You will become more efficient than you could ever have imagined
And 28 other things I wish I had known earlier about motherhood and work.
When I reflect on my years since becoming a mother and think of what has been hard, my mind creates the following buckets: a) the intense moments in mothering that felt (feel) spiky but not extended, and b) the low-level background buzz of hard that was (is) less about raising my daughter and more about my own evolution.
For example: bucket a) she felt teething hard, and it was so damn hard to see her in pain – but it wasn’t ALL the time (though, past me would have likely disagreed with this), and bucket b) learning to discern what to breathe through and surrender to and what to push against to change/steer. Both hard, just, well, two different kinds of hard.
I’d argue that we do a pretty good job of preparing or supporting mothers for bucket a – and we do a pretty terrible job at preparing or supporting mothers for bucket b.
A lot of what I found (find) most challenging in bucket b was my relationship with paid work and work in general – and by “in general”, I mean the way we think about value, identity and structure – and what happens to those things when women enter motherhood… You know, the light stuff.
Through my PhD research into motherhood and work, and my own lived experiences, I’ve come to realise a few things about these topics.
This essay marks my 70th article on Substack(!?)… And so, I thought, why not share some of these learnings in one post?
Maternity leave is a terrible term to describe what actually happens.
We’re pitched it as a holiday – something our employers, and society more broadly, are giving us as a favour. Meanwhile, our bodies are ripped apart, and we’re introduced to a level of sleep deprivation, noise and hormonal rollercoasters like we couldn’t imagine – all often alone. Yes, it’s incredible, and the joy is like no other, but the work of mothering begins as soon as your baby is put in your arms, and there is nothing “leave” like about it. Humanity Service, perhaps, or Maternity Work, is a better description.
The mothering work you do in early motherhood can be terribly isolating.
It will often make you long for your “past life” where you had a team and other structures around you – typically the only real “village” many of us are exposed to. But it can be confusing, because you change in motherhood, and all of a sudden, that pre-motherhood life that once felt familiar and safe, feels completely at odds with everything (everyone) now important to you.When/if you return to paid work, you might suddenly feel like you’re a square peg in a round hole.
It’s confusing because while everything looks familiar, it can feel as if you no longer belong. You’re not imagining it – you’re just experiencing what it’s like (probably for the first time) to not be the “ideal worker” anymore. Workplaces were designed for ideal workers (those with work devotion and no care requirements), not always for mothers.Expectations of both what it means to be an “ideal worker” and a “good mother” are regularly at odds.
Your work might expect you to show up consistently and unaffected, but society – even those closest to you – might have other subconscious expectations of how you shouldn’t be putting your child in full-day care. It sucks. It’s hard to navigate. Society has made it nearly impossible to “win” both roles. Back yourself to know what matters most to you at any given hour of the day.Some workplaces are incredible.
It’s easy to be terrified by either your own experience or what you’ve heard from others, too. But I think it’s important to remember some workplaces do get it right. They do exist. They’re typically the ones that don’t obsess over presenteeism and understand how to measure output over time in a seat.But healthy, flexible work options are culture-dependent as much as they are policy-enabled.
It’s more than what’s on paper. It’s in the lived experience of it all. Who is using flexible work? Everyone, or just parents? How are people promoted? What’s expected in person vs what’s normalised in remote work?Your manager and your colleagues are often just as important as the policy and culture.
This one comes up regularly in the research. We think policy protects us, but forget that most policy is implemented by our direct managers – and how they interpret, behave or relate with the policy can have a major impact on your experience. The same goes for colleagues who contribute to your immediate work culture.All that being said, many mothers find working from home full-time both a blessing and a curse.
I know! How dare we be complex creatures! How dare we want flexibility AND connection AND IRL conversations! Swinging the pendulum from full-time office work to full-time home work is tough. As Julie Schechter said in this How Mothers Work interview, it can mean you are “always at home” – and we all know how well that worked for us in the pandemic…There is a huge tradeoff to be made between informal and formal flexible work arrangements.
Some mothers opt for “informal flexible arrangements” to try to skip the broader promotion penalty, but are exposed to a lack of certainty that the arrangement can be relied on beyond the individual “granting it”. Whereas other mothers opt for “formal arrangements”, and while they get more certainty, they risk greater stigma on promotions, etc. Knowing the tradeoffs is important to your agency.Everything about this experience – from maternity leave to return-to-paid-work to full-time-unpaid-mothering – requires us to confront what structures we rely on in our lives to relate to the world around us.
