It made me feel bad and vaguely guilty, particularly because when we’d had bad news at my 20 week scan, I swore that if I just got my baby at the end of it all, I would never, ever complain about any of it… This turned out to be a promise I couldn’t keep. But when I think about it, I don’t think we should uncomplainingly get on with motherhood. Some parts of it are horrible, and we shouldn’t need to pretend otherwise.

But now, with a 5 year-old, who’s just finished his first year of school, I'm already looking back at Ted’s baby days with a wistful nostalgia. It feels like a lifetime ago and also yesterday that I was Googling “can you die from lack of sleep?” With that in mind I’m trying to appreciate the little things more, while they’re still happening

I think some of motherhood’s greatest gifts are hidden away in the m.o.n.o.t.o.n.y. In the repetition, in it’s frustrations, in the “CAN YOU PLEASE GET YOUR SHOES ON!!!”ness of it all.

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When you’re in the middle of it, you see the hard bits. Like how often you’re interrupted or not listened to. How tired you are, and how little time belongs to you. All the stuff you need to remember. Reading the same books, over and over, and over.

The sacrifices are obvious because you feel them every day. In life, in work, in the things you want to do, but the timing isn’t ‘right’.

It’s much harder to see the rewards, even if you love being a parent, love spending time with your kids, even if you know this time is precious and you know these are the moments you’ll (supposedly) miss.

They unfold so slowly they’re almost invisible while you’re living them. The closeness that grows out of ordinary moments together. The shared jokes, made-up songs, and nicknames that make no sense to anyone else. It’s so ordinary that it doesn’t feel like anything remarkable. It just feels like any other Tuesday at the house that used to be tidier.

It’s maddening when people with grown-up children tell you to enjoy it with the glint in their eyes. They try to tell you but you can’t hear them, I think it’s similar to the way pre-children you, thought you understood what parents meant when they said they were tired. You didn’t know. You couldn’t.

It isn’t just because they have forgotten exactly how exhausting it was. They still sort of remember the sleepless nights, the mess, or that they couldn’t finish a sentence without being interrupted. But time strips away all the boredom and annoyance. They remember the small hand reaching for theirs. They remember being needed. They remember being called from another room, to witness something unimportant. (If I’ve seen one handstand I’ve seen them ALL)

There’s something unfair about it. I spent so much of early parenthood wondering when life would become easier that I almost didn’t notice I was living through something that, one day, I’d give anything to do again.

We expect nostalgia to attach itself to special occassions, like the first day at school, birthdays or Christmas morning. But instead, it settles itself into the ordinary. The everyday. The unremarkable.

It’s the bedtime questions about life, the universe and everything while you wished they’d go to sleep. It’s walking the same route home every afternoon. It’s sitting together eating strawberries in the garden. It’s hearing them mispronounce a word (cupumba) that one day they will suddenly say correctly forever. The moments that seem almost too small to remember somehow become the ones that refuse to leave us.

One day, they’ll stop asking you to sit beside them as they fall asleep or reaching for your hand automatically as you cross the road.

I won’t miss the logistics of motherhood, or the arguments over shoes or the crumbs all over my house (BUY A ROBOT HOOVER YOU WON’T REGRET IT). And I sure as shit won’t miss the mental load.

But I know I’m going to miss being at the centre of someone else’s world.

The contradiction at the centre of it all, is while we’re focusing on the freedoms we’ve lost, we’re living through days we’ll remember with unbearable nostalgia. Even with a 5 year old, I’m already experiencing it over the stages that have gone. I tell him stories of him being a baby, and it seems almost miraculous that this little boy, so sure in his own options, was ever the little baby in our photos.

Ted’s knocked the wind out of me before by telling me “In 5 years I’ll be 10.” He’s right! But it forced me to time-travel through his life in 5 year segments. His childhood is a third over already and I’m grieving what I still have right in front of me.

But even knowing this, doesn’t make it easier in the moment. All of those people who tell you to enjoy every moment, to soak it all in, are asking you to do the impossible. I love being a parent, but there are bits of it I’m just surviving through, that are boring, or frustrating.

And even though, I think it’s probably an impossible task, I am consciously trying to slow down and pause, to remind myself that these ordinary days aren’t empty. They are full. So full, in fact, that I can’t yet see all they contain.

One day, I’ll lie awake in the middle of the night, and my mind will wander back here. Not to the birthdays or the holidays, but to the moments I barely noticed while they were happening. The sticky hand holding mine. The familiar weight of a sleepy child on my shoulder - something that is already mostly gone for me - he’s just too big. The voice calling, “Mammy! watch this,” for the thousandth time that day.

