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I grew up in the 90s, when a woman’s body wasn’t really hers. It was dangerous, something to fear, something to protect, something to be judged on, eyebrows were forbidden, thinness was everything. Long before the Sidebar of Shame, every tabloid printed red circles around any woman daring to have an “imperfect” body. No one was safe: not Britney, not Mariah. Somehow we were led to believe Jessica Simpson was fat. We absorbed it, to the point I think it’s something most of us are dealing with now. The 90s were rough.

I let myself go after motherhood, properly. I didn’t wear a bra for two years, didn’t wear nice clothes, for a long time I actually just kept on wearing my maternity leggings. I didn’t wear makeup, and some days I barely brushed my hair. My motherhood journey collided with COVID, so I didn’t even buy maternity clothes, bar a couple of pairs of stretchy trousers and leggings, and just wore my husband’s t-shirts and jumpers. Why bother spending the money when we weren’t even leaving the house? So the pressure to look nice while pregnant disappeared, it wasn’t something I had to contend with.

The greying hair started around then too. So did the stretch marks, a lot of them, Ted was a big baby. My stomach isn’t what it was, and Ted likes to tell me it’s squishy, but in a kind way, that doesn’t make me hate it.

Honestly, in the newborn days I didn’t feel particularly good about how I looked, but I didn’t think about it much, I didn’t really care, I was too knackered. Unless my dad happened to be about. He takes a lot of photos, and he’s got an uncanny knack of taking photos that make you think “am I really this ugly?!”

He gives you no warning, so they are unposed, and not in a candid photographer way, but in a way that just captures all of your chins on full display. I was looking at one of the pictures he’d taken of me, and wondering who it reminded me of. Eventually I worked it out. It was Timothy Spall, pre-weight-loss. No shade on him, but not great for my self-esteem. But 5 years later, I’m glad those photos exist.

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(No matter how horrible you feel, be in the photo, you’ll thank me later.)

My younger self would have hated all of it. She’d have just seen that I’d stopped making an effort, and let myself become less attractive. She’d have wanted to wear makeup to feel better about herself. I’ve always been thin, and she’d have been shocked to discover I did not bounce back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. I didn’t even try. I was breastfeeding, and man, did that give me a sweet tooth. I’ve never been into white chocolate, but I literally ordered a case of Tony’s Chocolonely White Chocolate and Raspberry, and ate them in secret, in our downstairs, walk-in pantry. True story.

Writing this has made me laugh out loud, and I’m still not even sorry! But this did mean, that rather than bouncing back, I gained more weight over the next couple of years.

But there was something extremely freeing about it too. I discovered I am still me when I haven’t made any effort. I’m still valuable whether I wear makeup or not, whether my hair looks good or not, whether I’ve gained weight, whether I’m wearing something nice or something I pulled off the bedroom floor.

I think that’s something women aren’t taught. We’re socialised to care deeply about how we look because, let’s face it. we’re judged by it, because our appearance can affect how we’re perceived, how we’re treated, how worthy we feel. I don’t want to live like that anymore. I DGAF what I look like on the school run, and I expect to be liked and treated well anyway.

I gained three stone (20kg) during pregnancy, mostly because it was an incredibly stressful nine months (I’ve written about this before: bad news at my 20-week scan, then a high-risk pregnancy) and you can’t exactly drink a glass of wine to get through it. So I comfort ate my way through instead. I ate a loooooooooooot of Nando’s. I was very sad, and it was the one thing that made me feel a little better.

When I gave birth to Ted, I had an episiotomy and lost a lot of blood, and a no-nonsense nurse brought me the blood-thinning injections I would need to give myself for the next six weeks. She said: “You need to take these, because you lost a lot of blood. And also because of your age (37) and your weight (undisclosed).”

Not sure it was necessary to add the second part, but hey ho!

Skip this bit if you find talk of weight loss triggering…

Now in the interest of full transparency, eventually I took GLP-1s for 6 months, and got back to roughly my pre-pregnancy size. Mostly because of my aforementioned age. At 42, I realised I had two choices: accept I was just gonna be this weight going forward, even though chasing my son about and even bending down wasn’t comfortable or fun, or do something about it.

After considering my options I went with that. But how I looked hasn’t actually been the important part of any of this. Now I know people have a lot of opinions about GLP-1s, but I was interested in my health, and as an older parent of an only child, I owe it to him to take that seriously. This is not an advert for GLP-1s, but they’ve worked for me. Almost a year after stopping, I’m still about the same weight, eating well and doing exercise. And it somehow cured by Diet Coke habit.

What I’ve grown to appreciate is what my body actually did. It grew a child. I’m not going to feel bad about how it changed to do that, size, stretch marks, grey hair, squishy stomach and all.

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These days I don’t look quite like the bedraggled soul I was in the newborn days. I’m generally showered, with clean, brushed hair, but I value practicality and comfort over anything else. Men generally don’t wear uncomfortable clothes, and I’ve decided I’m not going to either.

I’m a flat shoes person, or better, a nice trainers person. I’m all about convenience. I wear earrings I never take out. I own one shade of nail varnish, and really only paint my toenails, topped up whenever it starts looking chipped.

My hair is dark, and I’ve barely ever dyed it, apart from a brief goth, plummy-red phase in my teens, abandoned by the time I got to uni. It’s streaked with grey now, and I decided long before any of it came through that I wasn’t going to dye that either. My eyebrows, which are beasts, thankfully grew back after the 90s took them from all of us, and I just do them myself.

I have embraced not caring, in accepting myself how I actually am.

I basically never do my bikini line anymore. It’s uncomfortable, I don’t want to, so I just bought swimming bottoms that look like cycling shorts and wear those instead. Genuinely the top tip of this entire piece.

I’m pale. I can tan if I bother, thanks to my Italian genes, but I don’t, and I’m happy being the whitest white going. On a non-touristy beach in Italy once, two women near me loudly discussed the fact that I was quite possibly the whitest person they had ever seen, clearly assuming my extreme whiteness meant I couldn’t understand a word. I could, and it was brilliant.

