Bye supermom. It's time for 'good enough' mom

As outdated notions of gender and work change, it has now become more important to ask what workplaces can do to help young mothers

- Divya Naik

In 2015, Diksha Sethi returned to work just three months after having her son. It wasn't out of choice. With both she and her husband working full-time, no family in the same city, and work-from-home not even a whisper of a possibility back then, she arranged for a nanny and jumped back in. Her body hadn't healed. Her emotions were in free fall. And she was still figuring out how to be someone's mother. "I was still dealing with postpartum depression and the guilt of leaving my baby," she says. "I remember keeping the CCTV app open on my phone all day just to make sure everything was okay at home."

Sethi had switched jobs during her pregnancy—something she was later told was a "rare" and "risky" move. "When I left that company after three years, someone said hiring me had been a favor. That broke me." The underlying message? Your motherhood was a liability. Today, Sethi, co-founder of Noida-based entrepreneurship community Start Solo, has a better perspective: "If a woman chooses to go back to work after becoming a mother, it should be her choice. But that choice shouldn't come with penalties, pity, or the expectation that she's exactly who she was before."

THE BOUNCE-BACK MYTH

Society loves a comeback story, and when it comes to new mothers, it demands one—fast. The post-birth "bounce back" myth insists that women should return to their pre-baby weight, performance, mindset, and emotional bandwidth within weeks of delivery. And if they don't? There must be something wrong.