Right, I need to get back to work
I manage a small group of privately owned shoe shops for the family that owns them. I’ve been there ten years. I love my job and have been happy doing it, but always felt like I was passing time until I could do what I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember - being a mother.
I know it’s old fashioned but imagining spending all day being a mummy gave me such a thrill. I couldn’t wait to dress my child, teach it to crawl, walk, talk, bake. So, the joy I felt when I gave birth was tinged with a sorrow that I would soon have to leave her with somebody other than me. I can’t bear the thought of someone else looking after my child or even worse, my child turning to someone else for comfort before me. My maternity leave was an utter joy and I cherished every moment but it was bittersweet. The more time I spent with her the more I loved it and the prospect of it ending filled me with dread. As the time for me to return to work grew closer the knot in my stomach grew and I wasn’t sure if I could actually go through with it.
The problem is that my partner earns less than I do, his job isn’t the most secure and he has debts from before we met. It scares me that we might be left with nothing coming in. We simply can’t afford for me not to work.
The first time I left her, I thought my heart would break. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I didn’t even make it out of the nursery before I embarrassed myself by collapsing in a heap of messy tears in the manager’s office. I felt like I had let her down and abandoned her.
I cried every single time I left her. I looked at other mums with their children and a lump formed in my throat and on really bad days tears filled my eyes. It was so unfair, they got to spend time with their children whereas I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. It was even worse when I saw them on their phones ignoring their children. Didn’t they realise I would have cut off my right arm to be able to spend time with my child??
I cut back my hours and am managing a bit better but have just found out I am pregnant again. I know going back after the second will break me. What am I going to do?
Emily, 28, Retail Manager
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The reality is that, whatever their emotions about their baby and returning to work, most people feel they have very limited choices for practical reasons. Some have to go back at a certain point to keep the household solvent and others, who want to go back, find that the cost of childcare (especially for multiple children) means it makes absolutely no sense to do so.
Broadly, there are three approaches I see:
1) There are women who run back, thrilled to escape this strange new world and revel in wearing proper clothes and spending time with adults.
2) There are those who walk back, torn between work and home, but ultimately feeling they need the stimulation and income of work enough that it’s the right thing for them and their families.
3) And then there are those, like Emily, who are pushed or dragged back and never feel the same way about work again.
For the first two groups, returning to work comes with risks. A 2016 Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report found that three out of four mothers in the UK had negative or possibly discriminatory experiences during pregnancy, maternity or upon return. It also found that one in nine mothers reports they were let go in some way (dismissed, made redundant or treated so badly they had to leave). EHRC research in 2018 has shown that six in 10 businesses believe a woman should disclose whether she is pregnant during her recruitment process, while almost half think women should work for an organisation for at least a year before deciding to have children. In the same study, more than a third of private sector employers surveyed said it was reasonable to ask women about their future plans to have children during the recruitment process, while 41 per cent said pregnant employees put an ‘unnecessary cost burden’ on the workplace, findings that Rebecca Hilsenrath, EHRC chief executive, described as a ‘depressing reality’. Similarly depressing is the need for the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed (pregnantthenscrewed.com), which documents cases of maternity or pregnancy discrimination and offers legal help and practical support to women who have been discriminated against.
Even if active discrimination is avoided, the process and return can be very difficult. A hairdresser explained how she was only allowed two hours’ paid time off for each medical appointment throughout a complicated pregnancy but, because she drives 45 minutes to her salon, had to take unpaid half and full days every time she went to the doctor or hospital, despite having worked there for 10 years and having desperately tried to save up for the baby and maternity leave. Another mum told me that, as her second maternity leave ended, both of her children got chicken pox in succession. Her boss made her take this time as holiday, leaving her with almost no holiday days the first year she was back.
The report also found that found that slightly over half of the women who had flexible working requests approved after returning to work said it had negative consequences. The financial sector is, they report, the least tolerant, being the most likely to make pregnant women redundant and the most likely to turn down a flexible working request. What’s more, if you earn £40,000 or more, you are more likely to experience financial loss or negative experience due to a flexible working request. Despite these experiences, the report found that only one in four raised the issue with their employer, only 3 per cent went through a grievance procedure and less that 1 per cent went to an employment tribunal.
