After I had my baby, I never really returned to the office in the way I thought I would. It was 2021, when remote and hybrid work had become normal, so when my maternity leave ended, going back to work did not seem like a huge transition. I was still home. I could breastfeed. I could wear sweatpants. On paper, it sounded almost ideal.
Then I opened my laptop in my apartment, with my baby and nanny just a few feet away, and tried to slip back into business as usual. Except nothing was usual anymore. I had a four-month-old who needed me, and I was living with postpartum depression (PPD). Very quickly, I realized returning to work was not going to be as simple as logging back on.
Planning And Feeding With PPD
At first, I thought being close to my baby during the workday would be a gift. So much of my PPD showed up as executive dysfunction. My brain could not move smoothly from point A to point B to point C, especially when it came to pumping, storing, freezing, dumping, and tracking milk. Nursing felt easier because I did not have to calculate or plan anything. I just had to be there.
But that also made me feel even more central to our new little family than I already did. Even if I had a meeting that had been on my calendar for weeks, if my nanny appeared with a hungry, crying baby, there was not much I could do. I would turn off my camera, step away from work, and feed my child.
Suddenly, even though I was technically back at work, I felt trapped at home all over again. Trying to match the pace of my job with the needs of my baby felt impossible. Instead of feeling relief when the nanny arrived, I felt dread. Feeding the baby, feeding myself, and working full-time in the same 450-square-foot apartment became my own version of Inception.
I asked Allison Yura, LCSW, a therapist trained in perinatal mental health, about setting boundaries between work and postpartum life. She told me, “Working from home comes with many benefits, but many parents find it hard to focus on work when they hear their baby in the other room. Switching quickly from the parenting hat to the work hat can cause stress and confusion for some parents.”
Three Babies In A Trench Coat
Because my company had become mostly remote, the first time I saw my coworkers after maternity leave was at a team lunch. By then, PPD and I were unfortunately very familiar with each other. I had barely left the house, let alone socialized. So getting dressed, putting on makeup, and walking up the subway steps to meet everyone felt like I was performing a role I no longer knew how to play.
I felt like three babies in a trench coat pretending to be a working woman. How could nobody notice? If a colleague asked how I was doing, did that mean they could tell I was struggling? I felt alien inside my own body while greeting people I had known for nearly a decade. I wanted to bang on the glass and ask for help, but I did not want to frighten anyone away. So when they asked, “How’s mom life?” I said, “Great!”
Yura reminded me that this kind of disorientation is common. “It is common to feel that the postpartum depression, or the postpartum experience in general, has changed the way the world appears!” she told me. “Integrating this new role as a parent can take time and may change the way you feel out and about in the world and interact with friends and family.”
Maybe I was not actually three babies in a trench coat. Maybe I was simply a new version of myself, trying to introduce myself to the world again.
Masking In Plain Sight
I thought working near my baby would quiet the rumblings of mom guilt. Instead, it made them louder. I watched my nanny take my baby outside on beautiful sunny days and felt jealousy move through me in a way that embarrassed me. My postpartum thoughts spiraled around the time I was losing with my baby, even when I knew I was doing what I had to do.
Then I would join a video meeting and snap into bright, cheerful, competent mode. In some ways, Yura told me, work can offer a break from the intensity of postpartum life. But that break has limits. “Forty or more hours a week of masking can get tiring and will likely lead to a restraint collapse at some point,” she says.
For me, masking was not always bad. Sometimes it helped me survive the day. It gave me structure when everything felt chaotic, and it allowed me to show up for my job when I felt like I was falling apart. But the better I became at acting fine, the harder it was for anyone, including me, to understand how much I was actually struggling.
Returning to work with PPD was not the clean break from motherhood I had imagined. Remote work blurred every boundary even more. In a single hour, I could be an employee, a mother, a patient, a milk machine, a scheduler, and an anxious overthinker. The world seemed to keep moving like nothing had changed, but I was becoming someone new. So no, I never fully returned to the office. But a new version of me is still showing up to work.
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Inspired by this post on Scary Mom.
