The first time I returned to work as a mum, I thought the hardest part would be leaving. Leaving my baby. Leaving the rhythm we had found together. Leaving a version of
myself that felt raw, tender, and still unfinished. I believed that going back to work would feel like stepping into familiar ground. That once I was back at my desk, using my voice and my brain in ways I recognised, something in me would click back into place.
It didn’t.
Instead, I felt slower. More emotional. Less certain. I noticed how easily my concentration slipped, how often my thoughts wandered back to home, how much effort it took to care about things that once felt important. I told myself it was brain fog. I told myself it was tiredness. I told myself I just needed more sleep, more time, more discipline.
What I didn’t know then was that nothing had gone wrong. My brain was not failing me. It was changing.
When I returned to work the second time, I already knew that motherhood leaves a permanent imprint. I knew I would not feel the same. I thought that knowledge would make it easier. In some ways it did. In others, it made the contrast sharper.
This time, I wasn’t trying to become who I had been before. I was trying to understand who I was becoming. I noticed how deeply I felt things now. How my tolerance for urgency had softened. How my capacity came in waves rather than steady lines. I cared differently. I worked differently. I moved through my days with a new awareness that I could not switch off.
I began to understand that what we often dismiss as brain fog is something far more profound.
Matrescence is the process of becoming a mother, and it reshapes us from the inside out. During this transition, the brain reorganises itself around connection, safety, and care. We become more attuned to emotion, more sensitive to threat, more responsive to the needs of others. This is not a loss of intelligence or capability. It is a shift in wiring.
But we live in a world that rarely makes space for this change.
So instead of being supported through it, many women turn inward. We question ourselves. We try to override what our bodies and brains are asking for. We push, we mask, we perform competence while quietly wondering why everything feels harder than it used to. Returning to work after becoming a mother is not a single moment in time. It is a renegotiation of identity. It asks us to hold who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming all at once.
The tension comes when we are expected to do this without changing anything else.
Work often asks for sameness. Motherhood demands adaptation. And somewhere between the two, many women feel like they are failing at both. What I know now is that the answer was never to toughen up or push through. It was never about getting back on track. There was no track to return to. What was missing was support. Support that recognised that evolution is not a problem to solve, but a process to be honoured.
Support that understood confidence does not come from pretending nothing changed, but from being resourced enough to work with what has.
Becoming a working mother did not make me less capable. It made me more discerning. More values led. More aware of what matters and what does not.
But growth without support can feel heavy. And that weight is not a personal failure. It is a sign that something meaningful is happening without enough scaffolding around it.
If I could speak to the version of myself who returned to work for the first time, I would not tell her to try harder. I would tell her that she is in the middle of becoming. That it is allowed to take time. That who she is now is not a compromise of who she was, but an expansion.
This is not a story about going back.
It is a story about learning how to live, and work, as someone new.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, my relationship with work began to unravel too.
Before motherhood, I spent over a decade in corporate marketing. I led large campaigns, managed significant budgets, and moved comfortably in a world built on metrics, performance reviews, and measurable outcomes. I knew how to succeed there. I knew how to be praised, promoted, and trusted. And yet, at home, I could not get my baby to sleep.
There was no feedback loop. No clear marker of progress. No reassurance that I was doing this well. Just a small human in front of me, and a feeling I could not shake, that all I wanted was to hold him, to be with him, to slow the world down enough to breathe.
That contrast was confronting. I could manage million-pound campaigns, but I felt lost in the quiet, repetitive hours of motherhood. The screen that once represented competence and clarity now felt distant and strangely irrelevant. What I needed was not another framework or strategy. I needed support that made sense of what was happening inside me.
In April 2025, I walked away from corporate life. It was not a dramatic exit fuelled by certainty or a master plan. It was a decision shaped by exhaustion, by love, and by a growing sense that I could no longer ignore what this season was asking of me.
Now, in March 2026, with some distance behind me, I can see more clearly what I could not name at the time.
Through the research I did with mums returning to work, and through my own lived experience, I have learned that this new identity often feels overwhelming not because it is wrong, but because it is unfamiliar. There is a grief that sits quietly beneath the surface. Grief for who we used to be, for the ease we once had, for the clarity of a life that felt more contained.
And at the same time, there is something else. There is curiosity. There is growth. There is a deeper sense of alignment beginning to form.
These two truths often exist together, even when we are told they should not. We can grieve what we were, and still feel drawn toward who we are becoming. We can miss the certainty of our old selves, and still feel excited by the possibility of a life that fits more honestly now.
Purpose, I have learned, does not arrive fully formed. It emerges slowly, through listening. Through noticing where pain repeats itself. Through paying attention to the questions women keep asking when the noise dies down.
The work I do now grew from that space. From the gap between competence and vulnerability. From the moment I realised that what I needed most was not to be fixed, but to be understood in context.
This season of motherhood does not ask us to abandon who we were. It asks us to integrate her. To let her inform what comes next, without insisting she remains unchanged.
We are allowed to hold complexity here.
We are allowed to say this is hard, and this matters.
We are allowed to grieve, and still move forward.
We are allowed to evolve, slowly, into work and lives that honour who we are now.
That, for me, is where purpose lives.
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