So for now, I do the impossible, I hold on while also letting go, and I resolve not to feel guilty for not loving every moment. You can’t. You’ll go mad trying, but particularly this summer, I’m doing my best to be present and realise how lucky I am right now.

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A month ago this was a Google Doc. Not even a good Google Doc. A brain dump, sitting between a packing list and something called “ideas (do not delete!!!!).”

I’ve actually had Substack for more than a year, but I had what I’m going to call a false start. I popped up once, posted, then ghosted. When I decided to come back, almost 4 weeks ago, I had 2 subscribers (one of them was me…) and absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I didn’t understand what a note was, or why you’d want to post one. But from the couple of weeks I spent lurking I started to see the potential, the cool people, the ideas and I’d decided I really wanted to post on Substack, and in a weirdly intense ADHD related way, I decided I’d go all in. Tonight I hit 400 followers in 4 weeks.

Now, I’m gonna come clean. Over on LinkedIn (yes, the other place. the one everyone but me seems to hate - but it’s honestly sooooo much better than people give it credit for!) I’ve spent 2 years growing a following of 20,000 people.

I’ve been posting there about being a working parent, and I’m now at the place where people ask “how did you do it?” and because a lot of it happened by accident, and I didn’t document it, I’m not totally sure. Sooooo I don’t want to do that again!

Which means this is the first instalment of something I’ll do once a month: the actual numbers, what worked, what flopped, and what I got wrong. Growing in public, but properly, because I’ve read too many “how I grew my newsletter” pieces that mysteriously skip the part where you find any readers.

First, the numbers, because everyone hides the numbers.

Week one: 2 to 50-ish. Week two: past 150. Week three: 200, then 300 went past so fast I missed my planned celebration post... This weekend, four weeks in: 400. It hovered at 399 all day today, which was annoying!

Nearly all of it came from inside Substack itself, which was actually my biggest surprise, but I’m saving that for below.

At the minute I’ve got an open rate in the 50-60% range, which I’m told is high, and I’m mostly attributing it to not having had time to ruin it yet!

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What actually worked…

Short beat clever, and it wasn’t close.

My best performing Note was 14 words about how much money I now spend on fruit. Fourteen words. Also, funny gets likes, but I’ve discovered likes don’t automatically equal Subscribers.

Notes every day, including the pointless-feeling days.

Two or three a day, short, honest, funny, deep, whatever I’m feeling. Some sank without a ripple. But enough did well enough to meet new people. I never schedule anything on LinkedIn, but I’m finding for the fabled consistency that I might need to on here. Had a day out today, and slacked off completely…

So as I understand it, the publishing bit of Substack sends your writing to people who already found you. Notes are how strangers find you if they do at all. If I’d only published essays, I’d still be reading them aloud to my mam - which obviously, she’d love.

Notes wise, let people know you’re here - introduce yourself, tell people who you’re looking to connect with (but don’t just collect scalps) find the people you’re genuinely interested in, and talk to them. At first, you’ll be posting into a total void, sorry! Nothing you can do about it, but if you keep posting people will eventually start to like and even reply!

Not a quick growth hack, but what can I say? For me, I want to build a community of mums enjoying motherhood, and building their own dreams at the same time, so that means meeting and talking to them, and in 4 weeks I’ve met some great people.

My existing audience mostly stayed put - this is probably the most useful thing I learned.

I arrived with 20,500ish LinkedIn followers and assumed they’d help me grow on here. Having dug around in my stats, that’s not been the case at all. 13 subscribers came from LinkedIn.

2 years of audience-building there gave me 13 people - nice people who I already know - but it’s not many is it? I think so many people on there just don’t get Substack, and I sort of understand, I didn’t either. I didn’t need or want another app to learn. But long form is not the thing on Linkey Dink. If your post is long, people won’t read it, so sometimes I was posting about stuff, and still had a lot more to say about it, but nowhere to say it. So Substack seems like the logical place.

A month of turning up here as a complete stranger sent me the other 380-odd. If you’re starting out on Substack and waiting until you’ve “built an audience elsewhere first”: don’t. The strangers are already here, you just need to post notes for them to find you.

What I did bring from LinkedIn is a bit more of an understanding about what might land with people, and maybe I’m a bit more practiced at saying things online. I’m over feeling like a big cringey, cringer when I post stuff.