When I make an effort now, it’s because I want to, because I enjoy makeup, or nice clothes, or actually brushing my hair occasionally, not because I believe I owe the world a presentable version of myself. I expect to be treated well either way.

If I turn up looking great, lovely. If I turn up looking like I could have brushed my hair but chose not to, also lovely. If you’re into clothes and makeup and looking nice because it matters to you, then I love that for you. But it’s not me anymore. And if you’re doing it because of outside expectations? You don’t have to. The world won’t end.

Maybe “letting yourself go” isn’t always about giving up on yourself. Sometimes it’s just about letting go of the idea your appearance was ever the most important thing about you.

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We were due to be meeting up with friends, so I did what any competent 43-year-old adult would do. I rang my dad. Not to change the tyre, he’s not that sort of dad. But he does a very good line in dad’s taxi services.

Soooo, I got him to drive us about, while letting my tyre go totally flat outside my house. This meant having to book a (more expensive) mobile tyre fitter, who then couldn’t come until Saturday. But it meant we still got to see the friends Ted has been talking about seeing all summer. Possibly a win, possibly not, who even knows at this point.

Ted also finally acquired the cap he won in an art competition. He’s not taken it off since, not even indoors, not even, I suspect, to sleep. Seriously, it’s been suspiciously close to his bed in the mornings. The cap itself is slightly odd, it has a drawing of a local artist and his dog on it. But Ted is extremely pleased to have won his first competition and he wants everyone to see it.

As I’m covering 2 weeks, I’m not gonna share a full week breakdown (sure there’s a joke in there about MY full week breakdown. Or the bloody tyre. But I’m tired guys, so insert your own jokes here.)

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Weeks 2 and 3 have included:

More sleepovers for Ted, (PRAISE BE) who stayed at Nonna and Grandad’s again, highlight of this was a water fight in their garden. In his underpants. He also stayed with Gran and Grandad, and his highlight from there is they’ve bought a new train set.

More swimming baths - though this time we went to one with a waterslide, which Ted had to be persuaded to go down, after specifically going there for the slide. Once he’d confronted his fears (aka been cajoled into riding down it on my lap) he loved it, and we spent an hour doing nothing but sliding. My inner child had the best day ever.

More parks - though we gave the one nearest to us a miss, because everyone is sick of it! Went back to the splashpad one, had a fun ride on the tea cups at a mini-funfair with Ted, and everyone got a bit too hot and cranky by the end of the day.

More Minecraft - much, MUCH, more Minecraft. Ted has built a hotel, which consists of lots of impractical platforms over the sea. I am required to observe its creation. I am asked for suggestions, all of which are dismissed.

More jam - flushed from our first jam success, we collected more blackberries and made jam with the friends we were visiting on flat tyre day. It felt very wholesome and was free entertainment. Ted won’t eat the jam, but whatever.

More family - my sister Olivia came to visit from Glasgow, we all hung out and went out for Greek food to celebrate my Mum’s birthday.

My patience is a little frayed from the constant doing of everything, the heat (seriously, it’s wild in the UK right now) and the house being a total disaster. But we’re mostly still having fun, and we were managing not to spend too much money, right up until the point of having the flat tyre replaced.

2 weeks to go…

Rating for the last two weeks? I’m gonna say about a 7, not terrible, not brilliant. I’ll take it.

Grandparents deployed: 2. Tyres replaced: 1. Jam jars made: 3. Jam eaten by Ted: 0

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The growth, week by week: 400 around the 19th of July, past 500 by the 23rd, past 700 by the 30th, past 900 by the 3rd of August, and 1,000 landed on the 7th.

Nearly every day since I started I’ve grown by double digits. And even though I’ve got 20k followers on LinkedIn, only 20 people have subscribed from there. So almost all of my subs have come from inside Substack, not including my brother, and a handful of real life friends.

(As an aside, here’s my Linkedin profile, some people have found me on there already, but feel free to connect with me there if you want to. You don’t have to follow, tell me Substack sent you, ask to connect, and I’ll accept!)

Also flagging, that I’ve been co-hosting Mambition Podcast, for 2 years with my bestie Tiffany Scott Sanya. Over that time I’ve gone from feeling very weird about people reading/listening to stuff I say online to really not caring if you hear my oversharing. Unless I know you in real life and then, the worst thing you can say is “Ohh, I’ve been listening to your podcast” it makes my blood run cold, wondering what the hell I might have said, and how you might have been offended...!

I mention both of these things, to point out I’ve learnt a lot about online growth from growing 20k followers on Linkedin - (who I’ve frankly neglected a bit since finding Substack) and our 4k regular listeners. Which means I’m starting from a different place to most people, but, as I haven’t imported my mailing list, you can do the stuff I’m doing and see growth here too.

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I have an idea of what sort of stuff gets traction, which you’ll learn too over time, but most importantly having a good hook in your title is the difference between people opening your emails and, well, not…

I’ve also developed a whole other level of shamelessness. I’m over the ick of self-promotion. If you want to grow? My advice is get over that quickly. And how do you do that? By feeling the fear, and doing it anyway. And then doing it again, and again. Rip that bandaid off. Honestly, before long you won’t care. Post the stuff, say the thing. It’s not that deep. Soon, you won’t care if a post flops, you won’t care about baring your soul, or being embarrassing, or not getting trends. I don’t, and frankly, not caring is an asset!

What actually worked

Posting ‘connection’ notes. I wrote one 3 weeks into being on substack, asking where the ambitious mothers were at, and it is still, bringing in subscribers. That one note has brought me 238 subscribers. The funny posts get me likes, maybe some followers, not subscribers - but I like being funny, so I’m fine with that. The more reflective ones bring me a handful of subscribers. Notes where I’m actually looking for people to connect with, specifically, honestly, not just fishing, those are the ones that have helped me grow.

