No One Tells You That Coming Back Is Harder Than Leaving

Maternity leave has a date. Parental leave has a structure. Sick leave has medical clearance. But coming back? There's no roadmap for that. You're supposed to just slot back in. Pick up where you left off. Except everyone else kept moving, and you've been standing still, and now you're supposed to pretend the gap didn't happen.

The projects moved to someone else while you were gone. The client relationships shifted. The team learned to work around your absence. And they did it well, which was exactly what needed to happen. But now you're back, and the shape of the role you left is not quite the shape of the role you returned to.

No one restructured you out. No one did anything wrong. The business just kept moving. And no one thought about what it would take to bring you back into something that had already learned to work without you.

This is the part organisations get wrong most often. The leave itself is managed. The return is assumed. And the person coming back is left to navigate the gap on their own, in a role that feels both familiar and completely different.

If you've been through this, as the person returning or as the manager holding the space, you know exactly what this feels like.