Top of the flops (for balance):

Embarrassingly, I really did not get the whole publication thing. Why couldn’t I just post as me?! And, if you want the answer to that, I can’t really give you it, you need to speak to someone with a bit more of a clue.

I’ve been told, people won’t pay to subscribe to a person, and while I’ve not even turned paid on yet, it’s one of the reasons we’re all here, if we’re being honest, isn’t it?

I posted 3 articles as ‘me’, and got lots of nice comments and feedback, before getting the hang of things and moving them. Except, you can’t actually move them, so I had to copy and paste them and republish on my publication “Shy Bairns Get Nowt” - a local saying from my neck of the woods (North East England). Literally it means shy children get nothing, but basically, if you don’t ask, you don’t get, a philosophy that I’m trying to live my life by.

The thing I didn’t expect is what this place is like. I came from a platform where the algorithmic gods decide if you exist and everyone writes like they’re auditioning, but apart from all the AI slop and thought leadership, it’s not a bad place. But here, actual humans have actual conversations. A month in, this is the most supportive room on the internet I’ve found, and I’ve been on the internet since it made dial-up noises, and my mam would shout down the stairs that we needed to get off the internet so she could phone my gran....

So that’s month one. If you don’t ask, you don’t get: soooooooo subscribe and you’ll get the next instalment, numbers and all, including the less flattering ones - especially as I fully expect the numbers to tail off a bit.

And finally, a question. If you’ve been on Substack longer than me, what do you know now that you wish someone had said in your first week?

For me it would be “TURN ON YOUR PUBLICATION, DUMMY!”

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Ambition was something visible. Something you could measure. It came with job titles, promotions and recognition. That sense that you were moving forwards, you were climbing the ladder.

Then I became a mother, and something shifted for me.

Now, there’s a persistent idea that motherhood makes women less ambitious. That once you have children, your priorities naturally shift and your drive fades into the background. Sometimes it is said explicitly, but more often it appears in the assumptions made about mothers. They’ll want less responsibility. They’ll be less committed. Their career matters less now. This is the motherhood penalty in action…

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My start to motherhood was not gentle. At our anatomy scan we were told our son had something seriously wrong with his lung, and I spent the rest of my pregnancy facing the real possibility of losing him. My ambition shrank down to survival: get through the pregnancy, keep him away from colds and covid, get him through lung surgery. Eventually return to work and start to put myself back together again (but much like Humpty Dumpty, I struggled with this bit).

I disappeared from work for 18 months and my day job was the last thing on my mind. And yet, even in those early days, I was scribbling ideas in the middle of the night, planning a podcast, while deranged with sleep deprivation. Obviously, a totally normal thing to do right?

I’ve now interviewed 100 women about motherhood, identity and what it meant for their ambitions, on that podcast. Women in high-powered jobs, women who pivoted, women who couldn’t find what they needed so built it themselves. What they’ve showed me is that these things happen because of motherhood, not despite it.

Because, let’s be clear: the system is very, very broken. Mothers are discriminated against both explicitly, and in more subtle, more insidious ways. The support we deserve isn’t there, work is inflexible, childcare is hard to access and unaffordable. The school day and holiday dates act as though we’ve all got somebody just sitting around at home, waiting to step in. Because, somebody has to look after the kids when they’re not in school, but we just pretend this isn’t the case.

In the UK, women on maternity leave don’t even get the minimum wage, and if you’re self employed? No real maternity leave for you. And the joke we’re the lucky ones, when you look the women elsewhere who don’t even get maternity leave. It’s as though income is a nice optional extra. Paternity leave is woefully short. The people in charge do nothing while wondering loudly why birth rates have plummeted. I could go on (and on, and on, and on…) So against the backdrop of abject failure to support mothers, is it any wonder so many women opt out?

But it wasn’t because they weren’t ambitious. We’re just sick of being told we can have it all, when what society actually means is you can do it all. Enjoy!

Surviving that first year gave me something too. When you’ve handed your 1 year old to a surgeon and sat scared to death in a waiting room, your scale for what counts as scary gets completely rebuilt. I got through the hardest thing I will ever do, so now I can figure out anything. And you don’t need a bruising start to motherhood like that, to have a complete rearrangement of how you view the world, Matrescense is going to reshape who you are on a deep level.

