The thing that made returning to work after maternity leave a bit easier

I recently came across Laura Vanderkam’s post about dealing with going back to work after your maternity leave. It made me think about the one thing that I did when going back to work after BlueEyes was born, and that was for my husband to take a week off, to take care of BlueEyes the first week I went back to work (BlueEyes was 3 months when I went back). This was a great thing for us for a couple of reasons:

1. By being home for a week with BlueEyes, my husband realized what it takes to be home with a baby and why some days when I was on maternity leave I would be ecstatic to have contact with another grown-up after being home with a baby all day. He realized how exhausting it was, how for some reason you get nothing done all day and by 5 PM you find yourself on the couch with a crying baby, still dressed in pyjamas that may or may not have been puked on. After this, he would never ask, “What have you done all day?” on days that I was home.

2. For me, it was nice to go back to work and not have to worry about how BlueEyes was doing in daycare that first week. Instead, I only had to worry about pumping milk, being incredibly sleep-deprived, not fitting into my old clothes yet, trying to remember what I was sciencing about before going on leave, and adjusting to being this entirely different person who was mostly very alert whether somebody was crying or hungry.

3. I don’t know if for BlueEyes it mattered whether he was home with my husband or at daycare. I like to think that it was a nice transition for him, to have to drink from a bottle but still be in the house that he knew before going to daycare, but with such a little baby, it’s hard to know.

I think my ideal situation would be to have some hybrid work-baby situation with a small baby: be able to bring them to work or be able to work a bit from home (which I did much more with Little Brother), or be able to have both parents work half days, but of course each baby (and parent) is different. What would your ideal transition back to work look like?

Babyattachmode (@BabyAttachMode) is the pseudonym of a neuroscience PhD turned industry scientist. This story was published on July 29, 2015, on her Scientopia blog, In Baby Attach Mode (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.