The Real Cost of a Return From Parental Leave That Looked Fine

team@pause2power.com (Melissa Cravillon) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:32:50 GMT

I thought she was heading to a bodypump class. She was pumping breast milk.

A true story about a return from parental leave that looked like it went well and everything it quietly cost. And why goodwill was never the part that was missing.

On her first day back, a member of my team, someone I was meeting for the very first time, told me she had the right to go and pump twice a day.

I was young. I had no knowledge of motherhood and, at the time, no interest in it. There was a language barrier: I was at a company where English was the exception, not the rule. And I was rather preoccupied with sport. So I genuinely thought: "How amazing that a company lets an employee go to a fitness class twice a day to get back in shape after giving birth.

It took me half a day to realise what she actually meant.

That one misunderstanding measured the full extent of my ignorance. But it revealed something bigger, too: I never questioned whether she'd been properly informed of her rights, and I'd never been told myself what good practice for a sustainable return even looked like.

The failure wasn't hers. And it wasn't mine. It was the absence of a process that should have caught us both.

Let me tell you the full story, and every red flag that paved the way. Hers and mine.

Inheriting a manager relationship she didn't know existed

The story starts in a fast-paced industry, where I led a team of project managers handling dozens of projects a day: short turnaround times, high quality expectations. I joined the company after Elisabeth had already left for maternity leave. I was told she'd be back by a certain date, and that was it. We were never introduced beforehand. I'm not even sure she was ever officially told who her new manager would be, though I'm fairly certain the team filled her in informally (first red flag 🚩, start counting). And nothing had been prepared for her return: no plan, no notes, no conversation on file, just a date in the calendar 🚩.

Nobody was hired to cover. The team absorbed it all.

Nobody had been brought in to take over her accounts. A team already working at the limit of its capacity had to absorb all of her work on top of its own. I helped where I could, but it wasn't enough 🚩. So we were all, quietly, counting down to her return — not for her sake, but so we could finally breathe and hold the service level we were expected to deliver, constantly. And nobody had briefed the team that "back" wouldn't mean instantly back to full load. So what greeted her was relief, not readiness 🚩.

The day she came back, we welcomed her and sat down one-on-one to get to know each other. We congratulated her, talked about our careers, and caught her up on the business. And barely anything else 🚩. I didn't ask how she felt about being back. I didn't ask about the workload, what she could and couldn't take on, whether we should build up gradually and re-evaluate in a few weeks. I didn't ask about her ambitions, how things were at home, or whether she needed anything from me, the team, or the company. Instead, I asked how soon she could take her accounts back, because the team was under pressure 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩. And at no point was HR in the room. There was no process, no checklist, no third party whose actual job it was to make sure any of this happened. Two people, improvising 🚩.

She smiled and said she'd need to catch up a little, but could probably take them over that same week 🚩. Bear in mind: she worked four days a week, and the nature of the work meant a full handover every single week — hours of effort that regularly tipped her into overtime 🚩. And her targets? Never paused. She walked back into the same competitive, individually-tracked KPIs as everyone else, from day one 🚩.

Gratitude as pressure: hired while pregnant, and paying it back

Why did she say yes? Did she decide that freely?

Of course not. She was young. She was vulnerable. She was navigating a new reality she didn't fully understand yet. This was a time we talked about any of it even less than we do now. And she was under pressure… from me.

I never intended to pressure her. I thought I was being flexible. If she needed to leave early, we'd make it work. She could pump twice a day. My door was always open. I asked when she could take her accounts back; I didn't impose it. And every one of those things I counted as flexibility? Most were simply the legal minimum. I just didn't know where the floor was 🚩.

But come on. With the stigma and, as she recently admitted to me, the pressure of showing gratitude for having been hired while pregnant, she felt she owed us. She felt guilty on behalf of the teammates who'd been carrying her load. And on top of that, she's a genuinely talented, dedicated woman who was never going to not show up for us. She had ambition, and she was afraid speaking up would cost her.

That's the trap. The more capable and conscientious she was, the more the broken process could lean on her to hold itself together.

The real cost of a return from parental leave, traced back together

As I grew interested in motherhood, matured, managed other leaves and returns, and then became a mother myself, Elisabeth kept coming back into my thoughts. When I started my business around parental leave, thinking about how to equip managers to lead sustainable returns, I couldn't move forward without reaching out to her. To sit with her, apologise for my ignorance and my lack of support, and tell her how strong she'd been through all of it.

She told me it had been lonely, draining and stressful. And when we traced it back together, the cost had a long list:

Her health. She lost a worrying amount of weight and wasn't well, back at a demanding, deadline-driven job just twelve weeks after giving birth.
Her body, under strain nobody managed. The stress fed straight into her breastfeeding: her production dropped, she developed breast infections, ran fevers, was genuinely ill. She had to go home mid-day once, and the manager she turned to had no idea how to handle it.
The pumping she navigated entirely alone. She never knew when she could pump, whether she could step away, or who to ask. She worked it out in her own head, on top of everything else.
Constant guilt. She felt responsible towards the colleagues carrying her accounts, and took the work back faster than she should have.
The pressure to prove herself. Hired while pregnant, she felt she owed the company and that she had to show she wasn't a liability.
Her rights, left for her to find. She sat on websites working out how long her own maternity leave was. She felt she had to justify her entitlements, rather than being told plainly what she was owed.
Herself. In her words, she was "one tired wreck": navigating a new identity, exhausted, with no one around her in the same situation and no framework for what she was even allowed to ask for.

And the red flags weren't only hers

Here's what I didn't see at the time, because I was inside it: the same broken process that failed Elisabeth had already failed me.

Nobody told me I'd inherited her. Her previous manager had moved teams, and I became her manager by default, never announced to her, and never really explained to me 🚩. We were never introduced before her return 🚩. HR reached out to me exactly never: not to ask whether I'd ever managed a return, not to walk me through what Elisabeth was entitled to, not to hand me a policy, a checklist, or a single page of guidance 🚩. Elisabeth, HR and I never once sat in a room together 🚩.

Her targets were never reviewed, and I had no mandate to adjust them, the KPIs simply ran on from day one 🚩. Nobody was hired to cover her leave, which left me choosing between the team's service level and her recovery: an impossible position I was handed, not one I created 🚩. And nobody had told me what I couldn't have known on my own: the shift in identity, the exhaustion, the hormonal changes, what breastfeeding actually required. I was managing a transition I couldn't even see 🚩.

So when I asked how soon she could take her accounts back, I wasn't being callous. I was doing the only thing an unequipped manager can do: improvising, and calling the legal minimum "flexibility" because no one had shown me where the floor was.

Why goodwill was never the missing piece

Here's the part that matters most. None of this was fixed by my goodwill, because goodwill was never what was missing. She's told me, warmly, that she never blamed me, that she felt supported, that she could pump or leave whenever she needed. That was all true. And it still wasn't enough, because the things that would have protected her weren't mine to improvise: the right conversations, a plan, HR in the room, a briefed team, a phased return on workload and targets, and someone, anyone, telling her what she was entitled to.

She didn't leave. She hit her targets. She got promoted. And it cost her all of that, quietly, while everyone around her thought the return had gone well.

That last line is the one I'd ask you to sit with, if you lead people or you lead HR. Because the returns that look fine are exactly the ones nobody examines. A company can meet every WAZO and Wet verbetering poortwachter obligation to the letter and still get a return from parental leave this wrong, because compliance sets the floor, and the floor is not the same thing as support. What was missing here wasn't kindness, budget, or good intentions. It was structure: ownership, a process, and someone whose actual job it was to run it.

That gap is not a personal failing. It's a design problem. And design problems are fixable.

If you want a concrete sense of what "fixed" looks like, the 11-Point Return Check is a snapshot of the checklist I wish someone had handed me before the day Elisabeth came back.

That's why I built Pause 2 Power.

Note: Elisabeth read this before it went out and chose how she wanted to appear in it. I'm grateful she let me share our story and grateful for how she carried all of it.

Maybe you've watched a return go this way. Maybe you're not sure one of yours didn't. Or maybe you want to make sure it never does. Any of those is conversation about where the gap sits in your organisation and what closing it actually involves.

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