I know it feels cringey doing it. But if you want your work to be seen, then I’m here to tell you, you have to ask people to see it. You’re not going to grow quickly otherwise.

Being specific about who I want here helped a lot. I write about motherhood, ambition, career, identity, (and I like reading about the same, plus culture, writing, and growth) so that’s who I’m looking for.

I follow back generously, because I only had a couple of subscribers, mere weeks ago, but I’m not chasing every single person who replies to a note either. I also post weekly sharing links to other people I’m reading, and why you should follow them. These have actually brought in some subscribers too, but they’re mostly about building community, which is what I’m after more than anything. And who doesn’t like a shout out?

I also went to an in person networking event near to me, and luckily for me the guest speaker turned out to be of . Claire’s from my neck of the woods and a legitimate Substack superstar, as the UK’s first Substack coach. She started speaking and I sat there in the audience with a big grin on my face, thinking of my 300 subscribers and drinking in everything she had to say.

We chatted at the end, and I’m excited to say she’s coming on Mambition Podcast, when we get over the madness of the summer holidays and the kids are back at school. Not only does Claire know her stuff, she’s also LOVELY. Small world, and a good reminder to do in person stuff too, you never know who you might meet.

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The flops

I lost my first subscriber this month. Not gonna lie, it stung a bit, but I’ve told myself, it’s something everyone has to go through. I posted about it, and lost a few more. Ah well, onwards!

I wrote a post about growing from 2-400 subscribers, explaining in there how had taken me a long time, but I’d finally understood the whole publication thing, then I was rushing to post it, to go and do bedtime for my son, and posted it on my personal profile, like a complete newb. The irony.

I got nice comments almost straight away and then had to post it again on my publication. In order to not be annoying, I didn’t email people about it from Shy Bairns Get Nowt, which messed up my stats completely. What’s worse is I didn’t even learn my lesson, and did it again, with a post I was really proud of; Don’t Tell Me to Cherish Every Moment. Wah, wah, wah. I’ve learnt my lesson now. I think. Soooooo annoyed with myself.

My other flop was turning on paid at 500 subs, then panicking and turning it straight back off again. Literally had to delete Stripe to do so.

But at 900-ish subscribers, two separate people tried to become paid subscribers before I’d even switched it on. One of them, Mei, messaged me directly to say she couldn’t find the button, but could she upgrade to paid. Someone else pledged. Both of these lovely people made it very hard for me to keep making excuses.

I’d planned to turn paid on at 1,000 subscribers, hit the number, and then didn’t, for a few days. I hate asking people for money, it makes me feel a bit gross if I’m honest, even though I’ll happily tell you all the reasons you should ask your boss for a pay rise. Funny how that works.

It also turns out you also can’t appear on Substack’s “rising” lists without paid switched on. So it’s on now. I have 4 paid subs, one of them’s my bro - (I’ll return the favour when he turns on paid).

So the moral of the story?

If you don’t ask, you don’t get, if you don’t turn on paid, no one can pay you, even if they want to… And even if your numbers don’t move fast? Keep plugging away. We found with the podcast, you just need to keep doing it for long enough, and it compounds, you start to get traction. It might not happen overnight, but if you quit? It won’t happen at all. Just try and remember that.

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And on that note, if you wanna subscribe great! I love that for us. Almost everything will remain free here, but if you want to go deeper? If you want more of, well, me? Or access to coaching I do to help women achieve their ambitions after motherhood? Or the resources and guides I’ve put together on a good return to work or figuring out what next? There’s the paid tiers.

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When people ask what made me quit my job, and to leave without a plan. They imagine there was one terrible meeting, or a final straw. But there wasn’t one. It wasn’t one bad day, it built up slowly.

I was working in HE, as Head of International Relations and Partnership at a Russell Group Uni, a job that allowed me to travel, think deeply about stuff, have ideas, and work with genuinely interesting people. I set up international collaborations researching things that matter - like projects on the cutting edge of climate science.

So pre-motherhood I had no desire to pack up and leave my job. When I got pregnant, I’d initially planned to take 10 months off, from both a money point of view, AND to prove I was STILL SERIOUS about my career.

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But life had other plans for me. I was off 18 months, which I’ve written in my last two posts, so I won’t tell the whole story again here. But the short version is everything was normal, until it wasn’t. I went for my 20 week scan and didn’t go back to work until my son was 14 months old, thanks to a complicated pregnancy, a sick child, my son spending his first ten days in SCBU (during the February 2021 lockdown - just to make things extra fun), and the major lung surgery he needed at 12 months old, which COVID helpfully delayed three times.

I came back exhausted, breastfeeding, permanently sleep deprived, and unsurprisingly, very, very, anxious. I hadn’t had a diagnosis yet, but it turned out to be postnatal anxiety, PTSD and generalised anxiety disorder. I walked into a new team, very little re-onboarding, and the expectation that I’d just get on with it. Which, I’m just going to point out here, should not be the expectation of anyone returning from maternity leave.

If you’re expecting this, you’re setting them up to fail.

But in the case of anyone who’s been through a traumatic pregnancy and dealt with a sick child? This was woefully inadequate for an institution which has won plaudits for supporting women in the workplace.

We’d spent Ted’s whole life shielding him, because catching a cold risked him getting pneumonia, so we’d avoided all normal childhood germs, not visiting friends or family, if they had so much as a sniffle. So his first year at nursery was chaotic. We had a few days of settling in sessions, and after those he was too sick to attend his first paid day at nursery. I began to dread calls from Nursery that kept interrupting meetings, spiking my anxiety every time. Seriously, for the first 2 months I had to go and collect him every, single, week…

When I went back, people were kind. For the first few weeks anyway, they asked how I was. They understood I was finding it hard. They knew what I’d been through, they’d sent me flowers after I went to my 20 week scan and never came back. They gave me a bit of grace while I found my feet.

