sociologist Shelley Correll and her colleagues sent employers equivalent job applications that differed only in whether the candidate was a mother. Women without children were invited to interview about twice as often as equally qualified mothers. Fathers faced no such penalty. In the laboratory part of the same study, raters judged mothers as less competent and less committed to their work. Earlier, Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick had shown that in others’ eyes a working mother becomes warmer but at the same time less capable — as if one quality pushed the other out.

This doesn’t mean your team is like that. But it does mean that “take it slowly” is not always simply kindness. Sometimes it expresses a quiet assumption that you are now someone whose load needs lightening because you won’t manage it. And that assumption can hurt more than any sleepless night.

Who you are now — an identity that is neither old nor new

In the 1970s the anthropologist Dana Raphael used the word matrescence for the transformation a woman goes through when she has a child — modelled on adolescence. It is a fitting name, because it says this is a developmental stage, not a moment. Just as a teenager is no longer a child and not yet an adult, a new parent is no longer who they were and doesn’t yet quite know who they will be. I wrote about this in Parenthood as a transition: who am I now that I am a mother or a father?

Going back to work sharpens this transition. At work you are expected to be who you were: reliable, quick, available. At home you are expected to be who you have become: attentive, present, there for your child. The researchers Jamie Ladge and Danna Greenberg described exactly this uncertainty in interviews with mothers returning to work: the women doubted not only whether they could do the job, but also who they were as workers now that they were mothers. Some tried to prove that nothing had changed. Others put their professional image together anew — with different priorities, but not with less worth.

A common sentence is: “It’s as if I’m only half there at work, and only half there at home too.” That is not a sign you’re failing. It is exactly what identity goes through in a transition: the old shape no longer holds, the new one hasn’t set yet. You don’t have to decide which of the two you really are. You need to give time a chance to make a third person out of both.

Guilt that runs both ways

Guilt on returning is almost always double. At work there is guilt for leaving at four on the dot, for being at home with a sick child for the first time this month, for not making the afternoon meeting. At home there is guilt for handing your crying child to the nursery teacher in the morning, for seeing them for two hours in the evening, for thinking about email at the playground.

The peculiar thing about this guilt is that better organisation doesn’t really remove it. You can have a perfect timetable and still feel you owe something everywhere. That is because the guilt here isn’t about a specific mistake. It is about two systems, each of which wants all of you, meeting in one body. I have written more about why guilt clings most to the most devoted parents in Mother’s guilt: why the most devoted mothers are the ones who feel they do too little, and about how guilt is shared between partners in Parenthood and career: the guilt that is never shared fairly.

It helps to call guilt what it is: not a verdict on whether you are a good parent or a good worker, but a signal that two important things are jostling for the same time. You answer a signal with a decision, not with judging yourself.

The balance at home has shifted too

A lot of attention goes to how you go back to work, and much less to what happens at home as a result. During leave, one parent often becomes the one who “knows”: when the baby sleeps, what they eat, how to soothe them. The other went to work and joined in in the evenings. That isn’t necessarily bad, but once you go back, that balance can’t be kept without cost.

This is often where something shows that researchers of couples after a baby have been observing for decades. In their long-term study of couples becoming parents, Carolyn and Philip Cowan found that one of the more important sources of dissatisfaction was the gap between how partners had imagined the work at home would be shared and how it was actually shared. If it stays invisible at home that one of you, on top of a job, is still the main manager of family life, it will show up as tiredness, irritability and resentment. The knowledge base describes this under mental load. I described in more detail how to keep your partnership going in this period in The couple after the baby: keeping your partnership alive through parenthood.

Going back is therefore also a chance to share out the roles at home anew. Not because they were wrong before, but because the system has changed and the old rules no longer hold. It works best when you don’t leave it to chance but agree on it explicitly, the way you would agree on moving house.

When it’s the father coming back from leave

More and more fathers take part of the parental leave, and they too return to teams that have moved. Their experience has its own particularities. On the one hand, what happens to mothers often doesn’t happen to them: nobody assumes they will now be less committed. On the other hand, something else can happen to them.

In a 2013 study, the psychologists Laurie Rudman and Kris Mescher showed that raters saw men who asked for family leave as less suitable for promotion and attributed more “weak” traits to them. In the same year, Jennifer Berdahl and Sue Moon reported that men who did more childcare experienced more mistreatment at work than men who didn’t. A father who comes back from leave and goes home at four can therefore meet jokes that aren’t quite jokes: “So who’s the boss at home now?”

For fathers, going back is therefore often a quiet affair. They have lived through something that changed them — days with the child that put them in a new role — and they return to an environment where there is no room to talk about it. The same applies to them: what they experienced at home is not something to hide in order to be taken seriously at work again.