Since becoming a mum I have done some of the most ambitious things of my life. Some of them I’m absolutely convinced I wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for becoming a mother. I started a podcast even though the thought of it terrified me. I’ve guested on other people’s, and contributed to two articles in The Guardian. I’ve spent three years learning Italian, and can now understand most of what’s being said when we visit my family in Puglia. Last week I spoke on a panel about overcoming imposter syndrome, which I had in spades after maternity leave, so at least I didn’t worry about whether I was qualified.

I built a LinkedIn audience of 20,000 people by writing about the reality of working motherhood, having first got over the fear of anyone seeing me have an opinion online. Then I left my job, which had become toxic and draining. I started my own business, partly because I don’t want to answer to anyone, and partly so I can go to any school event I choose, and do pick-up. I’m giving myself flexibility.

Because motherhood, and 18 months out of the office, made my old working life look absurd. The back-to-back meetings that could have been emails, the competitive busyness, time spent at a desk was more important than, you know, actual outcomes. Everything was a priority, and all of it was treated as life or death. Which is funny, because I worked at a university…

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I once told my manager that the meetings filling my diary were making it hard to do any actual work. This was the same manager who tried to send me to Pittsburgh at the last minute, while I was still breastfeeding. She implied this was just the way it is. This was a big part of me realising that if this is how it is, then I don’t want it.

I want to be honest, though, there were long stretches where I could only think about ambition and what I wanted, because I was just too tired, too unsupported, and my confidence had been knocked flat. I went back full time because that had always been the plan. But it taught me something nobody says plainly enough: ambition isn’t fixed. It shifts and changes with capacity, and capacity is exactly what gets drained when women carry an unfair share of the load.

So when a woman steps back, it’s rarely her ambition that ran out. It’s the hours, the sleep, the lack of support. Sometimes she also needs time, or help - which is why I coach women on this - to work out what she wants her life to look like now.

It’s why so many women end up stepping out of the system entirely. Not because they stopped wanting things, but because the system won’t let them carry ambition and motherhood at the same time, with the flexibility that would make both things possible. Mistake that for a lack of drive and you’ve badly misread this whole thing.

When I look at how I’ve changed since becoming a mother, I don’t see ambition that disappeared, but I see my ambition changed radically.

Before Ted, ambition meant achieving more, progressing further, proving myself, chasing more money or the next shiny thing. There’s nothing wrong with that version of ambition, and women shouldn’t have to apologise for wanting success or recognition. But motherhood made me question whether ambition should be measured by how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice. For me anyway, motherhood (combined with PTSD and serious anxiety) made that model impossible to sustain, which is not the same as being less ambitious.

Ambition now looks like starting something with no guarantee it will work. Trusting an idea enough to give it my time and energy. Building work around the life I want, instead of squeezing my life around the demands of work just because that’s what we’re told we all have to do.

It’s made me question everything. I have less time that is my own, so I’m more selective with what I’m willing to spend it on (a big part of me looks back at the hungover weekends I spent lying on the couch, watching and eating rubbish, with a mixture of fondness and regret. But hey, as Alanis Morissette says, you live, you learn.)

There’s also nothing like being a parent to bring it home that life is short, we get one go at this, so let’s not spend it living a life we don’t really want anyway. I want to build something that is mine.

The women I’ve spoken to have shown me this shift isn’t just mine. For some, ambition means going after the promotion they always wanted. For others it means starting a business, changing careers, working differently, or walking away from a path they’ve realised they never really wanted. None of those choices is less ambitious. They’re just shaped by a fuller understanding of what matters.

Motherhood also gave me an ambition nobody warned me about: my ambition for my son. Not the old style, where I map out his career for him before he can reliably put his shoes on the right feet. I couldn’t care less what job he ends up doing.

What I’m ambitious for is that he has confidence in his own abilities and to follow his own path in life. That he never learns to people please, but stays the empathetic and kind little soul he is now. It’s a harder job than any promotion I ever chased.

I didn’t want that life. I wanted to travel, build a career and I had a job that allowed me to do things like travel to China or Russia by myself and attend business meetings, have fun conversations over long dinners and too much wine. I wanted freedom, I wanted possibility. I’d bought into the story that those things disappeared the moment children arrived. There was always another festival to go to or a wedding abroad, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids anyway, because, well, gestures hopelessly at the state of the world…

But in December 2019, as I approached my 37th birthday, we decided that in 2020 we’d give it a go. Annnnnnnnd, well 2020 started and we procrastinated a bit, started ‘trying’ in February, and well we all know what happened in March 2020. But by this point, I didn’t have the luxury of time to wait out the pandemic. At my age, if we were going to do this, and who knew how long it would take, we’d better just get on with it.

