Returning to work

Clean Cloth Nappies member Jes shares her experience returning to work when her son was six months old.

There are so many new experiences when you become a parent. 

You can have the best plan in place but the universe, and your little one, seem to love throwing a spanner in the works and watching you scramble to figure it out.

I had heard from all of my colleagues and friends about how hard the return to work would be and I was pretty sure it would be manageable. I mean, work was work and I knew how to do my job. 

We had a trusted daycare that our son loved and thrived in. I would have some space and get that much-needed adult interaction again.

We did a slow introduction to daycare when my son was 4.5 months old, starting with a few hours a day and building up to three full days a week. 

I planned to return to work two days a week for the first week, move to three on the second week and then four on the third week. These days would be shorter than my pre-baby roster but I planned on increasing them as time went on.

What could go wrong?

Ha, I was so naive.

Remember how I said that the universe likes to throw a spanner in the works? Yeah. That definitely happened to me.

The Sunday before I was due back at work, our son became violently ill. We ended up in hospital (the same one I work at) for a week with severe gastroenteritis that resulted in him losing 800g in 4 days.

We tried to do cloth while in hospital but our stash couldn’t keep up with the 20+ nappies we were going through a day. Disposables couldn’t keep the poonami in and my husband was working whilst trying to keep on top of the mountain of laundry and our animals.

It was exhausting but we made it.

I returned to work, albeit a week later in my schedule, and planned on disposables for the first few weeks as to not get too swamped with all the changes happening.

It’s funny, I thought doing disposables would make it easier for me in those first few weeks of returning to work but it actually made it harder. I hadn’t realized how much of a ritual my wash routine had become. It was my time to shut my brain off in the evening after we put our son to bed, scrape and wash the nappies, fold and stuff the clean ones and just mindlessly zone out. Without it I felt kind of lost.

I ended up going back to cloth after a week and whilst my return to work was an emotional rollercoaster and it felt like there was never enough time in the day, the guilt from being happy whilst being away from my son, for realizing I hadn’t thought about him for a whole hour, the fatigue of having to manage being exhausted and still being a mum and partner to my husband at the end of the day.

Even through all of that I found solice in my little routine with nappies in the evenings.

I know not everyone had the same experience as me. I know some returned to work seamlessly and I know other struggled a lot more.

I know some haven’t returned to work and there are no plans to in the near future. I know some returned much sooner.

There isn’t anything wrong with any of these and you are not alone in how you feel about your own return to work so take a deep breath in, hold it for a second or two and breath out.

You got this xx