The problem was that kindness and patience run out, and it happens much, much quicker than you’d expect. And anyway, kindness from your colleagues is not the same as proper understanding and support from your manager, and let’s just say, for the sake of brevity, that I really didn’t get that.

Anyone can be sympathetic for a few weeks. Real support looks like flexibility that exists beyond a policy document. Managers who know how to help, and have had proper training in supporting someone returning to work. Because that’s the bit that’s really lacking. Most people, in the UK at least, become managers as part of their next promotion, and don’t necessarily have the training or people skills to be good at the management bit, even if they’re good at the rest of their job.

Even without everything I’d been through, it would have been a difficult return. There was very little genuine flexibility - I was taking calls from different time zones, that sometimes meant joining a call from Australia, before nursery was even open, sitting outside with a child in a buggy.

Travel expectations hadn’t changed. There was a toxic culture of competitive busyness: back to back, ‘could’ve been an email’ meetings, meaning little time to do any actual work. Unless you had time to log back in from home in the evening. Or get to work early to catch up. Did I mention I had a baby? So none of that was possible. When I mentioned this, it was met with a shrug, everyone else was also doing back to back meetings. So rather than doing anything about what is a terrible and inefficient way of working, I was the problem, and they expected me to suck it up. Everything was urgent. Everything was a priority.

Which is HILARIOUS because things take an age to happen in Higher Education. When I first started, I’d suggest things and be told that would be IMPOSSIBLE until the next academic year. At first, I couldn’t believe it, but over time, you adjust to the glacial pace, you develop a kind of institutionalised Stockholm Syndrome.

So the system wasn’t failing because of my circumstances, it was pretty creaky and unsupportive for anyone returning, but my circumstances simply made it impossible to keep pretending the system worked. But despite my confidence being eroded day by day, I was determined to prove I could cope (spoiler; I couldn’t) and so I put up with it for almost three years, before jumping ship. That three year bit is significant though:

“Research shows that 85% of women leave full-time employment within three years of having their first child. While 98% want to return to work, cumulative workplace friction, inflexibility, and caregiving burdens drive massive attrition by year three.”

My source for this? The UK Government Website, no less.

SOOOOOOOOO. The big question is what the FUCK are we actually doing about this?! Because that is an outrageous statistic. The gender wage gap? It’s actually mostly a motherhood wage gap, that society is doing very little to change. Each woman who quits after not being supported, either in the workplace or at home, is treated as though it’s an individual choice she’s making, or her inability to cope, rather than a huge problem with the entire system. It’s no wonder that so many women end up opting out of the system entirely.

They’re setting up their own businesses, even when entrepreneurship wasn’t part of their plan. And I get it. If women could change the system themselves, it would’ve happened by now. We need serious buy-in from the highest levels of government. Businesses need to make it a priority. Male allies need to fight for it too, along with the better parental leave THEY deserve.

So we need to fight for this, for sure. But I don’t blame women for being tired. Tired of fighting a system that was set up for men with wives at home, who handled the school run, the holidays, the household etc.

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So what did I do after jumping? I took time off. I rested, I played with my son. I settled him into his first year at school, as I recovered from 3 years of being slowly ground down. I was lucky to leave with a year’s salary, which gave me the luxury of doing this.

Then I set up my own business, I’d never planned to do this. But it turns out to be the best thing I’ve ever done, even though it came from something profoundly negative. As you can probably tell, I’m angry that we treat women who have just done the most life-changing thing so poorly.

So I’ve built a whole business around helping mothers achieve their ambitions, and the lives they want after motherhood.

I think that the distance (not calling it a break - IYKYK) from the workplace, provided by maternity leave, no matter how long it is gives you the space to think. It gets you off the hamster wheel for long enough that you start to re-evaluate your priorities, your values and what you want from life. I think that’s why so many women already know they want things to change when they return to work.

(if you live in a country that doesn’t give you one, I’m really sorry. I desperately want this to change for you. It makes my blood boil that you aren’t supported to take time with your baby)

There was one meeting early on, which was a big sign of what was to come. I had an epiphany that this wasn’t what I wanted anymore, not enough to make me quit, not yet, but it sewed a little seed of discontent in me about the role itself, and not just with how I was being treated.

We were discussing something I’d watched the same group discuss before I’d gone off on leave. They were no closer to making a decision than they’d been months earlier,

I couldn’t believe they were still discussing it. But instead of feeling my usual frustrations about the level of navel gazing taking place, in that meeting, I realised I just didn’t care.

Now I hadn’t stopped caring about doing a good job, but those eighteen months leave taught me time isn’t an unlimited resource, and I was starting to realise I wanted to do something else with mine. Even if things were suddenly back to how they’d been before my leave? I was no longer sure it was what I wanted.

I went through the motions for 3 years, never did ‘slot back in’.

Looking back, leaving was probably the first decision that truly reflected the person I’d become.

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But I felt like I could show up for him properly on the days I spent with him, though crucially, I’ve stopped trying to entertain. We’re going low effort this week.

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Monday: Me and Ted. Ted kept asking what we were going to do, relentlessly, but I was determined we were going to have a slower day. Leaning into a bit of boredom being a necessity and refusing to operate as Director of Fun this week.

We didn’t get dressed until almost 11, but a whole day in the house is where madness lies, so then we walked to the swimming pool by our house, stopping at the library, to drop off our (overdue) books, on our way. The swimming pool’s a three minute walk, so I walk Ted there in his swim gear and crocs, to eliminate one set of getting changed.

Not sure if this a normal thing to do, maybe it’s a genius parenting hack, maybe it’s a sign standards have slipped so far there’s no coming back (for the avoidance of doubt I don’t make him walk back in the wet stuff!)

At the library the North East Literacy Trust were doing an event, which Ted wanted to join in. He hunted for teddies in his highlighter-orange swimwear like it was totally normal.

