Let’s set the scene:
It’s the Summer of twenty-twenty. We’re mid pandemic and everything is locked down here in the UK. I’ve been self-employed for less than a year, and I’m now excitedly, pregnant. This is brilliant news, and something my husband and I had been trying and planning for. Now what…?
Not long after I found out I was pregnant, my head began trying to wrap around what my future would look like. Yes, I wanted this. But I also couldn’t really visualise what it would look like balancing motherhood, self-employment and a creative practice. What would that feel like?
All of the mothers I knew were fully employed. So like any twenty something, I headed online. I began searching the depths of the internet to find examples of women who had done it before. Dear reader I tell you, it was like an internet black hole.
I went on to spend much of my pregnancy searching for blogs, videos, articles or advice columns about women who are self-employed here in the UK and also mums. I had so many questions! I kept googling the same questions: What kind of maternity leave were self-employed women taking? How did it work out for them? How did it affect them, their family, their work, their creative practice? I was desperate to read their experiences. I needed to see my experience reflected and hear from someone else on how they felt, on what it was like. But after each googling session I walked away disappointed.
Snap forward to having a one year old:
I’m over a year into motherhood and I’ve barely started working again. I thought I would take a short maternity leave, but after starting to work again at four months, I found myself burnt out, anxious and miserable. So I went back on maternity leave. Six months later, I’m much more myself and semi-ready to work. But I now have even more questions! I still can’t find anyone talking about the intersection of self-employment, creativity, business and motherhood. Everyone is sharing online, and yet I struggle to find people sharing their experiences with this online. I find there are either people who share experiences on motherhood as a part of their work or people who keep that side hidden from their work. Both are fair, but I just can’t seem to connect what’s happening to me with what’s happening to others.
Here’s what I think now:
Without the visibility of mothers (and I include here not just women but other heavily-involved caregivers) who are self-employed and/or in creative fields, I think we’re doing a disservice to those currently in this period of life and those coming up to it. It is possible to be invested in caregiving and our creative work. And, yes, it does look different for self-employed mums vs. the employed.
On the one side there are the many logistical things self-employed mothers need to figure out.
Maternity leave funding is different for the self-employed (and in so many ways unfair). Did you know that a fully employed person can take on a side-hustle during maternity leave, however any paid work on your creative practice or business is counted as a Keep in Touch Day for us self-employed parents? We only get ten of those or our ‘Maternity Allowance’ stops, and any amount of work, including emails, makes it ‘a days work’.
There is also no hr department, no one taking over your role to hand things off to, no one to to take over your emails for you when your baby is born unexpectedly and prematurely as happened to me.
On the other side is the more emotional and daily life sort of things.
For me, and I know for a lot of women, having a baby felt like a transformational shift I wasn’t prepared for. I loved my baby, but I felt as if the ground was shifting beneath me and I wasn’t sure where to step. I was now a mom. I had wrapped up client projects, but all I wanted to do in those first few weeks was work, I wanted to create. As someone with their own design studio, I had poured all of myself into my work. I missed that routine and purpose desperately. I had not expected this, and I found it difficult to navigate. Clearly, many employed women feel this too.
One of the reasons art, poetry, books, theatre and film are so important is that they help us process the world and our experiences. When we go through big life changes, loss or love, we want to see those experiences reflected back at us. To have a moment of ‘yes, I’ve been seen, I am not alone.’ Did anyone else feel the things or think the things I was? This was what I was searching for, and what I could not find.
I also wasn’t sure how much of my new reality to share. Sharing is a part of most of our creatives practices. We share so that our clients, fellow creatives, customers and online friends can understand us better, get to know us, give us feedback. We’re not big corporations, we’re people, using our work and businesses to live.
After a bit of time learning to be a mother, I began to feel that my work as a mother and a creative are linked, but it’s a tricky thing to navigate. Do I share my experience of motherhood? Will my clients think I can’t handle the workload if I’m a mother? Will they think I don’t work as hard? Will they think I’m not as focused if I show that my baby is in my studio at 3pm on a Tuesday? Will they expect me to be flakey? Will I be respected and taken seriously as a designer, if I also show that I’m a mum? All questions that roll around my head.
But if I don’t show that side, am I doing a disservice to future working self-employed and business owners mothers? For me, the answer is yes.
The work that I do, both as a mother and a creative stand for themselves. And if you’re a mother and self-employed creative or business owner, I know it’s the same for you. Who can question whether we are hardworking, creative and focused, when our body of work is deep, reflective and strong?
So now with a seventeen month old toddler, here’s where I’ve landed:
If I’m visibly showing that I care deeply and invest myself deeply in all forms of my work, and that motherhood and my creative work are intertwined in my life, then someone else who goes looking for this, may just see themselves reflected back and know that they will be okay.
