The Mothering Project
The Mothering Project is for women, carers, and empathetic leaders navigating work, care, and identity — and wondering when exactly the mental load gets its own day off.
Honest conversations about motherhood, leadership, and holding it all together (mostly)
The Mothering Project
The Tug of Motherhood and Work: A Personal Revelation
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Returning to work after maternity leave isn’t just a logistical shift — it’s an identity one.
In this episode, I talk about going back four days a week and living with the constant tug between wanting to be present at home and wanting to stay credible, committed, and capable at work.
The guilt.
The internal negotiations.
The pressure not to be the first to leave.
The quiet grief for the version of yourself who could stay late without thinking twice.
This isn’t an episode about “finding balance.”
It’s about naming the tension — and recognising that the tug you feel isn’t weakness. It’s information.
If you’ve ever felt stretched between career and motherhood, grateful but unsettled, ambitious but aching — you’re not alone in that.
Nothing here needs solving.
But it might help to hear it said out loud.
In this episode, I explore:
- What returning to work actually feels like (not the Instagram version)
- The myth of “balance” and the reality of compression
- The inner dialogue of choosing between your child and your career
- Why not wanting to leave first says more about culture than commitment
- How guilt and exhaustion can be signals, not failures
- The small, steady steps I took toward doing work differently
- Why this tension isn’t just personal — it’s structural