Then we splashed around in the pool, where he goes for lessons, so he swims for free. Not a very exciting day, low key and crucially cheap, but it was fun.

He even picked a free book at the library event: Peppa Pig, a bit babyish for him now, but it was the one he wanted, so I let the choice be his. C’est la vie.

Tuesday: Ted’s day with Nonna and Grandad. My parents picked him up on Monday so he could stay over, ready to spend the day with them - but I’ve just realised I have no idea what I did with my free Monday night. They hit their local park nice and early, then did a scavenger hunt in the garden.

Wednesday: Ted and Daddy. They didn’t do a lot, just hung out and played. They bought Kirby for the Nintendo Switch - which was far and away the most expensive thing that happened all week. Which won Daddy bonus points from Ted, if not from me…

Thursday: Me again. Our local park turned 150, there were free activities, food stalls and music, so we set up picnic blankets and met friends there. It was packed. I think we saw half the kids from Ted’s class. We ate a picnic, and Ted won the kids’ art competition, drawing his favourite bit of the park.

We were there all day, just hanging out. It was great, and free.

Friday: Ted’s other grandparents came to get him, and took him to the same park, despite us having been there all day on Thursday, and the fact we were going for another park day with friends on Saturday. I tried to disuade them, but they were having none of it. So Ted spent roughly 20 hours in this park over the week.

But they did help him practise on his scooter, so in all, a win.

Saturday: Back to the park, this time to see more friends. Blanket by the climbing frame, packed lunch of melon, sausage rolls and cakes.

The weather was colder than it’s been recently. It was a bit grey and windy, and if we hadn’t been with the kids we’d 100% have gone home. But it meant we flew a kite for the first time, which made the kids day. It’s the simple things? No?

THEN on the way out of the park we always do some ‘nature spotting’, where I point out different types of trees - at Ted’s request I hasten to add, before you think I’m the most boring person ever. This time we spotted about 5 blackberries on some brambles by the gate, and I let him pick them.

Ted said, “I have a really, really, great idea! We can make jam!” because his grandad makes it from the berries in his garden. We didn’t have enough for jam, and I didn’t know how to make it, but the way he said it was really infectious.

So swept along with Ted’s enthusiam, I took him to a scruffy little hedgerow near our house where I’d seen lots of berries growing a few days earlier, but hadn’t thought to pick them, because we live in suburban Gateshead and I’m an adult. We collected them in a little bag, then soaked them in water and apple cider vinegar overnight to get any bugs out. My enthusiasm had waned by this point (hello ADHD) and this was a delaying tactic in the hope he’d forget about the jam.

Sunday: You knew where this was going. Ted had not forgotten, not a bit. He wanted to make jam before breakfast, which I drew the line at. So even though we had a tenth of the berries the recipe needed, we made jam. One small jar of it, but Ted was so excited, and we took his jam with him to Nonna and Grandad’s so they could try it.

I was under the impression that making jam took hours. Turns out, like much in this life, it’s not as hard as you’d expect. 30 minutes. Done!

Score: I’m gonna say 9 (with the full awareness the only way is probably down). I’ve never spent so much time outdoors in my life, but the time spent with friends, for the strength in numbers parenting experience, was brilliant. From where we were sitting we could let the kids run wild and chat. Pretty sure making jam was Ted’s highlight and therefore, probably mine!

Four weeks to go. Last week I was ordering wine. This week, I’ve gone full Nigella. If she was a Geordie who picked her own urban blackberries and made pathetically small amounts of jam.

Parks visited 4 if you can count visiting the same park 3 times.

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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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So we stayed home, close to the toilet and far from any of the plans I’d made. We did some arts and crafts, discovering a forgotten paint your own solar system set in a cupboard, and thankfully doing that. That was the wholesome bit. We also watched roughly a thousand YouTube videos about building things in Minecraft, followed by Ted actually building things in Minecraft.

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Not the start I’d imagined. Onwards.

Our weeks currently look like this:

Mondays - me and Ted:

plans of swimming, the park and library - because they are all walking distance and cheap/free. This week was much more boring/disgusting.

Tuesdays - Nonna and Grandad (My parents):

This week that meant building a skyscraper in their living room and going to the park near them that has a zipline. He’s their only grandchild, so they basically do whatever he wants and he’s in charge…

Wednesdays - Ted and Daddy.

This week: the 9am screening of Minions and Monsters, where they were the only two people in the room, which meant nobody had to sit still or be quiet… Calling that a win.

Thursdays - me and Ted again:

This week we had reinforcements. Half of my friends with kids are free on Thursdays too, so this week was park number 2, this one with a splash pad and, currently, a funfair. I even went on a proper waltzer while the kids were being supervised by other adults. Screamed my head off, it was great! Very stress relieving. Fed the ducks too. Kids loved it.

Fridays - Ted’s other grandparents: Beach, then a sleepover, with Gran and Grandad. Which means we got to go and see The Odyssey. Generally, Greek mythology is not my thing, so I was worried this might be the first Christopher Nolan film I didn’t enjoy. But I was wrong, though I didn’t love the crushing realisation, that being the same age as Anne Hathaway, apparently means I could be cast as Tom Holland’s mother. This devastating blow aside, it was a great film.

Saturdays - Family time: This Saturday started with a 9:30am kids’ party (so no lie-ins, for anyone) then we went to a friend’s house for the afternoon and set up some wholesome craft activities for the kids, while drinking a glass of prosecco in the sun. Tremendous. Parenting is always much easier as a group activity I find!

Sundays - Family time: Birthday meal celebrating Uncle Joe’s birthday over at Nonna and Grandad’s, didn’t have to cook or wash up, got to eat lasagne, cake and chocolate. Now home and the boys are watching the F1 downstairs while I chill with a coffee. Nothing exciting, but a nice weekend.

Score: a solid 8 out of 10. Let down by the diarrhoea, but at least it was short lived.

