The Operating System Upgrade No One is Talking About
- Jun 10
- 6 min read
Catherine Divaris is a mental health Occupational Therapist, Emotional Regulation Coach, and Founder of Mind/Mom Potential. She empowers individuals & organizations to build mental resilience, master emotional and nervous system regulation & perform effectively in high-demand environments, with a focus on high-functioning women and mothers.
A returning mother sits across from her manager on her first day back. She is told, kindly, that things will “go back to normal soon.” The implication is unmistakable. Something ‘happened’ to her. Something that needs to recover. Something that needs to be carefully managed back into productivity.
We treat her like a system that crashed and is rebooting. Neuroscience however, thankfully, says the opposite. She did not crash. She upgraded.
I call this trajectory "The Maternal Arc", the full passage a woman travels from the moment she learns she is pregnant, through leave, and into the long, layered re-entry. After years of coaching women through it and advising the organizations that employ them, I have come to believe The Maternal Arc is the most misunderstood transition in modern work. Companies invest in it. Policies are written about it. HR teams build entire programs around it. Almost all of it is constructed for the woman she used to be - not the one who is walking back through the door. That is the real return-to-work problem. It is not that mothers can’t keep up. It is that we built our workplaces around a version of her that did not yet know what she knows now. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.
The first movement of The Maternal Arc: The announcement
The moment a woman tells her employer she is pregnant, two parallel processes begin. One is visible, coverage plans, leave logistics, conversations about “the transition.” The other is invisible, and it is the one that changes everything.
One in five mothers report experiencing pregnancy related discrimination at work, and nearly one in four have considered leaving their job due to a lack of accommodations or fear of how they will be perceived. Fifty nine percent of employers in one major study agreed that women should have to disclose pregnancy during recruitment. The bias is not theoretical. It is the climate she is already forecasting from the moment she shares the news.
But while companies are quietly recalibrating their assumptions about her ambition, her brain is doing something far more interesting. By the second trimester, her gray matter is already reorganizing. Researchers initially called this a “reduction.” A closer reading reveals it as something else entirely.
The second movement of The Maternal Arc: The leave
In 2016, neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema published a landmark study in Nature Neuroscience showing that pregnancy produces long lasting structural changes in the maternal brain, changes still visible at least two years after birth, and in some studies, six years later. The popular press read “gray matter reduction” and reached for the lazy headline, pregnancy shrinks your brain.
Hoekzema’s own interpretation was the opposite. The reductions, she explained, were almost certainly synaptic pruning, the same process that makes the adolescent brain more efficient, not less. Her team found no cognitive deficits. They found a brain becoming more specialized, more streamlined, more powerful in the regions that govern social cognition, empathy, threat detection, and theory of mind.
A 2025 paper in the Journal of Health Psychology by Sharon Ettinger and Pamela Geller went further. The authors argued that “mom brain,” the cultural shorthand for after birth forgetfulness, should be reframed as adaptive cognitive enhancement, a period of measurable upgrades in executive function, prioritization, and emotional regulation. Longitudinal data shows mothers tend to have better cognitive health in later life than women who did not have children.
After birth, the gray matter does not just stabilize. It expands. Week after week, for at least six months after birth, the maternal brain continues to grow, in regions that predict the quality of mother infant attachment and that overlap, almost perfectly, with the neural architecture of high performing leadership, empathy, rapid prioritization under uncertainty, stakeholder reading, systems thinking, threat anticipation.
The leadership development industry spends billions of dollars trying to install this software in executives. The Second Movement of The Maternal Arc installs it for free.
So why does no one talk about it that way?
The third movement of The Maternal Arc: The return
This is the phase companies invest in. Returnship programs. Phased re entry. Mentor matches. Lactation rooms. All of it well intentioned. Almost none of it built around the actual physiology and neurology of the woman walking through the door.
The numbers tell the full story. In the United States, mothers earn roughly 62 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, a 35 percent household level gap that widens with each additional child. About 14 percent of mothers leave or are let go after the birth of their first child. Of women who returned to work full time after maternity leave in one study, 79 percent eventually left because the job and the baby could not coexist in a system designed for neither. In 2025, KPMG’s Great Exit research found that labor force participation among college educated mothers with children under five fell from nearly 80 percent to 77 percent in a single year, coinciding almost exactly with the return to office mandates sweeping Fortune 500 companies.
Forty two percent of women who left the workforce in 2025 named caregiving as the primary reason. Mothers carry 73 percent of the cognitive household labor. Eighty six percent report handling all family responsibilities. Fifty two percent are clinically burning out.
We read those numbers and we ask the wrong question. We ask, how do we help her cope?
The right question is, why are we asking the most cognitively and emotionally sophisticated version of this employee to perform inside structures designed for the version of her that existed before The Maternal Arc began?
Open plan offices that overwhelm a newly heightened nervous system. Meeting cadences built around uninterrupted blocks of focus, when her brain is now optimized for rapid context switching and parallel processing. Performance metrics that reward presence over output. Promotion timelines that punish the exact period during which her capacity for systems thinking is at its lifetime peak. Return to office mandates that ignore the fact that her body is, neurochemically, still tethered to a small human across town.
She is not failing the system. The system is failing to recognize what just walked back into it.
The reframe at the heart of The Maternal Arc
For the mother reading this, you did not lose your edge. You acquired one your former self could not access. The fog you feel is not deficit, it is a brain reallocating resources toward the most demanding cognitive workload a human will ever run. The overwhelm is not weakness. It is a nervous system performing surveillance, attunement, planning, and threat detection simultaneously, all day, every day, often while also running a P and L. That is not a problem to fix. That is a superpower to resource correctly.
For the leader reading this, the mothers returning to your company are not a retention risk. They are the most under leveraged leadership pipeline you have. The companies that figure this out first will not be the ones with the most generous leave policies, though those matter. When Google extended paid leave from 12 to 18 weeks, attrition among new mothers fell by 50 percent. Accenture’s expansion produced a 40 percent drop. Twelve weeks of paid leave alone correlates with a 70 percent reduction in turnover.
The companies that win will be the ones that redesign the return itself. Not as recovery. As redeployment of a workforce that has just completed the most rigorous leadership accelerator nature has ever designed, and that costs nothing to acquire and roughly 21 percent of an annual salary to lose.
We have spent a generation asking mothers to fit into systems built for someone else’s nervous system, someone else’s cognition, someone else’s life shape. The data is now clear. The neuroscience is now public. The women are now leaving. The question is no longer whether the model is broken. The question is who builds the next one.
That is the work of The Maternal Arc.
Read more from Catherine Divaris
Catherine Divaris, Mental Health Occupational Therapist
Catherine Divaris is a mental health OT, Emotional Regulation Coach, and founder of Mind/Mom Potential. After over a decade working in mental health and corporate settings, she began to see a consistent gap. While there is no shortage of advice on what to do, there is far less support for how we regulate ourselves to actually do it. Following her own journey into motherhood after IVF, Catherine expanded her work to support high-functioning but overwhelmed women navigating the mental load of modern life. Through her CALM Container framework, she empowers individuals and organizations to build mental resilience and master emotional and nervous system regulation. Her mission: Mental health is the foundation for how we live, lead, and parent.