Gemma has one daughter, a post-graduate degree and a hunger to work. She reflects on her transition to motherhood and the damage it did to her career:
‘I worked at a Swiss bank before the financial crash and it suited me. But the crash and my daughter arrived at the same time. Initially they said they really wanted me back and put me forward for a promotion, saying I had to interview for the role. In the end, they gave the role to a man, I don’t know why, they didn’t give reasons, and they sidelined me into a back-office job. It became very stressful. I wasn’t that well suited to the role and worked all the hours I could. On a Friday night with friends having dinner I was reading my emails and crying and they said I had to stop. I resigned and spent a lovely three months with my daughter. I then took a contract role at an American bank…. It started out OK but they wanted me to move to permanent and then it nearly destroyed me. The pressure and the hours were devastating. I didn’t ever take lunch, I felt too busy to go to the toilet. I was happy to work long days and be on email but I just wanted to pick my daughter up twice a week and leave at 5.15pm to do it – however late I then had to work into the night to keep up. My female manager said no. She wouldn’t even consider it, yet one Friday she brought her baby to the office at lunchtime with the nanny. It was like she was taunting me with what I was missing. After that a friend offered me a job in a tech company with fully flexible hours. It was great. But after three years the company relocated abroad so I went to a hedge fund. It’s a lovely company but not my ideal role – it’s too focused on regulations. The truth is that I feel like all I’ve done since I became a mum is look for a job. I want to work, I want to work full time but I only want to be in an office 9am–5pm. It’s not about money, I’ve taken huge pay cuts since becoming a mum and the search guys have gone from seeing me as A-list to very B-list. My career feels like it’s falling down the other side of the mountain and I’m only just 40.’
Some evidence suggests that about six months is the longest you can take off without starting to risk losing status and future earning power at work. For example, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who wrote Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, showed that a woman who took more than two years off lost 18 per cent of her earning power forever. If she took three years off, this soared to 38 per cent. But two maternity leaves of about six months had little or no effect on future earnings. Hewlett believes that the greater number of women at senior levels in American companies is an upside of their poor maternity policies (a paltry six weeks for many women): that by having and taking our long leaves in the UK we are setting women back in the workforce. Anyone ambitious might take note: although a degree of scepticism may be advised given that some American companies were among the worst pay gap offenders in the UK.
Part of the value of maternity leave (alongside bonding with your newborn, obviously) is that it is often the only protracted period during your career when you can see the world from a different place and perhaps make different decisions. It’s a clear juncture in life when you can take time to think about what is really important and what you want for yourself, your kids and your family in the future. I recently heard a CEO at a conference saying she thought women should do leadership courses during their maternity leave. I understand her goal but would strongly argue that this is the one period if your life when you can think about something other than work.
Sarah Jaggers, MD of Managing Change, an organisation that coaches people through career transitions, says:
‘Returning to work after a baby can be a very stressful time. From handing over your baby to someone else, to being judged by your mother-in-law, to worrying about your time and expressing milk. We suggest women consider three things before they return to work after maternity: their work needs, their personal needs and their family needs. They need to decide what is important to them. But we also caution against making big assumptions too early in the process. Some women assume they will go back to work and hate it. Others are unsure until they have their baby but then feel it’s right to return. We find that women who have reasonable expectations and good support systems tend to do better: those who don’t expect the house to be immaculately clean, and can live with the fact they’ve put on a stone and are often running late.’
She is certainly right that many women are surprised by their own decisions. I interviewed mothers who thought they would love being at home with their baby and then couldn’t wait to get back, and those who thought their career was their pre-eminent motivator and never put a foot in an office again. The key is not to assume how you will feel until the time comes. Part of what changes the desire to go back to work or not is the experience of motherhood. Those who have a good birth, bond well and really enjoy mothering are unsurprisingly more likely to want to keep at it than those who might have started off in a bad place, and through no fault of their own, find it harder to adjust. A few working mums have imagined maternity leave would be so boring they would turn it into an extended holiday and explore Europe by train or get fit for a triathlon or convert the loft (this doesn’t usually seem to work out too well!). And sometimes women who really enjoy their first maternity leave, perhaps thinking that motherhood comes pretty naturally to them, hate their second maternity leave if it follows within a few years. Unlike the first, which enables full attention on one baby, the second makes them feel ripped apart by the different demands of a baby and a toddler. This can trigger a personal crisis along the lines of ‘I thought I was a career person but had a baby and realised I should be an at-home mum but now I find that I’m not good at that either.’
The following is a reflection on how people who’ve made those decisions reviewed them later.