We did a lot of genuinely fun stuff, some free, some paid, and we’re lucky enough not to have paid for a single holiday club this year, thanks to the kindness of grandparents and us managing to cover 3 days between us. But entertaining a child is punishing, and as of next week I will be leaning into my own 90s summer holidays, allowing more time to be bored and less time acting like the entertainments director. Being bored is apparently good for their creativity.

Parks visited 3. Shouts of “what can we do now?” too many to count…

Six weeks. This was week one. Five to go…

Now, I’m not here to bash anyone, so I want to say this bit very clearly: if that’s genuinely you, then I’m delighted. Truly. If you’ve had the leave, done the recovering, you’re feeling confident, supported and you’re walking back in, firing on all cylinders, that’s brilliant and I’m not here to take it off you.

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But I’m here to suggest that, having spoken to 100 women about their experiences with work, motherhood and ambition on Mambition Podcast, this is the outlier experience and should absolutely not be the expectation.

I think there’s an unfortunate tendency for some employers to see the best case scenario, and set their expectations from there. Then it becomes the excuse to not provide support, they can hold up this example, and say; “well Ashley, came back and was instantly promoted to Head of Sales, so I don’t see why you’re finding it so hard.” Then treat any returning mothers that don’t hit this ridiculously high bar as ‘the problem’.

I find it’s these same employers who don’t recognise the amazing skills that motherhood has developed in us (read the FAB Maternal Strengths Report). Something helped me realise, is these skills exist in parallel, with no real bearing on how easy or hard we find a return to work.

These employers don’t recognise that we’ve been through Matrescence. They just want us back, and back to our best. Immediately.

The trope

I don’t blame anyone returning to work for doing this. I think it comes down to the fact we’re very aware of the motherhood penalty. So “back and better than ever” stopped being one possible outcome and started being the outcome you perform, regardless of what’s actually true.

Ready! Excited! Raring to go!

The unspoken deal is to prove nothing has changed, prove the year off hasn’t cost you anything, prove you’re exactly as employable as the version of you that left, if not MORE SO, and maybe if you manage all of that, then the motherhood penalty just might leave you alone.

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If you’re not there yet? ( and the reality is that most women aren’t there yet.) If you’re running on four broken hours of sleep? If your boobs are leaking? If your confidence has evaporated somewhere along the way? If you cried in the car park before your first meeting back? If you miss your baby? If you feel guilty about their long hours in childcare? You learn pretty fast that’s not the version you’re supposed to bring inside.

I came back after 18 months off, with PTSD, PPA, as my son had just had major surgery. I was incredibly worried about leaving him, and if I’m being honest about it, totally traumatised by the whole experience. And what did I say?

“Oh SO good to be back! Great to have a hot cup of coffee and some adult conversation!”

Because that’s what you’re expected to say. You can’t burst into tears or fall asleep at your desk. Because you have to show you’re still committed! You still want it! So you pretend you’re fine, and you don’t speak up, because you’re worried you’ll be punished for it.

Why it’s harder than it looks

This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t really about your individual resilience or ability to cope. It’s the motherhood penalty, it’s just wearing a different coat, hoping you don’t recognise it and play along.

Because if the workplace already suspects mothers are a risk, less committed, less available, less ambitious then the pressure to perform readiness isn’t really about how you feel. It’s your insurance. We’re trying to insure ourselves against judgment, against the motherhood penalty, even if we’re doing it subconsciously.

But the more we all perform back and better than everness? The harder it is to ask for help. It makes it look like everyone else is smashing it, and you wonder “what’s wrong with me?!”

The very fact we feel the need to play this game, to keep our worries unspoken, to perform our commitment for the employers (who frankly, often aren’t all that committed back) says a lot about how supportive the workplace environment is, or rather isn’t, for mothers.

I feel like the more we make an effore to move away from this trope, the more we’ll understand and support mothers’ real experiences. Workplaces might accept that coming back from maternity leave is HARD. That it can feel like starting a totally new job, but where people expect you to have all the answers, straight away. They might realise that women should be able to expect a ramping up process, onboarding and proper support.

For the first two years of being back at work I went to bed with my son at 7.00 each night, he was a dreadful sleeper, just to try and get some sleep.

During the week, I survived a night of broken sleep, got up, chugged a coffee, got dressed into my too tight work clothes, got Ted ready, got the bus with him to nursery, dropped him off when it opened at 8.30, rushed to work to get started by 8.45, and did my full day of work.

At the end of the day I clock-watched at 4.45, knowing it was time to leave and that I needed to leave. I’d done a full day’s work, but worried if people saw me leaving it was a mark against my commitment. Then I ran to nursery, collected Ted, got the bus home, and arrived home about 6. Then I had to do things like, you know, eat and shower. After all of that, Ted would only sleep if someone was next to him, and I was so exhausted I was ready to go to bed myself, just to survive another day.

But if anyone asked how I was? I’d have said “Oh, fine. A bit tired.”

I think every mother has her own version of this story, but we’ve been fed the “you can do it all!” girlboss stuff, and we know “women can do anything!” and if we can do anything, then why is this so hard? What’s wrong with me?

We blame ourselves, and that keeps us from sharing that we need help. We’re all pretending we’re fine, so we’re not chewed up and spat out by the system. This allows the system to continue. Even though it doesn’t support mothers, who are leaving the workforce in astonishing numbers.

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What I’ve seen actually help

Every single mother I’ve spoken to has said how HARD returning to work is, even the super successful ones. The women who came through this well weren’t the ones who felt “better than ever” on day one. They were the ones who found one person, a manager, a colleague, sometimes just each other, they could say the real version to. “Why is this so fucking hard?” said out loud to the right person does more for a return than any amount of performed enthusiasm ever will.

The other thing that helped: having a realistic timeline instead of an instant one. Not “I’m back to normal,” but “give me six weeks before you judge the normal.”