But we needn’t have worried. By May, I was pregnant and trying not to vomit into a facemask as I ventured out to do our weekly shop. I was happy. I was excited. It was all a bit surreal because of Covid, but I wasn’t worried. I was doing everything right.

I’d been ambivalent about motherhood until I decided I wanted it, and then I took getting pregnant very seriously. I’d taken folic acid for months beforehand, I tracked my temperature every morning so I’d know when I ovulated (it turns out it’s also remarkably accurate at telling you you’re pregnant, because your temperature never comes back down). I stopped drinking completely the second I thought I was pregnant. I cut out caffeine. I drank 0% beer at socially distanced barbecues to hide my pregnancy.

Morning sickness, however, paid absolutely no attention to my planning. I’m never sick, so I’d always imagined I’d be able to “mind over matter” my way through it, turns out that’s not how it works at all…

I was working from home, and once I was through morning sickness caused by things like the smell of our freezer, or the sight of raw chicken, things were good. At 16 weeks I started feeling my baby move and it all started seeming real. We ordered furniture for the baby’s bedroom, not realising he wouldn’t sleep in there for the next three years, ha, or that he wouldn’t sleep much at all. I was mostly interested in buying baby stuff, and working out what size fruit the baby was each week.

Then we went for the 20-week scan.

Thankfully, restrictions had eased enough that my husband could come in with me. The sonographer had been chatting away happily until she suddenly fell silent. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m just going to get a colleague.”

I didn’t worry. She’d told us not to, and I’m generally a pretty optimistic person.My husband, meanwhile, had realised something was wrong.

They’d found a large opaque area in our baby’s lung whereas a healthy lung should appear transparent on a scan. They couldn’t properly see his heart because it had been pushed across his chest.

Before I go any further, I should say my son Ted is now five. He’s healthy, happy and you’d never know what we went through, the only thing he won’t be able to do is a combat role in the military, which I can’t say I’m upset about.

But we didn’t know that then.

We were referred to specialists and eventually learned he had a rare congenital lung condition called CPAM. If we made it through the pregnancy, surgery after birth was very likely. So as you can imagine, the rest of my pregnancy was absolutely unbearable.

I desperately wanted my baby, but I couldn’t allow myself to feel excited. I cried constantly despite many people telling me “stress is bad for the baby”. The day we went for the scan, I had a gift for my best friend in the car because she’d just had a baby herself, but instead of visiting her, I had to text her to say something was wrong with my baby. It’s horrible remembering all of this even now, 6 years later.

The pandemic made everything harder. Nobody could come round to see us, apart from on the doorstep, and I couldn’t go to anyone’s house. It was incredibly isolating going through something so huge without real support and the experience of all of this changed me completely.

Even after Ted was born, things weren’t straightforward. He went into respiratory distress and was admitted to NICU. We spent ten days in hospital, and again, nobody could visit us, and although me and my husband were allowed to spend as much time as we wanted with our baby, because of Covid restrictions, we couldn’t be in NICU together…

When we finally came home, we shielded him because having a baby with serious respiratory issues, during a respiratory pandemic? Not fun. We waited for a date for the operation that would remove most of his left lung and I’ve never known stress like it.

Motherhood changes us anyway. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “bouncing back.” I think we move forwards through Matrescence into someone new, but this experience accelerated that transformation.

It made me much less willing to compromise on what felt right for me and my baby. I’d spent half my pregnancy wondering whether I’d ever get to be his mum at all. Once he was here, I was completely unapologetic about leaning into motherhood..

He refused a bottle, so we breastfed exclusively for two and a half years, I didn’t sleep train him, despite being deliriously tired.

I dressed for practicality rather than appearance, I barely brushed my hair, I lived in leggings and breastfeeding tops. The old me would have thought that was sad. The new me simply didn’t care, even if present me wishes a tiny bit that I’d made enough effort to not look like Timothy Spall in most of the early photos.

Life has a habit of exposing the stories you’ve unknowingly been carrying around with you. Somewhere along the way I’d absorbed the idea that women become less interesting after they become mothers. Films, television, advertising, even casual conversations, all seemed to reinforce the same message: motherhood is ordinary. Domestic. Slightly dull.

And let’s be clear, yes, there is drudgery, and no, I don’t believe you can ‘love every minute.’

