Things To Do On Maternity Leave That Will Actually Matter — A List For the Woman, Not Just the Mother

Not the list that tells you to sleep when the baby sleeps. The list that treats you as the most creative person in the room — because right now, you are.

Every maternity leave list on the internet tells you some version of the same thing. Rest. Connect. Prepare. Recover. Be present. Be kind to yourself. All of it is true and none of it is enough.

Because none of it addresses the thing that the woman on maternity leave is often most hungry for — and least likely to admit she wants because it feels selfish, because the baby is right there, because surely this season is supposed to be entirely about someone else.

The thing she is hungry for is herself. Her own thinking. Her own creating. The part of her that existed before the baby and will exist after the baby no longer needs this particular version of her — the part that has ideas and visions and opinions about the world and things to say that are not about feeding schedules or developmental milestones.

This is the maternity leave list for that part. For her.

Understand You Are in Your Most Creative Season

Before anything on this list, this: you are in matrescence. The complete psychological and neurological transformation of becoming a mother. And one of the most significant — and least discussed — aspects of matrescence is that it is the most creatively fertile season of most women’s adult lives.

The neural restructuring of matrescence increases emotional range and expands creative capacity in measurable ways. The emotional porousness of the season — the heightened access to feeling, to meaning, to the profound questions about life and what we want to pass on — feeds creative thinking in a way that no other life period quite replicates. The ideas that arrive at 2am during maternity leave are not insomnia. They are your imagination, running at full capacity, looking for something to work with.

Give it something.

Write Something Only You Could Write

Not for publication. Not for anyone else. For the record — the permanent, beautiful record of who you were in this season, what you were thinking, what you understood about the world at this particular moment in your own history.

Write a letter to your baby for the day she is old enough to read it. Write a song, even if you are not a songwriter. Write down the rite of passage you will create for her thirteenth year. Write the laws you would pass if someone handed you the power. Write the version of motherhood you are inventing for yourself, as distinct from the version the world offered you.

This is not journaling as therapy. This is creative work. The kind that makes permanent the thinking that this season is producing — the profound, original, deeply felt thinking of a woman in her most expansive moment.

Design Something That Has Never Existed

The missions in Bloom’s programme are not random creative prompts. They are specifically designed to develop the form of creative intelligence that matrescence makes available. Design a household appliance that doesn’t exist. Design a Family Crest for your family. Imagine the ideal society that supports mothers. Invent something that would make the world better for the child you are raising.

These are not small exercises. They are the kind of thinking that produces the innovations, the social changes, the creative contributions that change things. And the woman in her matrescence — with her expanded emotional range, her deepened sense of what matters, her fierce clarity about what the world owes its children — is more equipped to do this thinking than she has ever been.

Ask the Questions Nobody Is Asking You

Who are you becoming? Not who were you before the baby, and not only who are you as a mother — who is the woman emerging from this transformation? What does she want? What does she believe? What does she want to create? What is she willing to fight for? What is she done tolerating? What does she now understand about herself and the world that the pre-baby version of her didn’t have access to?

These questions are available to every woman on maternity leave. Most are never asked them. Bloom asks them — through nine creative missions designed for the woman in the most extraordinary season of her life.

This is the maternity leave list that treats you as what you are: the most creative, most expanded, most magnificently alive version of yourself that has ever existed. Give her something to work with.

Bloom. IMAGENIQ.