Words are important

and I have chosen the wrong ones

Earlier this month I returned to full-time freelance design work.

In my first call I introduced myself and then came the question. People always ask freelancers where you have been recently. Of course they are just being nosy. It’s a small industry: everybody knows everyone else. But for me it has a different meaning. To me the question is more loaded.

I’ve been on a break, I said somewhat hesitantly. 

Was it a break? 

Waiting on my children 11 hours a day with occasional childcare afforded to me where I would play out my role as domestic manager instead. Long weeks with the kids sometimes sandwiched between busy weekends freelancing. If it was a break it certainly wasn’t restful.

I don’t know why I forget that I actually have been working, albeit part-time and adhoc. I haven’t worked much in the niche industry that I have returned to and I guess in a way that’s what I was thinking when I said it.

I have been on a break.

According to my CV I have been freelancing for almost two years now, come November. Two years since I quit my full-time job ahead of my return date from maternity leave when we realised that it would cost me more to go back to work in childcare costs than I was able to earn. (Despite the poorly named 15/30 hrs free childcare). My limited availability basically meant the doors were mostly closed on that niche industry, but luckily for me, I’ve been kept busy regardless.

Where have you been recently?
I’ve been on a break.

Words are important and I chose the wrong ones.

I believe that I have done some of my best work in the last two years. I have relished in the control of designing from scratch brands big and small. I have worked often directly with the client and so I have been able to expand my skillset in a way that my previous design role, as part of a much larger team, never allowed. And I have had a substantial part to play in the raising of two small humans.

I’ve been on a break
But I’ve been busy.

I feel like saying I worked part-time doesn’t paint the full picture. I have worked every hour I have been sent some weeks (although thankfully not every week). Passing the baton of childcare over to my partner at weekends; he has been busy too. When I say I worked part-time it does a disservice to the value of the childcare provided in the rest of the week. It paints a picture that I have been sat on my bum, relaxing - and if you are a regular reader of Distracted, you’ll know that there is no relaxing in this house! (Although there is boredom, but not without stress and anxiety.) If anything I have been working full-time. Extra-time, in fact, some weeks.

It’s made me think that words are important. How I communicate this experience of the last two and a half years is going to contribute to what people think about me, and about how they value the labour of raising children going forward, it may even contribute to how they see themselves.

It was not a break.
But what was it?

I often joke it has been an extended maternity leave, because it feels like I went on maternity leave and just didn’t go back.

When people think of maternity leave, they think of long coffee mornings with friends with babies, baby classes and sitting on a comfy sofa bingeing Netlflix. Whilst there was definitely some of that on my periods of maternity leave, I know I am not alone when I say it has been the hardest I have ever worked in my life.

The role of caregiving to a baby is all encompassing. The sisyphean task of feeding and changing it in the first few weeks just feels like you are on a hamster wheel unable to get off. I may have been sat on the sofa, but I was often pinned there against my will. I would sit long after what I thought was the final call of my bladder, as the baby slept just for some peace. When my second son came along and we took my then two-year-old out of full-time childcare, things got harder still. I was pulled in different directions at once, managing two very different needs often at the same time. I have never been so exhausted as that first year. It was not a break; it was hard.

I don’t just mean physically hard either. As it definitely was hard on my body and on my mind - I have learned things and grown in unforeseeable ways in looking after children. It has been challenging beyond anything I could have expected. So why am I saying I was on leave? That I was on a break? When actually it was an intense educational transformative experience with many additional skills that I could indeed take into the world of work.

Is it like a gap year where you go away and become changed? Maybe, but again that has connotations of dossing around with mates and beers on the beach. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett certainly doesn’t think so. In her piece Parental leave isn’t a holiday… she calls for better use of language after an increase in child-free women comparing maternity leave to a career break - something she notes is damaging to how parents and the care-giving role is seen in our society.

“Maternity leave is not a holiday. It is not a break, a sabbatical, a retreat, a period of respite. It is not “checking out”, time off, a gap year, a lull, a hiatus, or a breather. It is not “a stop-off on the side of the road during life’s long journey”¹

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Similarly I have called myself a reluctant stay-at-home mum but that implies I didn’t work but I thought that label fitted me best Monday - Thursday. I was staying at home; I wasn’t working I was looking after the kids. My role changed at the weekend, my label was then working mother. I used to think the two labels were the antitheses of each other, yet I identified with them both at different points during the week. Again, the use of language is funny in that we don’t call out working dads in the same way; they are just people who work; Bob in finance - his decision to procreate doesn’t affect his label.

Words matter and they can be reflective of the general attitudes in society towards women and unpaid caring. I hope that in using better language we can change these attitudes. But where do we start?

I’m flummoxed what to even say at these new work introductions because I do feel like I am coming back and returning in some way, but I certainly have not been on a break.

But what was it then?

What would you call maternity/parental leave instead?
Do you identify as a stay-at-home parent and a working parent?
How do you feel about the labels we put on mothers?

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1. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett writes in her piece Parental Leave isn’t a holiday… Guardian, Dated 14 September 2024.