But I’d completely misunderstood what motherhood actually does to you. I became the woman I’d spent years trying not to become.Twenty-five-year-old me would have been horrified, Jesus, even thirty-five-year-old me probably would have been, and she’d have been completely wrong.

I talk about my son far more than I ever imagined I would. I’m invested in what’s happening at school. I know every child in his Reception class. I’ve volunteered on school trips. I host a podcast about motherhood and ambition, I coach mothers working out their next steps.

My house, which contains carefully chosen mid-century furniture, including the Ercol sofas I inherited from my grandparents that I lovingly restored. Something that seemed like an excellent idea before I had a child, is now filled with toys, random plastic tat and artwork proudly displayed on the fridge.

Ted is five now, and I still often end up sleeping in his bed simply because he asks me to, but my life hasn’t become smaller, it’s become fuller.

Yes, I spend an unholy amount of time at our local leisure centre. I’ve endured countless birthday parties and lost the will to live in soft play more than once. I know far more about space than I ever wanted or expected to.

But alongside all of that is something I never anticipated, I have a much, much stronger sense of who I am.

Motherhood didn’t stop me from having ambition, but it shifted it. It stripped away all the parts that never really belonged to me in the first place, the bits I’d picked up from other people. When I was younger, I chased things because they looked impressive. Promotions. Achievements. The version of success I thought I was supposed to want.

Motherhood made me ask myself What do I actually want?

I sat in a zoom meeting just after I came back from maternity leave, and one of the topics of conversation was something we’d been discussing before I went off on leave 18 months previously. They still hadn’t made a decision about it, I couldn’t believe my ears, and while they talked I wrote “I DON’T CARE” on a piece of paper. It was a moment of clarity, that we get one life, and we should do something we care about with it. Maybe I should’ve left then, but it took me a while longer to get up the courage.

But that’s why I started writing. It’s why I launched a podcast. It’s why I care so deeply about the motherhood penalty and the countless women are sidelined, or overlooked or who wonder whether they’ve somehow lost themselves after having children,

Because I don’t think we actually lose ourselves at all in motherhood. I think many of us are meeting ourselves properly for the first time in a long time - perhaps not since those earnest teenage years (mine involved an intense devotion to Tori Amos). I think it’s an opportunity to step off the treadmill and take stock, and if we’re intentional about it motherhood can be the making of us. Really stripping away all of the bullshit, the stuff we don’t care about.

Do I miss parts of my old life?

100%. I’d be lying if I said no.I miss uninterrupted coffee. I miss leaving the house without packing snacks, wipes or yelling repeatedly about getting shoes on. I miss sleeping, although thankfully even that has (finally) improved. But I miss it less than I thought I would, I think I mainly miss the spontaneity of it all.

But these days I’m much more interested in building a life that feels meaningful. Ironically, motherhood has made me more curious, more ambitious and more fulfilled than I ever was when I was desperately trying not to become this version of myself.

I became everything I once dreaded, a middle-aged mum and the biggest surprise was becoming her and discovering she was never the woman I thought she was.

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I was lying in the dark next to my infant son when I opened my laptop and wrote a job application.

He would only sleep if I was pressed against him. The house was silent for now. I was grinding my teeth in my sleep, covered in a stress rash that wouldn’t shift, and so sleep deprived I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. I had PTSD. I was terrified, and here I was writing a cover letter for a job that was essentially my own.

That is my villain origin story and I need to tell you all of it.

The scan that changed everything

I was 20 weeks pregnant when a sonographer told me there was something in my son’s lung that shouldn’t be there. She’d been scanning babies for 20 years and had apparently never seen it before. She actually said that to me, out loud, as if that was helpful information.

I walked out of that scan and disappeared from the workplace for the next 18 months.

My son had been diagnosed with a rare lung condition called CPAM, in utero, during a global pandemic, and I had to navigate all of it, the specialist appointments, the uncertainty, the terror, the grief of a pregnancy that should have been joyful, while trying to hold my career together from a distance.

My manager at the time was not, to put it diplomatically, a people person.

I let him know what was happening straight after my scan and he asked when I’d be back at work. I didn’t know, we needed to see Maternal Foetal Medicine and find out what was actually wrong, with the baby we now knew was a he.

I emailed him again after the brutal scan where they told me his tumour was “impressive’ in size, and that I was at risk of losing him, and nothing we could do about it. To broken to use the phone, I emailed him to say it wasn’t good news.

He didn’t reply.

I followed up.

Nothing.