Most of us unknowingly put the majority of our “structure dependence” on workplaces, and this goes CRASH when we leave it (even if temporarily). It’s seriously destabilising. And what’s worse is that we think it’s up to us to just build better habits and routines to fix it. They might help, but they’re not addressing the root cause of questions like: Who are you without a title? What, where and who do you belong to? Where are you positioned in relation to those around you? What do you believe in, and how do you identify others who do as well?There is grief in the loss of structure.
I think we’re somewhat warned about the grief that comes with the changes to identity, but I think that glosses over the broader structural changes mentioned above – and grief comes with that too. Someone once asked me to build a grief ritual, and I think there’s wisdom in that in all areas of grief – even when we’re fatigued beyond imagination.Be conscious of company policies that push your economic activity over personal parenting decisions.
Companies offering you fertility subsidies or sleep training support are not doing it to be a good workplace – they’re doing it to get you back into “ideal worker” status.We also need to be aware of how workplaces create an “acceptable professional mother.”
That is, the type of mother that they will treat as a “normal” employee, and not penalise for their caregiving needs. Many workplaces say they’re parent-friendly, but if they’re only making it friendly to a set of choices that benefit their own interests (ie; no flexibility on hours, no support on breastfeeding, no child-accompaniment budget for travel etc) then they’re not actually friendly, they’re just good at marketing. True friendliness and true “professional mother success” is having various examples of how mothers mother that are all still successful.Self-employment is not the answer for everyone.
It’s trendy (and often genuinely empowering) for a lot of women for a lot of various reasons – especially when workplaces have failed to adapt and redesign how to integrate mothers (parents) into the workforce. All families need to figure out what works best for them – but it’s important to read the fine print beyond your favourite influencer who built a six-figure PDF business that there are MANY tradeoffs, lack of protection and often a double investment (first to get the client, then to do the work) of being self-employed.The return to paid work for many mothers is more varied than research or headlines suggest.
The area is seriously under-researched and poorly represented in national survey collections that haven’t updated the nuance in their employment questions for 50 years. What happens when a woman returns from maternity leave to a new job? Is it returning or just being a new starter? What about the women who take up self-employment? What about the kind of self-employment that means you only get paid every other month? If we’re not researching or capturing the varied approaches, we’re crafting an incorrect narrative about how mothers do paid work.Workplaces (society) will often expect you to use individual strategies to address their structural flaws.
Listen, I’m not saying it’s bad to do these individual strategies – most people benefit from some study, mentorship or networking – but do it because you want to do it, not because you feel it’s being expected of you to demonstrate that you’re “ready to return to paid work.” It’s pretty brutal when the implicit message is that unless YOU check these boxes, then it’s not the workplace, but you, who have failed to be prepared for work and motherhood.Work wounds follow you into mothering because it is also… work.
“If I just work harder, longer, better at X problem, then it’ll all be fine.” – sound familiar? Or maybe yours is, “I’m not really good at anything, and if I don’t work hard, someone will call me an imposter”? Whatever it may be, be prepared for it to visit you when doing the work of mothering. And most importantly, be prepared to actually have to confront whatever this wound is, because the work of mothering will not shy away from demanding your growth and evolution.Thankfully, so do your work strengths.
Our strengths in work are not exclusive to whether or not we’re being paid in a titled job or not. Work is work – and knowing your strengths is a critical form of self-knowledge. They also extend to the work of mothering – and what a blessing that can be! Familiarity! Ease(ish)! How can you structure your day with that knowledge? And if you don’t have the knowledge of your strengths, I suggest this tool.
There is equal parts unlearning as there is learning.
The difference being, is that people only really tell you and judge you for the latter in mothering and motherhood because it’s often more visible. The unlearning is often a very internal, almost spiritual journey, and that can be harder to show or talk about in passing at the playground. What can be even more confronting is that the unlearning can feel at odds with all the ways you learnt to survive in the world (especially work) up until that point. It’s uncomfortable to shed what you no longer need – especially when a child is screaming in your face. Hang in there, all growth is uncomfortable at first.Priorities and values shift, and it’s important to be able to name what’s actually changed.
“Everything feels different” is a statement that’s true, but can create a lot of murkiness until you’re able to be specific in the everything and the different. It might not be immediately obvious, but making time to be specific is critical for clarity in action. Maybe pre-baby you valued “Independence”, and now your small child is attached to you 24 hours a day, and maybe that feels confusing. Maybe, for this season, “Love” or “Family” or “Quality time” is feeling more important, and that’s okay. Just make sure you name it.