Running back
Some mothers really, really want to go back to work and, aside from the actual birth, hardly seem to change pace. Describing this they will say: ‘I had to go back to feel myself again’ or ‘I felt I had to go back to work to feel emotionally better, I felt that life would go back to normal’.
There are two ways to do this. One is to slink back in, without anyone really noticing, taking calls, a few meetings, picking up a few projects here and there and drifting back. Entrepreneurs and freelancers often say they did this and, without much external comment, returned to working very, very soon. People in very senior roles can often slide back into work mode this way too. Those who can work flexibly and mostly from home, taking breaks for feeding or bonding, while still keeping themselves solvent and engaged with adults, often feel pretty positive about their early return, even years later.
The second approach is to stride back in, and this can be harder practically and socially. For one thing, it tends to come with a huge amount of judgement from colleagues, family and new mum friends. ‘I hopped and skipped back to work. Ran at 100 miles an hour. I don’t regret not staying at home longer. I could not wait. I was going mad. I go to work feeling like I’ve climbed a mountain, run a marathon and wrestled with wild animals before 8am but, for me, it’s so much better than being at home all day and my kids (aged one and two) do really well at nursery. But don’t get my mother started on it, she makes me feel so guilty about working.’
Others share this experience. ‘My NCT friends didn’t understand me going back to work so soon. They were shocked, even though they are all working mums now. I felt very unsupported, they greeted the news that I was going back at six weeks with total silence.’ Another said: ‘I knew I was out of the group when even the woman who worked for McKinsey said “FUCK” when I told them I was going back at eight weeks.’ Both of these women were motivated by their desire to work as well as their responsibility as the primary household earner. Some are unbothered by the judgement, others are devastated by it. One thing I note is that those whose own mothers encouraged work and themselves worked long hours – the children of first-generation immigrants for example (‘My mum came here, barely spoke the language but worked all day and still had dinner for us on the table after school’) – seem far better emotionally protected from this judgement.
Logistically there are of course some big hurdles. Babies usually sleep intermittently in these early weeks and being exhausted is a huge problem unless you have good overnight support. Lack of sleep is both a cause and symptom of postnatal depression so you need to keep an eye on how you’re feeling and get help if you think you need it. If you’re breastfeeding you have to deal with pumping and persuading your baby to take a bottle. There is also the rushing of the perennial problem of finding the right childcare for you – something affordable and accessible. A freelancer who wanted and needed to return at three months said, ‘I would love nursery to be more affordable. In our area, the nurseries are massively oversubscribed – all have a one-and-half year waiting list – and cost upwards of £60 a day. That sort of money, £300 per week, makes it borderline cost neutral for us to go to work. The fact that we are both freelancers and spend a significant amount of time bidding for new projects makes that kind of expense very hard to justify and puts a lot of (impossible) pressure on making that work financially successful.’ If you can find and afford the childcare you need though, the truth is that, if you choose to do it, returning early can feel fine. Women reclaim their identity, the baby can be very well cared for and life can return to ‘normal’.
Women doing this, when interviewed, will sometimes say something pretty structured, such as: ‘I get up at 6am, check my emails. Then I go to work. I leave the office at 5.30pm and spend an hour fully with my son and put him to bed. Then I sometimes go to a work event and get home at 10.30pm or 11pm and go to bed. It works really well for us and when I go on trips I always bring him a great present and when he’s older he is going to be so proud of all the places his mum went to.’
Sometimes it works out that way. But some later come to reflect that their early return to full-on work created a force field shielding them from ‘giving in’ to parenthood. A way of not letting the baby take over your life. Over time, this doesn’t always keep working so well. As they become more aware and more verbal, our children seem to have the ability to get to us and change how we see the world. Just ask a mother whose toddler only wants daddy, or whose baby doesn’t crawl to her when she returns from that work trip with the toy, or who realises that her baby smells like their childminder or cries for her nursery carer when she bangs her head in the bath. Or the mum who found her daughter had written a letter to her boss saying that, as he always made her mum work long hours, she would like him to send her a pink computer by way of compensation. Therein lies heartbreak and, for some, a change in tack. If not, then much later still, these can be the children who say they felt ignored by their parents when they were children and plan to raise their own families very differently.
But for the consciously ambitious, running back has rewards, as described by a very experienced city-based headhunter:
‘There are the women who are going to the very top, in largely male environments. To get those jobs there are rules, codes and prizes. You don’t get them without following these: to be part of this group of people you have to be more driven than anyone else. The deal includes 16-hour days and absolute focus. You can’t be the secondary breadwinner with kids and do that kind of a job because it’s all-consuming: you can’t not answer your phone on the Friday when The Sunday Times is planning an exposé, you can’t be off on the day a scandal hits, things are time critical and you are paid to deal with them.
