What are we actually trying to stay connected to?
Updated: Sep 7
On parental leave, and what happens to the part of you that used to go to work.
When I went on parental leave with my first child, I did not particularly miss my workplace. I felt no pull to know what was happening in meetings I was no longer attending. Quite the opposite, I was happy for work to continue without me for a while.
But something was missing. A part of me felt unmet, and it took me some time to understand what it was.
For some women, parental leave creates an unusual absence. The professional part of themselves loses one of its familiar places of expression, while a new part of their identity is taking shape at extraordinary speed. Without somewhere to explore both, it can be difficult to see how they are changing, let alone recognise the value within that change.
That was certainly true for me.
For much of my adult life, work had been where I thought deeply, wrestled with ideas, solved problems and tested my judgement. It was also where I experienced myself as capable, useful and able to contribute something of value.
When I stepped away from work, I stepped away from the place where much of that had happened. The part of me that craved those things did not disappear with it.
What I missed was not really my workplace. It was something about who I had been able to be within it.
A connection to our professional self is not the same as a connection to our employer. Yet much of the way we think about supporting women on parental leave still treats the two as though they are interchangeable.
In Australia, employees taking a continuous period of unpaid parental leave can agree with their employer to work keeping-in-touch days. These days are designed to help employees stay current with workplace changes, refresh their skills and prepare for their eventual return. For some women, that will be exactly what they want.
Progressive organisations may also provide parental-transition coaching, wellbeing resources and flexible return arrangements. These are valuable developments. There is still room, however, to think more broadly about what it means to support a woman’s development while her relationship with work is paused.
Work may be where our capability, curiosity, expertise, ambition and judgement find expression, but those qualities remain ours when we step away.
A woman may want distance from her workplace while still valuing the curious, capable and professionally engaged part of herself that found expression there. Supporting that part of her does not require asking her to remain visible or prepare to return. It may simply mean giving her somewhere else for it to go.
A 2024 qualitative study drew on interviews with 80 professional women across Asia Pacific, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, collected over two years. It found that becoming a working mother was not a finite identity transition that ended when women returned to work. For many, maternal and professional identities continued to be negotiated and reshaped over time.
When I returned to work, I found myself asking questions I had not expected: Was I still relevant? Could I still do this? Who was I professionally now? My confidence had shifted more than I realised. At one point, I called a meeting with one of the owners of the consulting firm where I worked because I genuinely questioned whether I was still capable of doing the work I had done before.
I had not forgotten how to do my job. I had simply been away from one of the places where I routinely experienced myself as capable in that way. I held back at a point when I needed to advocate for myself, and I believe that cost me professionally.
What I could not see then was how much motherhood had developed me. It strengthened my ability to tolerate ambiguity, adapt when little was within my control and hold competing needs at once. It deepened my empathy, tested my resilience and changed how I understood pressure. Ultimately, it made me a better leader.
But I returned to work focused on what I feared I had lost, the ground I believed I needed to make up, without yet recognising what I had gained.
There had been nowhere to examine what was changing in me, give it language or understand its value. I was becoming someone different, personally and professionally, but I had not yet integrated those parts of myself. It took me years back in the workplace to recognise what motherhood had added.
This was my experience, and I do not suggest it will be every woman’s. Some women want to remain closely connected to work during parental leave. Others want no contact at all. Some feel professionally confident throughout. There is no correct relationship with work while you are on leave.
But I believe women should have the option of development that is not tied to staying current with their employer or preparing to return.
For organisations, that means designing support differently. Participation should be entirely voluntary. The space should be confidential and separate from workplace performance. It should allow enough continuity for trust to develop and focus on the woman’s identity and emerging capacity, not solely on managing her transition back to work. Ideally, it should also offer somewhere for that development to continue after her leave ends.
Kith Salon’s Parental Leave Circles are one response to that need.
They bring together the same small group of women across five facilitated coaching sessions. An organisation can fund individual places in a Circle with women from other workplaces or establish a dedicated Circle for women from within its own organisation.
In either model, participation is opt-in and the Circle is independently facilitated. Managers are not in the room and nothing a participant says is reported back to her employer. Organisations can assess the experience as a whole without being given access to individual conversations.
While a woman may enter Kith Salon during parental leave, her connection to it does not have to end when she returns. She can continue into future Circles and remain part of a developmental community that moves with her beyond this particular transition.
A Circle cannot solve the structural forces that continue to shape women’s careers after they become parents. It cannot remove the motherhood penalty or compensate for inflexible work, inadequate care infrastructure, bias or unequal responsibility at home. WGEA has long documented the effects of motherhood on women’s earning capacity and career progression.
But organisations can widen the question.
Alongside asking, How do we help her stay connected to us? we might also ask, How can we give her space to understand who she is becoming?
With that space, she may return with a much fuller understanding of what motherhood has developed in her and what she now brings.
The opportunity is to help her see it.