Your child’s temperament dictates more than books suggest.
And one of the biggest choices you’ll face regularly is when to work with it or to push it to a different kind of behaviour. This will feature in nearly every area of your life. Feeding, sleeping, transporting, playing, dressing and, importantly, whether or not you’re able to be physically separate easily. Every baby, as with every human, is uniquely coded and learning their code is part of the work. But you will often face people, books and products that make money off trying to codify people into groups and repeatable practices. Think about it, would anything ever sell in the mass market if you were told that your baby is unique?You might also just learn to compartmentalise external work for what it is: a means to an end, and not the end in itself for a happy life.
I don’t know about you, but I have always been a poster child for my paid work HAVING to be part of some greater plan of my contribution and legacy to the world. It took up a lot of my EVERYTHING. I could never understand how people were able to just treat it as work. But now, with a child and a greater understanding about the depth of life, I can see how it might just be necessary to fund that life, and not create meaning in itself.But when you have kids, income, expenses and tradeoffs are very, very real.
Charlotte Stephens explained this well in her How Mothers Work interview when she explained how any potential income has to be traded off against the very real cost of childcare, etc. This is only made scarier when you think of the motherhood penalty against “taking time off”. So the real shitshow becomes: have access to work, but not too much work that you’re paying for extended care (especially relevant with school kids) but don’t have no access otherwise you might not be able to get back into work later. It’s insane.
There is a difference between motherhood and the work of mothering.
I describe it as motherhood being the experience of being a mother, and the mental and emotional load that comes with that, and mothering being the physical (and mental, emotional) act of work in raising your child. Knowing the difference, especially in early motherhood, and especially if you’re DOING the work of mothering, can be helpful in characterising how your day is spent.
The work of mothering is the most fulfilling and challenging work available.
It will test you, push you, grow you, open you up and fill you with a deeper perspective on this crazy human experience like no other. In one breath, everything in life is full of joy and by the next, you’re wondering to just what extent you need to be broken down by all your wounds that seemed to have resurfaced and are being mirrored back to you by the most angelic-looking creature that YOU created. Life’s a trip. As with all work, you do your reps, you get stronger, you become, dare I say, good at what you’re doing, and of course, it will change as soon as that happens, but even with all the challenge, I would come back for the indescribable fulfillment it brings every time.You will become more efficient than you could ever have imagined.
No MBA, Harvard-labelled-anything, coaching course, [insert whatever else is being pitched to you online] will make you as efficient and able to ruthlessly prioritise like motherhood, and the work of mothering, will make you. Society has spent far too much time and money making mothers think their brains are going cRazY instead of focusing on all the ways in which a mother’s skills and capabilities become next-level superpowers.Time is permanently altered.
There is the kind of time before you become a mother, and the kind that happens after. The first is consistent. It fits onto a normal clock and a normal calendar, and everyone around you appears to follow the same rhythm. Then you become a mother, and time is warped. What was once an hour is unrecognisable. Sometimes faster, sometimes containing a whole day within the same 60 minutes. It can be challenging to slot back into pre-motherhood time environments when your own perception of it has shifted. You’re not going mad. Promise. Your mind is becoming more elastic.Motherhood belongs on your resume, and to be recognised as a valuable part of your career journey.
This is not some sort of neutral, trivial experience that has no (or negative) influence on your work capacity and your broader career. It’s a pivotal growth experience that makes you a freaking weapon in the office. Don’t shy away from it. Own it. We all have to if we want the narrative to change, no matter how much the man’s eyes you’re speaking to twitch or glaze over a little in conversation. Mentally give them a little, “Bless your heart” and continue on explaining how pivotal your experience has been and how you can contribute to their productivity.As we enter a different world of work with AI, mothers have a real opportunity to shape how this plays out.
Not just in how, why and what we do at work – but the how, why and what we do when we’re not working extended hours and have to create structure and meaning in our lives beyond a 9-5. We were overlooked the last time the men sat down to discuss the future of work when they came in from the factories to the offices – let’s not let it happen again.Now… What else would you add?
With care,
Kiya
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What an incredible body of work you’ve created! 👏👏👏 I hope you’re very proud of all of this, thank you for being a guide to me and so many other mothers in moments of WTF in early motherhood. ❤️
Agree with all but number 27 is a big fat yes!