‘To make it work at that level with kids you must have a partner who takes domestic responsibility. These are the kind of women who are often the first senior woman that the company has ever had, so often they find they end up writing their own maternity policies because the company has never done one for that level before. My advice to these women is not to be hidebound by the legal frameworks about the conversations you can and can’t have but to take control and be very up front about how you manage your maternity leave – tell the CEO “this is how we’re going to make it work” and explain the plan you’ve got, for you and for how the company will cover your responsibilities. Afterwards, you have to model behaviour because everyone is looking at you. Which might mean going to the nativity play and saying you’re doing it and, if you do, the men may start to go too.
‘You can make it work with a very supportive partner and a clear sense of team, when you both agree why you’re doing this. I see women at very senior levels who are happy and working very hard – if they have a partnership at home and they feel that running the “team” of their family is a proper joint effort with their partner.
‘That said, we shouldn’t be dewy eyed about it. There will always be people with something eating at them who are super-, super-driven, who want the rewards and status of the very top of the tree. The prizes at the top remain high: we all know the increasing gap between the CEO salary and the shop floor. You justify those superhero salaries with superhero commitment. More often than not, those people are not particularly balanced. They will always work harder and be more driven than the rest of us – sometimes it’s verging on the sociopathic. I’m not convinced it’s something we all need to aspire to. It has a lot of personal cost and that won’t suit most of us.’
An HR director who has watched many women return from maternity leave over the years reflects that some of those who run back become very tired of it all later: ‘I watched a really driven women, who returned a few months after the birth, sitting in a meeting at 6pm, that would clearly go later, as a man said they’d all have to meet again the following morning at 8am. She was one of those women who just keeps going, but she looked utterly exhausted and drained. Afterwards I asked her about it and she said she was fed up with everyone else’s inefficiency getting in the way of her seeing her child.’
That is the final aspect of returning to work (especially if early) that we just don’t talk about enough: sleep deprivation. Says one mum: ‘If your child’s been feeding all night, or up vomiting, or has woken you three times with anxiety attacks, the next day is likely to be a write-off. But I think mostly working mothers are too stoical to mention these things. They just soldier on. But crikey, now the kids are older I think about the days I’ve sleep-walked through – luckily I’ve never operated heavy machinery for a living.’
I take two things from my own experience. One is that it’s remarkable how well you can function on very, very little sleep even if, before kids, you were an eight-hours sort of person. The other is that this phase passes in such a daze that you don’t remember it very well afterwards. Factually I know that our second daughter refused a bottle when I returned to work at six months and chose instead to feed all night, since I was there and she had no problem sleeping all day. If anyone can remember what happened in those months, do please let me know, because, for me, this whole period is like an old joke about not remembering the 60s. Minus the acid and casual sex.
Walking back
Then there are those in the middle, who come to appreciate their time at home but, as it approaches the end, feel the tug to return to the world of work. One said:
‘I started to really enjoy the decadence of the 2pm coffee and cake and realised that I’d stopped admitting what I was doing to my husband because I felt slightly guilty about it. It feels so liberating to be pottering around in the day with your kids and your new friends rather than being in back-to-back meetings stressing about the business. But one day we were talking and this mum was wondering whether her husband would “allow” her to have a new cooker, when another mum says in this slightly too practical tone, “just buy it on the Visa card and give him a blowie when the bill comes.” Everyone laughed but I knew at that moment that I had to go back to work. I mean we do need the money I earn but, more than that, I have to have financial independence.’
Many women who get to relish this time then also plan their transitions in a calm and ordered way. Trying out nurseries in the weeks before the actual return, doing their ‘keeping in touch’ days and generally being on top of the process. If the childcare works out and the feeding is sorted, this can work well. But there are no guarantees. Even in a short period a restructuring or change of leadership can upset the stability of the world you assumed would be constant. It’s a strange feeling going back after maternity leave to find the layout has changed, the focus of work has moved on and someone new suddenly seems the centre of the world. Many a mother who felt they had planned well and stayed in touch and done everything right was gutted to get back and find that they still couldn’t stay.
