Preparing for 'Maternity Leave' as a Freelancer (Spoiler: It Took Over 2 Years)

** I wrote this blog before Albie arrived, and intended to post it on the first Friday of my “mat leave”. Albie had other plans, and arrived on the Thursday, so I’m a little late getting it live (!)

The time has come (the walrus said…) for me to take some time away to grow, birth, and get to know our little babe. 

It feels misleading to refer to this as ‘maternity leave’ because that suggests that it is a period of time off sanctioned by a company, and paid for by a company and the government. As a freelancer, what I really mean is that I am stepping into a period of intentional unemployment.

I write this sat on a bench in the Westgate shopping centre, sipping a fruit smoothie, having just wandered around the shops to try and get things moving, and pick up a few breastfeeding-friendly bits that fit my aspirational ‘cool mum’ aesthetic. I wish I was joking. 

As a person who spends a huge proportion of my work and leisure time advocating for the advancement of women, I want to comment on what it has taken to get to this point. At the time of writing, my self-employed maternity allowance (different from Statutory Maternity Pay, for those on PAYE contracts) is £27 per week. I should point out that it is due to a clerical error that I have been ‘awarded’ so little, and I am confident that in the coming weeks the outcome of my appeal will allow me to claim my full entitlement of £150 per week. I bring this up because if I had not been emotionally, physically, and financially preparing for this baby for the last 2+ years, my situation would be a lot more anxiety-inducing than it is. 

This is not a conversation that comes up often with my self-employed friends, but I wish it did. For the last two-and-a-bit years, I have been contributing to a Monzo savings pot called ‘Maternity Leave’ and it has felt like a dirty little secret. I opened it after my then-boyfriend now-husband and I had our first conversation about wanting children “at some point in the future”. From that moment onwards, I felt an immense amount of (admittedly, self-imposed) pressure to create a situation in which that was possible, alongside my career choices. 

There were very few people I trusted to hold and respect the nuance of that situation, knowing that I wanted children at some point and therefore starting to prepare early, and also wanting to push my career forwards without the additional pressure of having children holding me back from making bold choices. Whenever I had a wobble about it, I reminded myself that a savings pot is just a pot, and if it wasn’t needed for maternity leave for any reason, I could go on a lavish holiday. That may seem flippant, but it helped keep the ‘am I actually crazy?!’ thoughts at bay.

James only became aware of the Maternity Leave pot when we made the decision to start trying to conceive. I can completely understand why that might raise a few eyebrows, and I am interested to have conversations around this, because my question in response to those raised eyebrows is, what is the alternative? Should we be expected to just ‘see how it goes’ and ‘cross that bridge when we come to it’? This isn’t the expectation for any other major financial events in our life, so why should preparing to have kiddos be any different? 

What I am advocating for here is the same principal that I am always advocating for: it is possible for women to have our cake and eat it too. It just requires a bit of forethought and being truly honest with ourselves about what we want, whether that is to have children, launch a new business, buy a house or travel the world. If financial independence is important to you, having children doesn’t have to be an obstacle to that. And for those who need to hear this, a desire to have children does not mean you are betraying your feminism, or that you don’t take your business or your career seriously. I wish I had read that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of internal debates with myself.

As of this week, Amy Meadows is taking a pause, and I will be taking new enquiries from January 2022 for projects to be delivered in March 2022 onwards. You can fill out an enquiry form here.

In the meantime, I will be jumping in goggles-on, feet-first into motherhood. See you on the other side!