What to do on Monday morning

If you’re heading back and you’re not “raring to go,” you don’t owe anyone the performance. Say the true version to one supportive person who can actually do something with it: your manager, HR, a trusted colleague, the parents’ network, a coach or mentor. Ask for six weeks, or a phased return, or simply the permission to not have an answer yet about how it’s going.

Some workplaces are really bad at supporting a good return, that’s not your fault. But make sure you know your rights, what you’re entitled to, be as assertive as you feel able to about what you need to support your return, and have in mind where to turn if that support doesn’t materialise.

And if you are back and better than ever?

Then genuinely, good for you. Carry on smashing it! Post your blazer photo! Everyone else, especially employers, let’s remember this isn’t the bar returning mothers should be measured against. I’d love it if we could move away from people feeling like they need to perform this energy.

And finally, I know there’s a case for fairness, not everyone has kids, not everyone even gets a maternity leave (hello self-employed mums, I am in awe) but the majority of people in the workplace will need flexibility to care for someone, at some point. A partner, a parent, a family member, a pet. We all have lives, can we stop pretending that we should live to work. Even the most ambitious people out there have life commitments. Let’s build empathy and flexibility for everyone.

Tell me the truth about your return, whichever version it was.

I read every reply, and this is exactly the kind of thing I really want to know all about.

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.

EDIT - and just to demonstrate irony is ALIVE and WELL - I wrote this and then somehow published on my personal profile. Sigh.

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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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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 any of this struck a chord please subscribe and share it with anyone you know who’s been let down by the system.

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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“No,” I say. “We’re one and done.” It comes out easily, like I’ve always known it. But it took five years to make that sentence sound easy.

Because this was never the plan. I’m one of three and I assumed I’d recreate it, because that’s what family meant. My dad, on the other hand, is an only child. He found it hard: the pressure of being everything, all of it, for two people. He overachieved his way through it, first person in his family to go to Uni, and not just any Uni, Oxford, becoming a solicitor etc. But he carries the anxiety to this day, still trying to make everyone happy long after my grandparents are no longer around.

So I grew up on the cautionary tale of the only child. If you’d asked me when I was young, I’d have told you two kids minimum (if I had any at all - which was never a given).

Then came my 20-week scan.

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The sonographer was funny. She told us Ted was a boy and said she was so certain, if she’d got it wrong, she’d bare her bum in Boots’ window. We were all laughing and having a lovely time despite the whole COVID situation.

My husband was sitting in the corner at a distance in a mask, and even though I could only see the top half of his face, I could tell he was chuffed: a boy! I mostly remember really needing a wee, because they make you come with a full bladder, but the second she told us, I could already see myself, as a very non-girly type of woman, being a mam to a little boy.

Then she went quiet, and said she just needed to fetch a colleague. Nothing to worry about, she said. I’m an optimist, so I didn’t worry. I was still caught up in the excitement of knowing my baby was a boy. I found out much later that my husband, who was sitting quietly in his corner, listening to me chatter excitedly, was terrified. He’s not an optimist, he’s a worrier, and he’d clocked something was potentially wrong, but was doing his absolute best to remain calm.

The colleague came in. The two of them looked at the screen for a long time, pointing at things, saying nothing. There is no silence in the world like the silence of two professionals pointing at a screen that has your child on it. The penny began to drop for me.

Then the colleague turned the screen around to show us.

“There’s something in the baby’s lung that shouldn’t be there.”

I thought I might pass out. Less than 10 minutes earlier, we’d been laughing and excited. That’s how fast it happens: the world you were planning and the one you actually get, swapping places between one sentence and the next.

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When he was born, things briefly seemed ok, he breastfed well from birth, like a natural, then at 5am, I tried to feed him again, and he wouldn’t do it. We tried a bottle, and he wouldn’t take that either. I knew something was wrong, and because I’d spent the latter half of my pregnancy watching videos about babies in respiratory distress (FUN!) I knew what I was looking for, and rang the call buzzer.

They took Ted to SCBU, and put him on oxygen, and they took me to the ward they keep for mothers whose babies are sick, or whose babies didn’t make it and I cried behind my curtain as quietly as I could manage, which probably was not very.

A woman who’d been there a few days came round the curtain to ask if I was okay. She had her own catastrophe going on somewhere in that building, but she came to check on mine. I wasn’t okay. But I’ve never forgotten her.

Two days later I was doing the same for the next new mother on the ward. Bonded together by the grim circumstances we’d found ourselves in.

He came home, eventually, and we spent his first year waiting for him to be big enough for the operation. We had a nice year, I loved, loved, loved being with my baby, but I had terrible anxiety about absolutely everything. Imagining our house catching fire, how would we get out?! if he fell asleep in the car, I was terrified he’d get positional asphyxia. What about SIDS? In the brief windows he was asleep I’d lie looking at him, knowing what I was thinking wasn’t normal, but worrying about something, ANYTHING happening to him.

The operation, when it came, was to remove most of his left lung, which had never worked anyway, and they’d sever the blood vessels it had helpfully grown straight out of his heart. It had its own blood supply that was putting strain on his heart and could lead to heart failure.

You learn to say sentences like that in a normal voice. It takes practice, to say them without tears welling in your eyes, but at some point it happens.

On the day, they gave him something to take the edge off before theatre, called pre-med, I think, and it made him drunk. A one-year-old in a tiny, brightly coloured hospital robe, riding down the corridor on a hospital trolley in my lap, flashing his nappy at passing strangers and sort of singing. He’s never made a better entrance than he has to theatre. It was adorable, funny and completely heartbreaking.

Then he breathed in the gas while I held him, he struggled a little before going floppy in my arms, and then we had to leave him there. I’m honestly mostly recovered from what happened to us, but writing that just made tears roll down my face.

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The Sick Children’s Trust gave us a room in the hospital grounds, basically a charity-funded apartment for the poor parents whose children are somewhere in that building, sometimes for surgery, sometimes for long-term care, waiting for transplants etc.