Back to the HR director, who observes that the pain point here is often struck as the agreement they have made about their hours becomes a reality:
‘There is that moment at 4pm or 5pm when they stand up, having agreed they would do this, but you can see on their faces that they are torn to leave their work and their colleagues yet also know their child is waiting elsewhere. The conflict is palpable. Some screw up their faces and race out. Others try and sneak out unnoticed. I say, keep within what you’ve agreed and just leave. Walk. Just go.’
Dragged or pushed back
Then there are those like Emily who wanted to stay at home longer, perhaps forever, but feel they have no choice. Even if the law is on their side, many feel the psychological pressure bearing down on them:
‘I felt huge pressure to get back at three months. People told me I had the right to have a year, I said “I might have the right but I’ll make myself redundant”. So I went back. I asked to come back three days a week. I was told “no, it’s a full-time job”. I was surprised there was no flexibility. So I’ve come back and booked one or two days’ holiday a week, just to show them it can be done. I hope that when my holiday runs out I’ll have proved my point. I realised then that the working world is not designed for mothers. We talk about equal pay because we can measure that but we can’t measure equal treatment and that is the problem.’
Some, like this mother, grit their teeth and do it because otherwise the household finances just don’t work and are enraged by the people around them judging them for it: ‘We had a new mortgage and my husband had been made redundant, I didn’t do it because I’m a shit mother, I did it because we needed to be able to eat and not default. I’d say to anyone who has a view on it, shut your mouth, let people choose what is right for their family, you have no need to comment.’
Others feel later that they were too focused on the financial short term, and that money issues that seemed overwhelming in the moment look rather different within the context of two decades of active parenting. ‘We couldn’t afford for me not to return full time so I went back even though I didn’t want to. The thing is our second child has special needs and I have taken almost a year off with him and now work part time but, by cutting back pretty significantly, we’ve managed to make it work. I guess that everyone thinks they can’t afford it but if I did it again I would do it differently.’
Some admit their pain to their colleagues and others lock themselves in the toilets, work as part time and close to home as possible. Some will choose to roll one pregnancy into the next and go straight out on another maternity leave.
There are plenty of web chats exploring the pros and cons of having two children very close together. Burnt in my memory though is a woman I used to see locally who had a non-walking 18-month-old and a six-month-old. She was a delicate woman and to see her lugging these two chunky kids around playgroups was enough to put me off. A friend who did have kids very close together says that the upside is that the baby years seem to go very fast.
Some, of course, suck it up and return, albeit shaking with sadness. Sarah Jaggers, MD of Managing Change, adds: ‘If someone is going back and they really don’t want to work but must because of financial pressure, we would be concerned about the impact it could have on their mental health. We’d want to explore with them what they are trying to do: do they want to adjust and live with the situation or explore other ways of working that might suit them better? Ultimately if they really don’t want to be at work their performance will suffer and it may become unsustainable anyway.’
How do you change it if it’s not right?
Jaggers says:
‘If people are struggling with choices, or feel trapped in the arrangement they have, we encourage them to consider what fulfilment looks like to them in broad terms. If they are driven by status and external approval that leads in one direction, if they are driven by wanting to provide wholesome meals and helping their children build dens at the end of the garden, that leads another way. Whatever their ideal is, we explore what choices they will make in order to make that possible for them.
‘One conversation we encourage couples to have is about how their partnership works. At its most stark it is about whose work takes precedence in a crisis. If it always falls to the working mum to make sacrifices, and she has not signed up to that, then it can get very stressful. And – this is a generalisation – in our work we see that in many cases it is the mums who are the ones who step in when needed. It can seem like it’s always the mum whose job it is to pop out at lunch for the red tights needed at school the next day. But ultimately, agreeing a pattern that works for you as a unit is what is important.’
She’s quite right: take it from one full-time working mother who is married to an equally full-time dad: ‘We never had a conversation where he said, “you have to put yourself on hold, it’s all going to be about me and the kids”. We never discussed that. We never agreed. It was a given. I feel stupid thinking it but I feel fucked off about that. I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mum, I love my kids and I’d die for them but I don’t want to be with them all the time and I don’t want to sacrifice networking and nights out. But he assumes it will ALWAYS be me that compromises. It will always be me that finds a babysitter. It kills me. I am ambitious too.’
Setting boundaries with work
As before, doing this before you get pregnant can be massively helpful. But if afterwards, establish boundaries about what working from home means: will you go in if it’s an important meeting, will you swap it for another day, will you not go? And then stick to those boundaries. The good news is that a book called Great at Work by American management professor Morten T. Hansen, which is based on a large business research project, says that we can be more successful in shorter times if we obsess over a smaller number of priorities. He argues that doing this – as well as some other changes – will ensure success over rivals who work longer hours.
