The Second Cutting of the Cord: What Actually Happens When You Go Back to Work

Good Inside with Dr. Becky

This episode of 'Good Inside' explores the emotional and practical challenges of returning to work after parental leave, featuring journalist Lauren Smith Brody, author of 'The Fifth

Key takeaways

• Returning to work after parental leave is often experienced as a 'second cutting of the cord,' symbolizing emotional separation from parenting identity.
• Many working parents feel guilt or disorientation upon return, despite being essential contributors at work.

Main topics

• The emotional transition of returning to work after parental leave
• Reframing the return as a professional reset opportunity

Notable quotes

"I call that chapter about the first day back in my book. I call the second cutting of the cord because that's what it felt like."

Conclusion

Returning to work after parental leave is not just a logistical transition but an emotional and professional

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) There's just something about summer that makes parents think, maybe this is the time to finally tackle potty training. And if that's where you are right now, I want to offer a minor reframe. Potty training isn't really about the potty. Now, I know what you're thinking. Um, Dr. Becky, what do you mean? Potty is in the name. But actually, it's really all about independence. See, your kid wants to do more things on their own. Your kid wants to build confidence and feel like a big kid. That's why I like Pampers Easy Ups. They fit and feel more like underwear than a diaper, so kids can practice pulling them up and down on their own. And those moments of, I did it, really matter in confidence building. They even come with Peppa Pig designs, which, if you have a toddler, you know can make almost anything more exciting. And because accidents are part of learning, Pampers Easy Ups are designed to protect day and night, which means less stress for you and more room to focus on helping your child learn. The goal isn't a perfectly dry day. The goal is to help your kid feel more capable. And I like that Pampers Easy Ups helps make room for that. Speaker 1 (1:06) We've partnered with Emily Oster, economist and founder of Parent Data, to Speaker 2 (1:09) bring exclusive pregnancy and baby content to the Good Inside app. Yes, Emily herself will be inside the app. To celebrate the launch, we've got a limited time offer. Join Good Inside on an annual membership and we'll gift you a full year of Parent Data, Emily Oster's membership program. Good Inside and Parent Data together. It's kind of the ultimate two-for-one. Redeem this offer at goodinside.com. Hi, before we get into today's episode, if you have a new baby at home, or if you're about to, or if you know someone who's in that boat, I want to tell you about our Rattled podcast. It's a show made specifically for those first few months of parenthood when everything is harder than expected, or it kind of feels like you just started inhabiting a new world even though you're inside your same home. Right now we're running a series over there called In Good Hands. Three episodes about finding care for your child. The last one is about going back to work after having a baby. Think of it as back to school for parents. It's that re-entry moment after the leave ends. And that moment is hard in a variety of ways for every single honest human I know. Lauren Smith Brody joins me and it's a conversation I think you're really ready for. Find and subscribe to Rattled. wherever you're listening to this. And let us know what you think. Email podcast.goodinside.com. I love to know what resonates. I also love to know what doesn't. I promise you don't have to take care of my feelings because that feedback helps me grow. And that's what I'm really all about. Let's start with some data. 76 % of employees say caregiving affects stress at work. 54 % say it affects their work significantly. 46 % have missed work entirely due to caregiving, and 41 % have seen productivity decline from the challenge of finding or managing care. This Speaker 1 (3:01) data Speaker 2 (3:02) is from research that Care.com did, and it's a perfect transition into the final episode of our three-part series with Care.com about finding care for your baby. And today, the element of that we're going to be diving into is the transition back to work. We're going to talk about what happens after parental leave ends. Not just the logistics, although we have some practical logistics that are going to be helpful, but also just how it feels when you get there. The disorientation, the guilt, the relief, all of it sometimes happening in one hour. My guest today is Lauren Smith Brody. She's a journalist, author, and the person who wrote The Fifth Trimester, a book about this exact transition. She's talked to hundreds of working mothers about the return to work. And she did it herself after her first son was born. She is so honest. She has names for things that make you say, oh, that's what that is. And she gets into the details about what it actually feels like when it all happens. So let's get right into it. So there's a lot out there about the decision to go back to work. Okay. And we'll talk about so many things related to that transition, but I like to start with the experience. That first morning, that first cup of coffee, the commute, the walk into the door, Speaker 1 (4:30) the going back to your desk, but maybe your desk is in a new place or something. Do you remember anything about that first moment? No, I blacked out. No, I remember it all. In fact, when my husband read the draft of my book before I sent it to my publisher, he was like, I can't believe you remember all these details. And I was like, yeah, because I felt them like cellularly. Yeah. I actually call that chapter about the first day back in my book. I call the second cutting of the cord because that's what it felt like. And I think like so many moms, it actually, it didn't feel like a decision to me to go back or not. I was at that point, my husband was in his medical training. I was the breadwinner. There was no angst about will I or won't I? I really had to. And I had had 12 weeks of leave, which most of them even paid, which, you know, I thought was sort of as good as it could ever get. What was wrong with me that this felt hard? And it's funny coming into the studio today, I walked up the exact same subway stop and I walked up the exact same flight of stairs. And I remember how heavy each step felt. And then I walked in and it was like blast of air conditioner, nobody on my body, water, ability to go to the bathroom and colleagues who were so grateful to have me back. And that alleviated immediately a lot of the feeling of do they resent me? Have they been covering for me? What did I miss? Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:52) You know, I'm thinking about these worlds that we're then traversing, right? In the moment we go back to work where, okay, so you're leaving your house and maybe you figure things out there. You're trying to figure out this human being that is in some ways very, very needy and very loud. Also very simple and boring, like all at kind of the same time, right? And then you have a work life where maybe going back to a world that's chaotic, where you're getting pinged all the time and there's Slack messages and emails and three projects and deadlines. very high stim in a lot of ways. Talk to me about just like the traversing of those different worlds and yeah, how do people feel competent? Can you feel competent in both? So, yes. I talk Speaker 1 (6:35) a lot about resetting in this moment and about using returning from leave after, you know, after having a baby as an opportunity to reset. And for a lot of my clients, corporate or coaching, They sort of imagine that, oh, the reason I have to set these new boundaries now, the reason I need this new schedule now, the reason I have to say no to all these things is because of the baby. Speaker 2 (6:58) And Speaker 1 (6:58) yeah, actually, probably it is. And that's OK. But what I remind them is that very often new parenthood coincides with sort of that like lower middle-ish level of your career where you might be moving into management anyway. And so actually, a lot of those things are training you to be a better manager. Speaker 2 (7:17) And Speaker 1 (7:18) that's the whole concept of the fifth trimester. Not that you necessarily have to have that flavor of ambition to keep moving up, stay steady. That's fine with me too. But it gives you an opportunity to say, what am I over delivering on? What have people covered for me that actually they should hang on to? I'm going to have less time in the evenings, let's say, to do business development, networking, meeting people. How do I preserve some of that? Will I build it into my workday? And how do I do that? I have to clear space. And so there's probably things that you could manage other people into or let them hang on to that actually elevate you. They don't make you seem weaker. They make you seem stronger. So Speaker 2 (7:54) you're saying you've had this time at home with your baby. That's happened. You figured certain things out. Your schedule is changing. But that doesn't have to mean you're going back to work at a deficit. Is that what you're saying? There's correct. Oh, yeah. Be more concrete about that. So how does that? Yeah. Like, what could that look like? Or someone listening, thinking. Okay, that sounds nice in theory, but yeah, what does that mean Speaker 1 (8:15) practically? Paint that picture. Right. So it's funny. For the book, I interviewed and surveyed more than 700 working moms, and they were all saying, you know, I'm better at saying no now, or I'm more efficient now. And when I actually asked them about how they use their time and what they were saying no to, it turned out it was actually almost the inverse of that. They were better at saying yes to the things that mattered most. Speaker 2 (8:41) And Speaker 1 (8:42) when they said yes, they had done all of that, like, you know, mental algebra, calculus, whatever to figure out. I can't be two places at once. What am I sacrificing to be able to say yes to this? And they had said yes, because they really meant it and they were going to deliver on it. So I say, don't say that you're better at saying no, you're actually better at saying better yeses. And they have the efficiency. This is really cool. Your baby is the hardest boss you may ever have. They're not very, they're not patient when they're really little, right? So baby cries needs a diaper change. Baby cries need to be picked up. Baby needs to be fed. Like there's not a lot of waiting in between. And what I've found in my research actually is that that compression of pivot time translates to the workplace too. So you just don't need as much resetting between tasks. You just kind of go from this thing to the next thing. That's where the efficiency comes from. So Speaker 2 (9:29) interesting because I think what I hear from a lot of people, you know, about workplaces. It's like I'm working on one project and someone's like, actually, we need you for something else. We're not doing that anymore. Let's do this higher value work over here. I was already working on this, but it's so interesting. I'm thinking about life with a newborn and I'm sitting down, I'm folding my laundry and then all of a sudden, oh, baby's awake. And I'm just thinking it's true. You just don't say, oh, well, I was already, I was working on that. Like, all right, I guess I'll get to the laundry later. And you learn to just constantly adjust to. Speaker 1 (10:03) new Speaker 2 (10:03) environments and Speaker 1 (10:04) not take it personally not take it personally this is just a basic human personally Speaker 2 (10:08) yeah did they not think my work was good often not they just think there's something else to work on and so you're saying my body has kind of gotten more familiar with that which means that also will plug in in a different way when Speaker 1 (10:20) i Speaker 2 (10:20) go Speaker 1 (10:20) back to work exactly yeah so Speaker 2 (10:22) fascinating Speaker 1 (10:22) okay Speaker 2 (10:23) i want to talk about the g word guilt oh yeah guilt oh i feel so guilty and what i mean i have so many thoughts on that too so This is going to be a fun section. Speaker 1 (10:35) Guilt is Speaker 2 (10:35) fun. I Speaker 1 (10:36) give an hour long talk about it. Give me your highlights. Give me your best stuff. My best stuff is that guilt is mom guilt in particular. is a sexist classist social construct oh oh i have the chills like Speaker 2 (10:52) when someone takes something small and is like this is bigger i am with you go Speaker 1 (10:56) not i want to hear not to say that if you say you feel guilty as a mom that you're falling prey to it or doing something wrong but okay so the research i did for the book i did all these surveying all this interviewing and so i had just the thousands and pages thousands of pages of transcripts and i actually had an amazing single mom lives in Cleveland. Her name was Sarah. Do the transcribing because this was like pre-AI being able to transcribe things. And she would, she's a mom of two and she had little kids at the time and she would like send me her comments in the margins. Like I just needed her to transcribe, but she was a perfect sort of test case for me. And she was like, have you noticed guilt? Everybody talks about guilt and it means totally different things to different people. So you've got one person saying like, I feel guilty. Leaving my baby in the care of somebody who I