Workingmums.co.uk - connecting mums and employers

You've done your time at the coalface of maternity and now it's time to go back to the office. However, you haven't been there for months and, although you've popped in with the baby and emailed colleagues to catch up on the gossip, you feel a bit out of the loop. Plus you've have several months of interrupted sleep to cope with. How are you going to manage? WorkingMums has some tips for looking like you're on top of everything when you feel like you've just landed from outer space. 

1. Focus on the actual getting to work practicalities and try to bury the deep-seated guilt you feel at leaving your baby. You will feel this for ever so get used to it. In fact it only gets worse as they get more adept at making their feelings known. This is the easy part. Learn to embrace the liberation that comes with being able to eat your lunch with both hands once more. 

2. Everyone will ask about the baby, birth etc. You will get bored of telling the same stories after the second person. Start exaggerating about the birth and embellish a few details. This is especially effective if you are asked ‘how your holiday was’ by male colleagues. Go into particular detail about any stitches or ruptures you may have endured. This will buy you some time before you have to come face to face with the horror that is your computer. 

3. If you have remembered how to switch it on, you’re doing well. It will probably seem that it was eons ago/another lifetime when you seemed automatically to know how the permutations of your office system worked. Simple things like where the on switch is will now seem incredibly complicated. It’s no good just pressing a few buttons and kicking it, as you do with those infuriating electronic toys your relatives buy the baby. You will have to resort to the old favourite of saying that there must be a new system in place – you’re probably right anyway – and asking for supplementary training or at the very least some guidance from a kind colleague [this is in the hope that you have some kind colleagues and you do not feel like the entire office is waiting for you to fail. Which, of course, they aren’t. At least not all of them]. 

4. The same is also true of the phone system. During your absence your esteemed employer, as is their wont, will have installed a new office system, probably just to spite you. It will have all sorts of important codes you have to press to get your answer machine to work. Of course, the manual will have been lost after the first week so you will need a training session on this too. Keep it brief and ensure you only focus on the essentials like dialling out. Never learn how to transfer calls or you will spend your life doing only that. 

5. The same is also true of the photocopier, fax machine and any other office system. Limit yourself to one IT-related stress session a day in your first week back. 

6. Remember to check your clothes at some point during the day. It is important to look not just at whether they are covered in sick/milk/snot [particularly check the shoulders and back], but whether they are in fact on the right way round and are not inside out. It’s hard getting dressed while simultaneously holding/feeding a crying baby and realise that from this point on your relationship with a mirror will be merely fleeting – and probably all the more satisfying because of this. 

7. If you are breastfeeding, don’t forget to change the pads. You don’t want your important first meeting to be dominated by a sense of horror as the two rapidly expanding circles of whiteness which appear to form on your shirt rapidly link up to create a huge ocean of dampness. If you forgot to bring spare pads, make any excuse and rush to the toilet and shove enough wads of toilet paper down your front to stem the tide but not so many as to make it look like you’ve had one of those 10-minute lunchtime boob jobs. 

8. Don’t have alcohol for lunch. If you have had little sleep for the last six months, even a whiff of alcohol will knock you out for at least the rest of the day. Take any form of stimulant going and, whatever you do, keep talking. At least when you’re talking you and everyone else will know you’re awake. And marvel at the joy of adult conversation which is not just about how to mash a banana. 

9. Try not to look too much like you’re clock watching and don’t put a picture of your baby right next to your computer. You won’t be able to concentrate on looking like you’re really into the job and you’re enjoying wading through those 1,000 plus emails. Skim read most of them except the ones market ‘urgent’, ‘redundancy notice’ [if only] and the ones from your boss. Print out the rest for reading at your leisure [ha!] at home. 

10. Walk slowly and with dignity to the office exit at the end of the day and then belt down the street to whatever form of transport you take so you can get to your childcare in time [if it is you who is picking up] so as not to incur the £10 fine for being five minutes late. Understand that in later life when your child is at school, this will only become more of a stressful experience as you are warned that recurrent lateness could incur an intervention by social services. No pressure.