TLDR: Wish I’d had this book when I went back to work after my first maternity leave.  About 10% of the content is dated now, but this book is still the absolute best resource on post-maternity onboarding, an often over-looked but critical phase in women’s careers. 

Going back to work after my first kid was so much of a black cloud that I only have a few “snapshots” of memories. One was crying while sitting on a toilet trying to pump between meetings.  Another was crying while trying to take care of a baby AND get dressed in clothes that very much did NOT fit me. Another was crying in the middle of the night when the only thing I could think about was please please can I sleep but the baby wasn’t having it.  Two more hours to go until I need to be up to get this baby ready to leave him with people I don’t trust so that I can go to work….

I got this phrase wrong. I thought “plenty of women have done it, I’ll be fine”.  W-R-O-N-G.  In my opinion, this is one of those major transitions that don’t get enough air time.  I’d think of it as the lynchpin of being a working mom.  IF you get the transition back mostly right, you can leverage that momentum.  IF you get it mostly wrong (as I did), you may spend years trying to fix it.  In fact, I ended up leaving the company I was President of, largely because I never recovered from a terrible re-onboarding process.  

Brody refers to the 3 months back after maternity leave as “a massive, woman-wide epidemic of outsize expectations and minuscule resources that contributes heavily to the emotional distress of returning to work with a newborn”.  Yep, that’s right.  And that’s if you’re lucky enough to even have a real leave, which many women are not.

Key insights from Brody’s book I wish I had known:

• Increasing maternity leave reduces the chances of leaving by 50% – Brody has some creative ways to do that 
• Become less patient with how things have been done and take ownership of making changes for efficiency’s sake 
• Create a “closet within a closet” of shit that fits (does that sound obvious? Having not slept more than a few hours at a time in months, this simple solution never occurred to me!)

I wouldn’t wish the 6 months after having my first kid on anyone.  HE is wonderful.  The experience was… well, it’s a black hole in my memory for a reason.  Reading Brody’s book was a pretty eye-opening experience in that it didn’t have to be as bad as it was if I had only had a handful of tips and tricks.  Brody does a great job of synthesizing the information out there and using it to guide new moms as they go back to work.  I’d think of Brody as the work big sister we all wish we had.  

Highly recommend.  You can get The Fifth Trimester here.