A conversation worth hearing

The tension of returning often shrinks into a single sentence. This exchange is composed, not about a real person, but I have heard it in different versions many times.

“I’ve kept the Kovač account for now so you’re not overloaded. You’ll have different priorities now anyway.”
“Thank you for looking after them. I ran that account for five years.”
“I know. I just thought it would be easier for you this way.”
“Maybe it would. But I’d like to make that decision myself. Could we sit down with Andrej tomorrow and look at how we split the clients?”
“Yes … of course. You’re right.”

Something important happens in this short conversation. The colleague isn’t acting out of ill will — she took on a role and is now reluctant to let it go, which is understandable. The returning colleague neither gets defensive nor withdraws. She acknowledges what the other did, says what was hers, and suggests that roles be divided explicitly, with the manager, not quietly. The system gets a chance to reorganise itself out loud.

What helps in the first months

There is no recipe that makes going back easy. But some things make it more bearable.

A conversation with your manager before you return or in the first week. Not about how much you can handle, but about what changed while you were away and what your role will be now. Clarity here prevents your place from being decided by quiet signals.

Time to get to know the team again. The team has changed too. Perhaps new people have arrived, perhaps someone has left. It’s worth not measuring those first weeks only by how much you got done, but also by how much you reconnected.

An agreement at home. Agree on who is responsible for what this month — nursery, illnesses, shopping, doctors. Not so that everything is shared exactly equally, but so that nothing lands on one of you by default.

Room for sadness. Many people are surprised that, alongside relief, they also feel sadness when they go back — for the days with their child that won’t come again. That sadness doesn’t mean you chose wrongly. It means that time was worth something.

The first months after going back are often more like waves than a straight line. What overwhelms you one week barely touches you the next, and then comes back in another form.

Exercise: two maps

You can do this exercise tonight, alone or with your partner. You need a sheet of paper and twenty minutes.

1. Draw a map of the team as it was before you left. Write down people’s names and next to each one word about their role: who handles crises, who knows everything, who calms the manager down. Where were you?
2. Draw a map of the team today, as far as you know it. Who has taken on what? Where is there an empty space now, and where is it crowded? Where would you place yourself?
3. Draw a map of home as well — next to each family member (including grandparents or a childminder) write what they are responsible for now. Circle the things that have stayed with you by default.
4. Choose one thing on each map that you want to change. Not all of them. One at work, one at home.
5. For each, write the first sentence of a conversation that would start to change it — with your manager, a colleague or your partner. And write down when you will say it.

The maps won’t be perfect. Their value is that what happens quietly becomes visible — and what is visible can be talked about.

When it isn’t about adjusting

Everything I have written rests on the assumption that the difficulty lies in the transition — in two systems needing to reorganise. Often that is the case. But not always.

Sometimes it is unequal treatment, not adjustment. If, after your return, responsibilities were taken away without explanation, you were moved to a worse position, or you are made to feel that as a parent you are no longer wanted, that is not something a chat over coffee will fix. I can’t give legal advice here, but I can say where to turn: to your trade union if you have one, to legal advice, and in Slovenia discrimination is also dealt with by the Advocate of the Principle of Equality, and breaches of employment relations by the Labour Inspectorate of the Republic of Slovenia.

Sometimes it isn’t about work, but about distress after the birth. If your tiredness runs deeper than lack of sleep, if you can’t find joy in anything, if you are flooded with anxiety or thoughts that everyone would be better off without you, that isn’t “a hard return”. It may be postnatal depression or anxiety, which can appear many months after the birth and in fathers too. I wrote about this in Postnatal depression: when you “should” be happy and you are not. Turn to your GP or gynaecologist. If the thoughts are severe, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours), or in an emergency 112.

Sometimes going back is simply good. Some people return to work with relief, glad of adult conversation and of work they love. That isn’t a sign they are bad parents. And the other way round: some realise they don’t want to go back to their old job. That too is a legitimate outcome of the transition — not a failure.

If you recognise yourself in this and would like to talk about it, we can explore it together in therapy, on your own or with your partner — and I also work with English-speaking clients. Sometimes simply saying out loud what is happening in both systems is enough for things to start falling into place.

What to remember

• When you return from maternity or parental leave, you return to two systems that have both moved — the team and the home.
• Your old role in the team is no longer free; it is better to agree on the new one out loud than through quiet signals.
• Research shows that mothers are often credited with less competence, and fathers who care for children with less “seriousness” — this is not your personal failing.
• Guilt on both sides is a signal that two important things are jostling, not a verdict on you.
• If it is unequal treatment or postnatal distress, adjusting is not the answer — seek legal help or see a doctor.