He basically pretended I didn’t exist, until I complained to HR and forced a meeting. He did apologise and had the grace to look mortified when I asked him about it to his face. He said he wanted to send the perfect reply, but didn’t know what to say, so said n.o.t.h.i.n.g.

I didn’t hear from him again until October or November the following year.

The box-ticking exercise disguised as an opportunity

When he finally did get in touch, it was to tell me they’d created a new role, between mine and his and they’d like me to apply.

At the time, I thought that was nice, I was touched, even. I now understand exactly what it was. It was a way to make sure they couldn’t be accused of passing me over for promotion while I was off. Box. Ticked.

I didn’t really want to apply. Did I mention my son was waiting for major surgery? I was barely functioning. But I felt I had to, to prove I was still committed, still career-focused, still worth investing in. I’d read about the motherhood penalty and was absolutely determined it wasn’t going to happen to me.

(Spoiler: turns out you have a lot less control over this than you think.)

My manager made a big deal about the timeline. Six weeks to interview. He said it was so we could “get it out of the way” before my son’s surgery, without once asking me whether that worked for me. It was just what was happening.

So there I was. Infant next to me in the dark. Teeth-grinding. With my aforementioned stress rash and PTSD. Calling the hospital every day trying to get my son’s operation listed. Not knowing when he’d go in, and because of that not being able to commit to nursery start or a return to work date. Writing a job application on my laptop.

He rang me a few days after I submitted it.

I wasn’t even going to be offered an interview.

My application was, he said, glib. (Yes, he actually said that to me)

I fought back tears and hung up the phone without even asking what he meant, because it was all just too much and the penny was dropping. This had been a box-ticking exercise. He’d put me through it for nothing.

The person doing my maternity cover got the job - which I think is the actual nightmare scenario people worry about.

Coming back

After 18 months, which was nicely finished off by watching my 12-month-old put under to have most of his left lung removed, followed by his recovery in PICU, I returned to work.

I came back to a whole new team. A new executive team. A new strategic direction, and the person who had covered my maternity leave was now my manager.

I was still breastfeeding. I was attending 6 weekly hospital appointments for Ted’s lung check-ups. He’d been shielded throughout COVID, so his immune system had never been tested in a childcare setting and every illness felt like a potential emergency. I was exhausted in a way I still don’t have words for.

I asked to do a phased return. I was already planned to use annual leave to ease myself back in doing 4 days a week. I was told if I did this it would be unpaid, even though my last few months I was actually off sick, rather than on Maternity Leave - so I’m pretty sure was wrong. But I was too worn down to fight it.

So I just got on with it, more or less unsupported with no onboarding. No acknowledgement of what I’d been through. Just: you’re back now, here’s your new desk.

The moment it all turned

Five months in, I was asked at three days’ notice to fly to Pittsburgh for a week.

I said I couldn’t go. I was breastfeeding (a protected characteristic in the UK, for what it’s worth.)

My manager, a woman with two small children of her own, replied: “Well, I think you should.”

I said I absolutely couldn’t and she ended up going instead and from that moment, everything curdled.

She was annoyed, I could feel it and what followed was a slow, relentless dismantling of my confidence. She’d ask for my opinion in meetings and then derisively dismiss it only to implement exactly what I’d suggested two months later. She micromanaged. She told me to “pick up the pace.” I was increasingly isolated and increasingly convinced it was my fault.

I was too fragile to push back. Too emotional. Too traumatised. I knew, somewhere deep down, what was happening, but I couldn’t fight it. I just kept doing my best to show up.

Meanwhile, I was managing someone who was pregnant planning for her leave, supporting her handover and trying not to be triggered by her 20-week scan, trying not to put any of my experiences onto her.

I’d gone from being on an upward track, on the senior leadership team, respected, ambitious, to sidelined and doubting my own competence. I gained weight. I couldn’t sleep. I felt like a fraud. I took sertraline. I had two separate periods off work with stress and anxiety. I had two rounds of therapy both organised by me.

During one of my periods off work, she looked at my LinkedIn profile, constantly. I eventually had to block her.

What I want you to understand about the motherhood penalty

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you: the motherhood penalty isn’t always loud. Sometimes it doesn’t look like discrimination at all. I’m sure the people involved don’t think “I know, let’s discriminate against this new mother!” It’s much more insidious than that. It’s a manager who goes quiet when your scan results are devastating. It’s being asked to apply for a role you don’t want, at the worst possible time, because it covers their back. It’s being asked to fly to another continent after coming back from a year and a half away, and being told you should go, after you’ve already said you can’t.