So even though I was having a monumentally shit time of things, I still felt like I couldn’t complain. There were parents living much worse things than me.

I was more exhausted than I have ever been, before or since - and Ted didn’t sleep for basically 2 and half YEARS. But I lay there and did not sleep for one single second of the several hours the surgery took. It was like a weird out of body experience and I felt like I could hardly breathe.

Then the phone rang: he was out. It had gone well! We jumped up and threw our shoes on like the building was on fire, and then we stood there, shoes on, because he wasn’t awake yet and there was nothing to run to. Nobody warns you about that bit. We walked over to the hospital, bought coffee and tried to pull ourselves together. I can’t even express how bad PICU was, for seeing Ted in horrible pain after surgery and hearing older children screaming for staff to get away from them.

He healed remarkably quickly. They say kids bounce back, but I again I’d not really understood what they mean. Within days of coming off morphine and having his chest drain removed, he was climbing things and trying to run about.

Then I went back to work, where the story continues, but the sympathy doesn’t.

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People assume the worst moment of my return was being asked, just after returning to work, at three days’ notice, to fly to America for a week, as though I didn’t have a small child who was still breastfeeding. It wasn’t. The worst moment came six months after his surgery.

We had the appointment where, all being well, his consultant might finally sign him off from hospital care. I picked Ted up from nursery, met my husband at the hospital, and everything seemed ok. Then they found he had a chest infection we hadn’t known about, which felt like an enormous failing on our part, and just like that, Ted needed six more months of monitoring.

I was devastated. I’d been pinning my hopes on ‘normal life’ where we could leave all this behind us. But I hurried back to work, because I had a meeting with the unsupportive Pittsburgh manager.

I told her what had happened, choking back my tears, because she wasn’t a super sympathetic person anyway. She nodded, in the way people nod when they’ve mentally allotted thirty seconds to the nodding. Then she said, “Well, this meeting is about your progress since coming back to work. So we can either go on, or postpone it. If you can’t manage.”

That’s it. That’s the moment. It wasn’t cruel, exactly. But news about my sick child was an inconvenience to her agenda, and I understood at that moment with total clarity how the next decade would feel from inside that building.

So this was the backdrop at the time I was still full of hormones assuming that once I managed to get everything onto an even keel and then having another baby would just be something that happened. My husband wasn’t so keen - he’s the worrier, remember?

We went on our first holiday shortly after, because Ted could only fly now his surgery was done, and at that point I still thought maybe. My hormones were campaigning for another baby, but my body was telling another story: a rash, ground-down teeth, anxiety, PTSD, and now a new terror about work. I wasn’t sure my career would survive a second baby (turns out it wouldn’t survive the first…)

Then Christmas came. I’d saved up my leave, so for once I had time to actually think. I looked at my husband and my son and realised something enormous: I was happy. Not at work, that was still totally horrible. But here, inside my little family, properly happy. This child was everything to me, a total delight and I was so lucky to have him.

Not long after I realised the thought of being pregnant again made me feel all kinds of negative emotions, from two directions at once. The obvious one: everything that could go wrong, because I now knew exactly what could go wrong. And the one nobody warns you about: in a healthy pregnancy you barely see the medics, and after two years on first-name terms with what felt like half of the NHS, all that silence would have sent me spiralling.

So I finally asked myself the question underneath the question. Did I actually want another child, or had I just always assumed there’d be one? Assumptions are sometimes easy to confuse with wants if you’ve never examined them, you have to hold them up to the light to tell the difference. So I did, I held it up.

I didn’t need a second child. I was happy with my little Ted.

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There was grief, but it was short lived, and it surprised me by what it was for. The mental picture of the three- kid house I grew up in and had always assumed I’d recreate. Plus a I had a few inherited fears about only children that came from my dad’s story, and the image problem only kids have (mean, spoiled can’t share - basically Veruca Salt) which really had nothing to do with my actual son.

I did grieve that my only experience of pregnancy was a traumatic one, and that my only maternity leave happened inside a pandemic. I get one go at all of this, and the universe made the biggest mess of it all. But that’s also exactly what settled it for me one go means the rest gets done deliberately, my way, I will seize it with both hands.

Doing it again, would have more to do with me trying to put things right, and the sane part of me knows that’s impossible. We went though what we went though, and another pregnancy, no matter how normal, can’t change that.

And also, yes, there was some maths involved…

I turned 38 a month after Ted was born, so if we were doing it again, we’d have needed to do it soon, and soon was not right for me. So my age became the final factor in the decision we’d mostly already made.

People talk about family size like it’s a preference, something you choose the way you choose a paint colour. Nobody mentions that sometimes the choosing is done for you, by a screen in a darkened room, by a year spent going to the hospital every 6 weeks, by surgery, by a workplace that showed me exactly what it thought of mothers, and my own biology.

And then, years later, a nice woman in a school yard asks if you fancy another, and you have to fold all of that into a sentence that won’t make her feel uncomfortable. So instead I just say;

“No. We’re one and done.”

But what she doesn’t know, that nice school yard mum, is that I’m not making the best of anything. One child is, for me, an easier life, and I love the relationship I have with Ted and the particular dynamic of the three of us together. I love it more than I ever loved the imaginary family I was supposed to be grieving. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for us.

Ted, for the record, has been consulted.

Once, from the back of the car he was talking about people from school and their siblings and he said: “I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

My heart sank, just a little, shiiiiit, is he going to be lonely?

“That’s right,” I said, carefully, because “do you want one?” is not a question I ask when the answer isn’t on offer. “How do you feel about that?”

“GOOD. I DON’T WANT ONE!”

So it’s unanimous, then. This family votes one and done, and the ayes have it, at full volume, from the back seat.

But no matter what size family somebody has, try and remember “are you having another?” is a loaded question, and you might not like the answer if you don’t get the TLDR…