Was it ethical, I wondered, to put my son down for a nap just so I could make a phone call? Could I hold a voice recorder in one hand, phone in the other and push my child in a swing with my foot while I did a work interview in the middle of a playground? Could I shut my baby in the garden, behind some double glazing, to play with the fox poo while I sat at my computer and had a conversation on speakerphone?
As a freelance writer, I was lucky enough to have a choice when it came to maternity leave: live on £140.98 for 39 weeks and risk losing my career, or simply work when the baby slept. For the first year, I chose the latter; on one particularly remarkable occasion managing to submit a tax return while rocking a Moses basket.
When my son was not quite a year old, I got the opportunity to interview a photographer for an article. I wanted to do it and so said yes without hesitation. The only snag? I had nobody to look after my child for the hour it would take to do the interview, let alone the time needed to transcribe and write up the conversation. Both his grandmothers were ill, my partner works full-time in a school and I cannot afford nursery.
At the time, I didn’t feel able to ask anyone else; the few times I had tried in the past – attempting to write in my friend’s bedroom while she played with our children downstairs – my son had stood at the door screaming until I came back into the room. So there I was: a phone, a deadline, a commission and no idea what to do with my child.
Would a good mother, I wondered, simply put their child in a sleep bag, dump them in their cot with a pile of snacks, a wooden spoon and some old remote controls for an hour, and hope for the best? A few minutes later, while scrolling through the photographer’s biography online, I learned that he was also a parent of two children. Suddenly, the internalised, patriarchal stupidity of what I was doing hit me. Why did I feel this shame at admitting to someone that, as well as having paid work, I also had a child? Did I really think the sound of a child playing was so revolting that he would hang up? Had I really come to see parenting and professionalism as mutually exclusive?
I remembered Jacinda Ardern sitting in the UN General Assembly with her three-month-old daughter, Neve. I thought of Senator Tammy Duckworth casting her vote in the Senate with her newborn daughter Maile in her arms. I thought of Harriet Harman breastfeeding in the House of Commons in 1982. Here I was, in 2018, sweating over a quick phone interview, when so many women have fought so long to simultaneously make money, babies and a difference in the world.
So I stopped planning. I stopped trying to shoehorn this tiny, precious human being into a boxfile just so I could work like the big boys. I stopped trying to scrape any trace of motherhood from my voice before work phone calls. I stopped organising meetings on days when I knew someone else would be on hand to wheel my child around the park. I stopped telling editors I was always available at half an hour’s notice. In short, I stopped pretending that I didn’t really have a child at all.
That day, I opened the interview by explaining that my infant son was in the room and might make some noise. The photographer said that was absolutely fine. And it was. A few months later, I watched my son scatter raisins across my agent’s carpet while waving around a hairbrush he had liberated from a nearby drawer. Just this week, I interviewed a doctor while breastfeeding my 20-month-old in front of her.
I am in the incredibly privileged position of being able to work as a freelancer with family and friends around for help. I am not a single parent. I did not have to go back to full-time work mere weeks after my child was born in order to afford food and heating. I am lucky and I am very grateful for it. But it is important that women such as me, parents such as me, fight to bring the reality of parenting into the world of work. We need to be honest about the pressure, the strain, the juggling, the missed opportunities, the injustice and the work-arounds, in order to make it, hopefully, eventually, fairer for everyone. Sometimes we have to bring our children to offices, rearrange meetings, get our breasts out beside filing cabinets. But we can still work. We can still make it work. The day I stopped trying to work only when my baby was either asleep or absent was the day I decided to claim a new space in the world: one in which I always needed to be paid, might need more time and would probably take up more room. You know, like bosses do.
