I’ve returned from maternity leave twice. Once in 2022, once in 2025. Both times were hard, and each were hard in completely different ways.
Maternal mental health at work is one of the most underserved areas when we think about people and culture, and most employers don’t realise it until something goes wrong.
The first time, I came back as a different person. I didn’t fully understand that at the time – I just knew the person sitting at my desk felt like a stranger wearing my clothes. The logistics were relentless and I struggled to adjust to the mental load of childcare drop-offs, feeds, sleep schedules, nursery settling periods, all compressed into the hour before I was supposed to be a functioning lawyer.
The second time was different. I wasn’t disoriented by the logistics in the same way, but my confidence had gone. Somewhere between the baby and the return, I’d lost whatever internal voice used to tell me I was good at my job. I still turned up and did the work. But I felt like I was pretending; someone had given me a script and I was hoping nobody noticed I was reading it.
Two babies, two years apart. Two completely different experiences of the same event.
Why this matters for employers
The reason I’m writing about this isn’t my personal therapy! It’s because I’ve advised employers on maternity returners, and the gap between what most return-to-work processes offer and what people actually need is significant.
Most employers treat the return as an event. You go on leave, you come back, there’s a keep-in-touch day, maybe a phased return for the first two weeks, and then you’re expected to slot back in. The process is designed around the assumption that the employee is essentially the same person who left, just slightly rustier.
That’s not how it works.
There’s a word for what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother: matrescence. Matrescence describes the profound biological, psychological and social transformation of becoming a mother – and the neuroscience behind it is fascinating.
Research has found that gray matter volume reduces in the majority of the brain’s regions during pregnancy, by around 4% on average. This isn’t a loss of intelligence. Scientists describe it as a tuning and pruning of synapses – old connections cleared away, new ones formed, particularly in the regions that govern social cognition. One neuroscientist compared it to Michelangelo chipping away marble to reveal David. Crucially, these changes can last up to six years.
We have a word for a similar process in teenagers; adolescence. We build whole systems of support around adolescents whose brains are reorganising and we certainly don’t expect them to juggle full time work whilst they’re at it!
We don’t extend the same thinking and respect of that adjustment to mothers. The flamingo is another useful image here – female flamingos lose their pink colouring during nesting and feeding, directing everything they have to their chick and it can take years to “get their pink back”. Some women describe the return to themselves after birth in exactly those terms; they’re not who they were. They’re not yet sure who they’re becoming.
Expecting them to slot back in as though nothing has happened isn’t just unrealistic – it ignores what the science actually tells us about the biological realities.
The mental health reality
For some women, the return to work isn’t just an adjustment. It’s happening alongside an active mental health condition. Postnatal depression and postnatal anxiety are more common than most workplaces acknowledge – around 1 in 5 women experience a perinatal mental health condition.
Postpartum psychosis and postnatal mania, though less common, are serious conditions that can emerge quickly and require urgent support. Birth trauma is another thing entirely – a woman can appear to have had a straightforward delivery and be dealing with the psychological impact of it months later, sometimes not until she’s back at her desk and the adrenaline of new parenthood has worn off.
None of these conditions are always visible. None of them are always disclosed, and none of them resolve on a timetable that fits neatly around a return-to-work date.
What the law says (and what it doesn’t)
Employers have legal duties here, even if they’re not always framed in those terms. Maternity discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 covers unfavourable treatment connected to pregnancy or maternity, and that includes treatment during or following a return from leave. Where maternal mental health amounts to a disability, which it can, reasonable adjustments are required.
Beyond the legal minimum, there’s the implied duty of trust and confidence, the general duty of care, and the practical reality that tribunal claims involving maternity returners are expensive, reputationally damaging, and almost always preceded by a period where something could have been done differently and more supportively.
The law is your basic minimum; it doesn’t tell you what actual support looks like.
What support actually looks like
Good support for maternity returners isn’t a checklist. It starts with the manager understanding that the person coming back may not be who they were, and that this isn’t a problem to fix – it’s a reality to work with.
Some practical things that actually help:
- A proper return-to-work conversation that asks open questions, not closed ones. “How are you finding it?” lands differently from “Are you all settled back in?” One invites an honest answer.
- Flexibility that’s genuine, not performative. If someone needs a later start on nursery days, that needs to work in practice, not just in theory.
- A manager who checks in regularly in the weeks after the return, not just on day one. The first week back is often adrenaline. Week four or six or eight is when it gets hard.
- Not assuming the second return will mirror the first. If someone came back confidently after baby one, don’t assume they’ll do the same after baby two.
- Awareness that maternal mental health conditions, including postnatal depression, anxiety, postpartum psychosis and birth trauma, don’t always resolve before someone returns to work and aren’t always disclosed. Managers don’t need to be therapists, but they do need to know what to look for and who to signpost to.
The thing nobody tells you
I didn’t expect to find the second return harder in confidence terms than the first. I think I assumed that having done it once before would make it easier. In some ways it did. In others, it didn’t come close.
The mothers returning to your teams are navigating something that’s personal, physical, hormonal, logistical, and professional all at once. They’re not asking for special treatment. Most of them are working harder than anyone realises just to appear functional.
What they need is a manager who’s paying attention, a process that treats them as an individual (who is severely sleep deprived and, at the end of the working day, will have hours of bedtime battles ahead).
We work with employers across the UK on maternity returner support, from training managers to reviewing family-friendly policies. If you’d like to talk to us, get in touch at enquiries@thrivelaw.co.uk or call us on 0113 861 8101.
