Staging a mumback – getting a career after having kids

Staging a mumback – getting a career after having kids

Staying home to look after children is often fraught with fear for women whose return to work seems an uphill struggle in the face of sleepless nights, additional laundry and wages that are stung by childcare.

But for those who forge careers after having children, the road to success is made more difficult by those who assume motherhood is nothing but dead time, and counts for nothing in the competitive world of ‘experience’.

At 24 and in my third or fourth role, following various internships, freelance bits and pieces and working for my mum’s PR firm for several on-off years (nothing glam – b2b, the electronics industry – yawn,) but still a graduate trainee after a journalism masters and a stint sub-editing various nationals straight out of uni, I got knocked up. Not like that. I was in a loving relationship with an older man. It was, should have been, fine.

I went into motherhood with my eyes shut, hoping for the best, and a soon-to-be husband who promised to look after me.  I was physically at my peak, but my career was still very much in its infancy. With my trainee wage barely covering the nursery fees, I gave into motherhood, and for years remained frustrated, fearful and jealous as my uni peers’ careers took off, some stratospherically. I pottered around, starting my own business for something to do which I ran in between potty training and baking bread.

But when Tom lost his job (he was a banker, we were comfortable but nothing like the papers would have you believe) my lack of career was truly terrifying. I’d just had Ava. Starting out on my career wasn’t an option as sleep deprivation kicked in. I had therapy instead. Bread baking became essential in the face of the dole.

It was a kind of desperation that forced me back to work. Loneliness, despair, kids, pride, all of it played a role. I was qualified to the hilt, but without experience all I could expect was a junior role somewhere mediocre. And I couldn’t afford to do that.

Journalism was squeezing its last pips as everything went digital, but  I’d closed my ears to the death knell of print. I was, always had been – a technophobe. It took a deep breath to change direction into  advertising  and starting again was like reverse vertigo. Scary, if slightly thrilling. I wracked my diary for contacts. My step brother, a big deal in Asia. I looked up the company he worked for and I applied for a grad scheme. I learnt as much as I possibly could about adland in the two weeks running up to the interview. I didn’t get on the scheme.

But I knew enough to know I’d found my comfort zone, and that advertising was where I wanted to be. I flung out CV after CV. Eventually, someone I used to know picked it up. In a startling coincidence, he had gone to school with me, and I happened, on that day to be on the same street as his offices, doing another interview (for restaurant work, if you must know.)

We met for coffee, and – a new dad himself – he sympathised with what having children could do to someone’s CV, which he described as impressive, but patchy. When he reveled he lived in an apartment opposite the duplex, I knew the job was mine – an internship, for which I paid my childcarer more than I earned, but at least it was paid, and – he promised – not for long. Within a month, I was hired, on a grownup salary, with a grown up job title, and a desire to prove I was worth every penny. It wasn’t – and hasn’t been – easy, but I did it. And like all good things, it may have been more luck than judgement, but hey, thems the breaks.