Becoming a working parent: the hidden identity shift

When you have had children and are returning to work after maternity leave, you likely have spent days, weeks, and months thinking about the practical shifts that need to happen to set yourself up for success.

How many days will you go back for? What will your hours look like? What are your childcare arrangements, and how will you juggle drop-offs and pick-ups?

What we pay less attention to, however, is the identity shift that comes from returning to work. The job role, the work and the environment may be largely unchanged. But we are not the same person who left.

Why work may feel different after becoming a parent

"I don’t feel the same as I used to at work, and Iam not sure this still fits me anymore" Sound familiar?

This shift can come as a surprise. It might be that you notice you're questioning career ambitions that you once felt so certain about, re-evaluating your priorities or feeling pulled between different parts of your identity. These are all normal signs that you are adapting to a significant life transition and making sense of who you are now.

Not only do you have a new role of parent, taking up a considerable amount of energy and headspace, but your values may also have shifted. What mattered to us before may be different now. We might have different tolerance levels in what we are, or are not, willing to ignore.

This all impacts how we show up to work, what we want work to look and feel like and how we define success for ourselves in our career. From this, we can gain clarity.

This shift we experience can, in some respects, provide more clarity. I remember a mentor sharing with me before I went off on my first maternity leave, that I may experience an increased sense of where I need to place my energy and focus at work, and my time had to become more boundaried, and I found myself prioritising, saying no and using the time I did have more wisely.

Uncertainty can teach us a lot

But this shift can feel unsettling, too. You are aware that things have shifted for you, both at a practical level, and you might notice that things feel different internally. But you might not have a clear sense of direction or understanding of what this means for you yet.

There is a tendency to want to jump out of this period of uncertainty and rid ourselves of this feeling. But there is a real opportunity here to learn from what this is telling you and not rush the process. Clarity here can come gradually as we build a deeper understanding of what we need, what we want and what this might look like in actionable next steps.

The goal isn't to return to who you were

Returning to work after having children is not simply about fitting your old self into a new routine. Whilst we recognise that we feel unsettled and things have shifted, recognising too that this is a result of becoming a different person, is a huge step. From there, we can move forward.

Taking time to explore and understand who you are now and what a new version of success might look like can offer helpful insight.

You might like to explore some questions like:

• What matters to me now? What feels more important to me than it did before? And what perhaps feels less important?
• What gives you energy at work? And what do you find harder to tolerate than you did before?
• What parts of how you define success may no longer fit who you are and your life now?
• What do I want to carry forward and what do I want to leave behind?’

By spending time in this discomfort and starting to unpack some of these questions, you gain insight and understanding about what deeply matters to you. Creating steps to more closely align with your values can reduce the friction you might feel and bring you closer to living and working in a way that aligns with your new identity.

This understanding rarely arrives overnight. It often develops gradually through curiosity, reflection and self-compassion. As it does, you can begin to build a working life that feels more aligned with who you are now, rather than who you used to be.