A chubby baby, bundled up in the first layers of autumn, suckled at Léa's breast (at the request of the witnesses, all first names have been changed), an employee with a small company in the cultural sector. The din of the percolator, which made the customers in this café in Paris's 18^th arrondissement raise their voices, seemed to lull the child to sleep. At two months old, she would soon have to adapt to the crèche to enable her mother to return to work. In these last moments of snuggling, Léa contemplated the upcoming return, with a slight apprehension in the pit of her stomach.

She remembered the first time she went through this, with her older daughter, Nora. At that time, she came off maternity leave from within the snug embrace of an apartment with light blue walls where the sun shone every afternoon. The return promised to be smooth: From announcing her pregnancy to leaving, including the months away from the office, everything went very well with her employer. Her management had asked her if she wanted to be kept informed of developments in the sales department while she was away and she had said yes, without being under any obligation. "I appreciated the offer, being made to feel that I was a central person in this small company."

A few weeks before she was due to return to work, she was asked to attend a meeting where she was offered a promotion: The position of sales director was hers, if she wanted it. She accepted, grateful that motherhood was not an obstacle in her professional life. "I was lucky that people trusted me and didn't think I was less capable of doing things because I'd become a mother," said Léa.

For Léa, her return continued in the same vein. The company was supportive in every way. However, when Léa looked back on her first day back at work, she remembered a difficult moment. It was a Monday in November, just as the second lockdown had been announced. She found herself alone at home, in the same setting where she had spent two months cradling her newborn baby, sitting at the dining room table with a computer in front of her eyes and a breast pump strapped to her chest. "What the hell am I doing here?" she said to herself, over and over, her eyes misty with tears and unable to focus on the "unread emails" tab.

'I felt invisible'

Even in the best-case scenario, returning to work is marked by this personal upheaval, as you have to spend most of your day without the person you haven't left for more than a few hours since birth. It was like cutting the cord a second time, with the feeling of "betraying this tiny baby, still a defenseless creature," said Léa. This sense of guilt also comes through in 38-year-old Elsa's words, an employee and mother of two young children. "When you leave your baby, you enter a first symbolic separation: You pass on the baton," she said with obvious nostalgia over the phone.

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