When I found out I was pregnant with my first, I did what any completely normal, definitely-not-Type-A sales person would do.
I immediately started calculating how much maternity leave I could take without ruining my career.
Not how much I was entitled to take. How much I could justify taking.
I’m American, but I live and work in the UK, where you can take up to a year of maternity leave. Which, coming from the US, should have felt like winning the lottery.
Instead, I was basically like: A YEAR?! Absolutely not. They’ll forget I exist.
I Was Convinced My Career Would Move On Without Me
I’d spent more than a decade building my career in sales. My entire working live revolved around targets, pipeline, deals, being available, being the person people could rely on.
And suddenly I was supposed to disappear for potentially 12 months?
My brain could not compute.
Who would take my accounts? What would happen while I was gone? Would I come back and technically have the same job, but somehow be completely irrelevant? Would everyone else move forward while I just… didn’t?
So with my first, I didn’t take the full year.
And somehow I still managed to feel guilty about basically everything.
When I was home, part of my brain was thinking about work. When I went back, I felt guilty that I wasn’t home. I was worried I’d taken too much time off AND worried I hadn’t taken enough.
Very efficient of me.
And the weirdest part was talking to my friends and colleagues back in the US.
They weren’t sitting there debating whether taking nine months versus 12 months would hurt their careers.
They were going back after three months. Sometimes less.
Not because they were dying to get back to their inboxes, but because that was the leave they had.
It was such a different problem.
I had the privilege of worrying about taking too much time. They were worrying about not getting enough.
Then I Had My Second
And I was just… different.
Maybe because I’d already gone back once and discovered that, shockingly, the entire corporate world had not collapsed in my absence.
Maybe because once you’ve had one baby you understand how insanely short that phase actually is.
Or maybe I was just too tired to manufacture an elaborate career crisis the second time around.
But I took the time.
And this time, I actually let myself take it.
I wasn’t mentally planning my comeback while holding a newborn. I wasn’t constantly wondering what was happening without me.
And somewhere during that leave, my whole perspective changed.
Instead of thinking:
I can’t believe I get to take this much time.
I started thinking:
I cannot believe American parents AREN’T.
Because once you’ve experienced having that time, 12 weeks suddenly sounds absolutely wild.
You’ve had a baby. You’re recovering. Nobody is sleeping. You’re trying to figure out feeding and childcare and who this tiny person even is — and then it’s like, okay! Back to work!
What?!
I Still Don’t Think the UK Has It Completely Figured Out
Obviously having the option of a year is an enormous privilege. I know that.
But having the policy doesn’t automatically remove all the other stuff that comes with it.
The career anxiety. The identity crisis. The little voice telling you that ambitious people don’t disappear for a year.
Nobody at work actually told me that taking maternity leave would hurt my career.
I told myself that.
And I think that’s the part I wish I’d understood the first time around.
Stepping away from work for a period of time isn’t the same thing as stepping down.
Your career is longer than one year.
At the time, though? It really did not feel that way.
So Would I Take the Year Again?
Yep.
I don’t regret going back earlier with my first, because that was what felt right for me then.
And I definitely don’t regret taking more time with my second.
If anything, having kids has made me realise how weirdly we sometimes measure ambition.
I spent years thinking being ambitious meant always being switched on, always pushing, always taking the next opportunity.
Now I think ambition can also look like knowing when work can wait.
Because — and this would have horrified first-time-mum me — it actually can.
The deals keep happening. Someone else answers the emails. Your company survives.
And so does your career.
If you’ve had a baby in the UK, US or somewhere else, I’m genuinely curious: how much maternity or parental leave did you take — and did it feel like enough?
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