WHEN WORK FEELS LIKE… TIME OFF

Louise McLaren - 12 Nov 14

At work, there occasionally cropped up a little joke that going on maternity leave was going on ‘holiday’. I took it in good humour, and when a colleague bid me a great break, I pointed out that he wouldn’t have time to miss me. Blink and I’d be back.

Off I swanned, confident I’d be back to my job before anyone really noticed. Optimistic I had planned my maternity leave such that my client accounts would not suffer much, if at all. And smugly self-satisfied in my feminist plan to share leave equally with my husband. I must admit I was looking forward to having time off.

Time off… Ha. A break from one sort of work, and after a few weeks of pottering around, enjoying lovely June days, baking bread and meeting NCT friends for lunch, I was parachuted into a new role. With no job description, no time off (and I mean none), no day-to-day satisfactions, rewards, tangible goals or praise to get you through to the next task.

It’s a truth acknowledged only in fragments, it seems to me, how freaking hard being a mother is. You hear it can be thankless, you hear it can be boring, but you rarely hear that it’s infinitely harder than many paid jobs. I imagine mothers don’t want to be open about this, lest they put prospective mummies off.

And I had a quite tough frame of reference. I had worked in consultancy for ten years, full-tilt. There had been work trips such as the one to Shanghai where I got 2 hours’ max sleep a night for a week and was so addled I left a suitcase full of all my workshop materials and my computer in the boot of a taxi. Or time I went to India, and returned with a virus and exhaustion (having, in my zombified state, stolen the bed of the man behind me on the plane – don’t ask). There were more such examples.

In between these punctuation marks, these multiple apostrophes, there was the dot dot dot of endless long days to hit deadline after deadline. Failing to leave the office at a decent hour yet again. And again. Missing my husband’s birthday, failing to go to the Olympics.

I was caught in a bind and would replay my dilemma over and over to myself during my commute. I loved the ‘content’ of my job but hated the workload. I was committed to the company but just wanted out. Every rational bone in my body appreciated the financial benefits and relative security, but a voice kept telling me I wanted to escape to the countryside and live a very different life.

It certainly wasn’t during my maternity leave that I recognised the error of my mindset and gained perspective. Instead, I totally lost much of my capacity to have any form of perspective. I was at sea. There were several times when I found myself crying that I couldn’t cope. When my son’s reflux wasn’t under control and I had had yet another night of barely more than an hour’s sleep. Or when I had just recovered from a post-birth infection to find my autoimmune condition, which had gone into remission during pregnancy, had suddenly and dramatically flared up again and couldn’t be medicated properly if I wished to continue to breastfeed my month-old baby.

In my ongoing sleep-deprived state I became obsessed with any sleep-promoting techniques, and walked for hours and hours to get and keep my son napping (when I had barely slept myself). So much of it was lunatic and feels unreal as a memory. With his sleep being as it was (till I hired the support of a specialist clinic) and my mental capacity directly impacted, I lost the ability to think clearly, to look after myself, to eat a hallway decent diet, to separate myself from my wakeful child.

Sod the frustration of a job that often involved leaving the office at the hours that justify a taxi home. This was relentless way, way beyond my paid work. The easy days and moments were so few and far between that they really stand out, looking back.

Finally, I mustered up the courage to return to work. In spite of my fierce feminism and pride in my career success to date, and the fact I was the main breadwinner, I had had to overcome a strong gut instinct to jack it all in, to stay at home and stay in control. Or what I thought was control.

I feared returning to work would threaten the tenuous grasp I had only recently gained, just weeks before I was due back. Little did I realise that I could never feel the sense of control over a baby that I could over my work, however demanding my job and however easy that baby was becoming relative to his early self. I recognised that I struggled with the unfathomability of my son compared with the average client, and his unpredictability compared with the average work project. But I was highly anxious that returning to work I would find things even more challenging, juggling work and a baby.

I had no idea how much easier the day-to-day would become. The simple fact no-one cries (overtly) at work does wonders for my stress levels. The fact that I can manage to get away from my computer to buy a sandwich outside and then eat it soon thereafter (followed by a hot drink which is actually still hot) waves a magic wand over my sense of wellbeing. The fact that I have a commute alone outside of the house actually feels positive – who thought a 70-minute London commute would feel like a healthy thing?

I still got my feminist box ticked. My husband works compressed hours to look after our son a day and a half a week. He does all the nursery pick-ups and drop-offs. I admit I have it jammy as hell. This set-up makes him – something I have not admitted to him – the ‘default’ parent (there has to be one, doesn’t there?). And while a big, emotional part of me sighs a little with relief whenever the toddler wants his mummy over his daddy, this isn’t enough of a motivator to this selfish mother to want to see herself in the traditional mummy role anytime soon.

As Ayelet Waldman points out in her excellent book ‘Bad Mother’, there is intense pressure around the concept of being a ‘good’ mother – with some hideously exacting standards and open judgement – whereas the idea of being a ‘good’ father is much more loosely defined. It’s basically a dad who’s there for bathtime as much as possible. The good father role sounds pretty appealing to me. If I tell myself that adopting something approximating this role makes me hugely happier and thereby a better mother, I can sleep easier. As long as my husband continues to be the one dealing with the night-time toddler tantrums and illnesses, of course.

Motherhood is different for all of us… if you’d like to share your thoughts, why not join our Network & start posting?

Louise McLaren

Louise is a marketing consultant and mother to toddler Rory. She constantly finds herself thinking that her son is the most amazing thing in the world and she can't believe he exists, but a few seconds later that she must get away from the tantrums right this second and have a holiday... Where is her husband when she needs him?!

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