All of that said, both parents and non-parents underline that working mums have a big responsibility to be fair to their employer and colleagues, too. New rules ensuring flexibility are resented by some managers and employers, including those who have children themselves, because they perceive people to be misusing them. Taking the piss and leaving work to others, not delivering what you said you will, being uncontactable on your ‘working from home’ days, playing fast and loose with sick days – these give working mums a bad reputation. Now I’ve never met a mum who has even implied she has done this, yet everyone seems to have worked with someone who has. A team manager underlines it: ‘Don’t fiddle and duck in and out, pretend to work from home and confuse everyone. Say what you will do and get on with it.’
If you’re too tired and wired to read the above
• Before you do it, you don’t really know how maternity leave will work or when you’ll want to return. Try to leave your options open. Saving as much money as you can during your pregnancy (and before) helps to increase the range of options.
• It’s possible, with a bit of money and determination, to shield yourself from some of the ravages and vulnerabilities of motherhood: you can ask for a C-section on a specific date (you may or may not get it of course), choose to bottle feed, recruit a support squad (paid or family) and return to work within the week. Initially this can seem to work really well but, down the line, some of the people who have done it talk about weak connections with their kids, a lack of support networks for themselves and emotional distance from their partners.
• You may find that gradual rather than sudden moves work better: taking a few calls, doing some emails, popping into some meetings rather than marching back into the office and sitting down as if nothing happened. If you haven’t had kids yet you won’t believe it but I’ll say it anyway: small babies are more transportable and flexible than toddlers. You can put your baby into a sling and walk or bus into town and meet a colleague for lunch or coffee. You won’t be able to do this with a rampaging two-year-old in tow if you have a second one, so make the most of it the first time round.
• Some talk with absolute glee about the first day they put their work clothes on and drove back to their ‘safe, happy place’. I note that those who can work flexibly – almost irrespective of total hours – seem much more content with their lives. Recent research suggests these women are no less ambitious that those working full time.
• Whichever path you choose, you need to reassess and make active choices, adjusting as you go. The most frustrated parents are those who get locked into one working pattern that they feel powerless to change. Advice on how to do this effectively varies, but one critical thing to keep in mind for any conversation is to focus on what you will do and deliver (‘I will run all of my projects and oversee the development plan to completion’) before you talk about how you will do it (‘I will do this with two full days of meetings in the office and three days of remote working, during which time I will be fully available in working hours.’). If you state these things the other way around, it’s possible that, instead of focusing on the fact that you will be achieving what is asked of you, all they will hear is ‘I’m dropping to a two-day week but you’re still going to pay me for the full five.’
• Use your relationships and networks at work to stay in touch. Call a friend regularly and pop in now and again so you are not forgotten. Keep interested in what they are doing. Some prefer to keep an eye on key emails throughout maternity leave, some find it stressful and prefer to detach.
• Seek to bridge rather than extend the disconnect between non-parents and parents. They may not understand but you may not be helping them either. Using humour, honesty and clarity to explain the pressure you are under may help. If, for example, your boss knows the nursery charges you £10 for every minute you are late they may well be the one spotting you are cutting your leaving time very fine. Obviously this won’t work for everyone.
• Be honest about the financial pressure but don’t wang on boringly about it to your colleagues. Those without kids may find it irritating and mystifying, especially if you earn more than they do.
What happened next?
Emily had her second baby and decided she couldn’t go back to work whatever it cost. Her partner reluctantly agreed and they rearranged their lives to make it work. They moved to a smaller flat, cut out socialising and haven’t taken a holiday since the baby was born. Emily walks round the supermarket looking for offers and mentally totting it up as she goes so she doesn’t lose track of what she spends.
Watching working mothers drop their children off at school in their smart clothes, new cars and talking about where they are going for the half term holiday Emily sometimes feels a pang of jealousy. She wonders if her girls are missing out on the experiences their friends are having – they’ve never been on a plane or to a theme park.
But then she sees the bored childminders chatting, not taking any notice of the children they are supposed to be looking after; she remembers the tears of one of her daughter’s classmates when her mother wasn’t at the show and she remembers how proud her oldest one was when she showed her round the classroom and pointed out her work on the walls and knows that, despite everything, she wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s happy with her decision.