The Maternity Leave That Changed What She Wanted
Lauren had a plan. Six months off, then back to the firm, then the partnership track she’d been building towards for a decade. She had not included in the plan the possibility that she would become, at month five, a fundamentally different person with different priorities. Plans rarely do.
The video call was on a Wednesday, which she knew because she’d logged it in her diary as ‘team check-in’ and dressed from the waist up in a blazer she’d found at the back of the wardrobe, the one that still smelled faintly of the office. Theo was on her hip. She had one side of her collar up. She had not slept properly in eleven weeks.
She joined the call and saw her team — the people she’d spent the previous decade building her professional identity alongside — and felt, for the first time in her career, like she was looking at them through glass. They were discussing a case she’d been working on before her leave. She knew the case. She knew all the arguments. And somewhere between the opening of the meeting and her colleague asking her a direct question, she had the clear and unwelcome realisation that she no longer cared about it in the way she had.
She answered the question. She unmuted herself, said the right things, gave the right advice. She was, she knew, still very good at the job. The job had not stopped requiring what she had. It was only that what she had seemed, suddenly, to have reorganised itself around different priorities.
“I’d been warned that maternity leave would be hard. I hadn’t been warned that the hard part might not be the baby. The hard part was looking at the person I’d been before her and not quite recognising what she’d wanted.”
A decade of building, and what it had built
She’d qualified as a solicitor at twenty-four and joined a commercial firm where she’d made her reputation in corporate transactions. She’d worked the hours that kind of reputation required, not resentfully but with genuine appetite — she’d been good at it and interested in it and the two things together had been enough to sustain a decade of long days without her wondering whether they were worth it.
She’d met her husband, David, at twenty-nine. They’d bought a flat at thirty-one and had Theo at thirty-three. She’d planned all of this with the same organised intentionality she brought to client matters. She’d planned the maternity leave duration, the childcare arrangements, the phased return. She had not planned for the thing that happened to her sense of what a good day felt like.
At month three of her leave, she’d started noticing that the things she found herself wanting to think about had changed. She’d always been interested in employment law as a neighbouring discipline — not her specialism, but adjacent. She’d begun, during Theo’s early morning feeds, to read about it more systematically. About flexible working rights. About the gender pay gap. About the specific ways in which the law did and did not protect women in the situations she was now inside.
“I was feeding Theo at 3am reading employment tribunal judgments on my phone. David said: ‘What are you doing?’ I said: ‘Research.’ He turned the light off. He’d learned by then not to question the 3am research.”
The conversation with David, and the one with the firm
She told David before she told her firm, which was the right order. She said she was thinking about requesting a significant change to her working arrangements when she returned — not partnership track, not full-time corporate transactions, but a move towards employment law at reduced hours, at least initially. She said she wasn’t sure yet what the firm would say. She said she was telling him first because she needed to know he was with her before she found out.
He said he was with her. He also said — and this surprised her — that he’d been thinking about what he wanted to change too, and that this might be a good moment to talk about that as well. They talked until midnight. Theo slept through it, magnificently.
The conversation with the firm was harder. Her supervising partner was supportive in the hedging, equivocal way of people who are not sure they’re allowed to be unsupportive. She was told that a move between practice areas at her level was unusual. She was told that reduced hours would affect her progression. She said she understood that, and that she was requesting it anyway, and that she’d prepared a written proposal, which she submitted the following day.
They came back with a counter-proposal that was not quite what she’d asked for and better than nothing. She accepted it. She returned at seven months instead of six, in employment law, at four days a week.
What she knows now
She is thirty-four. Theo is nine months and has two teeth and is extremely pleased about this. