Carina O’Brien
speaker
1,722 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Carina O’Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And I think it helps us make sense of this transition that we go through.
And if you're not familiar with matrescence, uh, it is the psychological and emotional transition of becoming a mother.
And the idea is simply this, just like adolescence, it is a recognized developmental life stage that takes years to move through.
Not days, hours or weeks, years.
Matrescence is the same.
Becoming a mother changes you, your identity, your values, your sense of yourself and the world, and that transition doesn't happen overnight.
Which leads me to something I want you to hear.
Coming back to work after having a baby is a transition that takes months, not days or weeks.
Please be patient with yourself.
You are going through something genuinely significant, and you deserve the grace of time to find your footing.
And the research backs this up.
A study tracked mothers from just before their return all the way through to six months afterwards and found that stress about going back to work was the highest at the beginning.
And then it gradually eased over those months.
Not in the first week, but over time, over that six months.
So
If you're in the thick of it right now and it feels really hard, I want you to know this is the hardest part.
It won't always feel like this.
And for those of you who little one is also finding drop-offs tough, I just want to mention this too.
Separation anxiety in babies is completely developmentally normal.
It typically peaks somewhere between eight and eighteen months.
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