My employer had an Athena Swan award, for promoting equality, in higher education, but did absolutely nothing concrete to support me. But they were very careful to make sure they’d technically ticked every box.

How I got out

I found my people. My friend Tiffany Scott Sanya and I built the Mambition Podcast while I was still working there, because we were both convinced that things shouldn’t be this hard for mothers. We’ve talked to 100 mothers now, all of whom have shared their own stories of the juggle, of how they manage to achieve their ambitions in a system built for men with wives at home. Creating it gave me back something I hadn’t felt in years: a sense of who I was and what I was capable of.

It gave me the confidence to leave, when work needed to cut 300 staff via voluntary severance due to the rough state of UK HE finances, I jumped at the chance to leave. Just before the 3 year mark of having Ted, which makes me one of the stats of mothers who leave due to the motherhood penalty.

I am now, thankfully, self-employed. I work with ambitious mothers navigating this exact thing the return to work, the identity shift, the grief of the person you were before, the discovery of who you are now.

Because here’s what I know: we don’t get less ambitious when we become mothers but ambition shifts. It evolves. You might need help to figure out what it looks like now, in this life, with this version of you.

Matrescence is real, you are not who you were before. You don’t have to be and you absolutely do not have to keep working somewhere that treats the fact you grew and birthed a human being as a personal inconvenience. I’m not saying quit your job, it’s not that easy, but work out what you do want, and make a plan of how to get there. Don’t put yourself last.

I’m angry. Genuinely, properly angry. Angry at how I was treated. Angry that this is normal. Angry that we continue to treat women like they’re doing something inconvenient by continuing to populate the planet.

But the anger is fuel now - I’m just getting started.

If this resonated with you please subscribe and share it with anyone you know who’s been let down by the system.

Things I’ve Googled at 3am since becoming a parent (and what they taught me)

There are two types of parents in this world:

1. The ones who sleep, because they were lucky enough to get one of those unicorn babies that don’t wake every 90 minutes.

2. The ones with the kind of Google search history that could be submitted as evidence of some kind of breakdown.

I’ll let you be the judge of which type I am. (Yes. It’s the second kind…)

I’ve spent many 3ams curled around a small, overheated child, one eye on him, the other on my phone, doom-scrolling between Calpol dosages and existential dread.

Here’s a real and only slightly shameful selection of things I’ve Googled in the dead of night (and what I learned from them. It’s debatable if I )

‘Can you die from lack of sleep?’

Time: 03:42am

Ted had been waking every 90 minutes for what felt like several presidential terms. My limbs were vibrating oddly, I’d started crying at adverts. Surely this wasn’t survivable?

What I learned:

You probably won’t die. But you might cry if someone even breathes in your direction and coffee stops working after cup four.

‘How to get a toddler to take antibiotics without them rage vomiting on you’

Time: 01:17am

It’s like wrestling a furious, sweaty goblin, who also just happens to know all your deepest weaknesses.

What I learned:

There is no elegant solution. Employ bribery, use distraction. Pray to the Calpol gods and surrender yourself completely to the madness.

‘Is blue poo normal after birthday cake?’

Time: 04:03am

A truly alarming nappy, which is an electric, radioactive Smurf blue. My brain said ‘food colouring.’ My my poor anxious heart said A&E? We had a rough start to parenting with an ill child, who needed most of his left lung removed, so I’m an anxious soul when it comes to Ted’s health.

What I learned:

Yes, it was the icing and no, 111 doesn’t need to hear about it (again.)

‘Sleep regression chart by age because something evil is happening in my house’

Time: 02:46am

Let’s preface this by saying, Ted was NEVER a good sleeper. But when bedtimes started to remind of scenes from The Omen, I started hunting for a scapegoat.

What I learned:

There’s always a regression. Or a leap. Or a molar. Or a mysterious full moon ritual that only children are invited to. Ride it out, there’s nothing you can do but ride it out, drink more coffees, or like me, enjoy a brief flirtation with copious amounts of Lucozade, and know this too shall pass.

‘What happened to me?’

Time: 03:21am

In the quiet dark I miss the me I used to be. The woman who slept. The woman who made plans. The woman who didn’t measure time in Calpol doses and nightly wake ups. The woman who wore nice clothes, that didn’t have stains or bodily fluids on them.

What I learned:

She’s still here somewhere. She's just very, very tired.

#Parenting #Motherhood #WorkingMum #SleepDeprivation #Humour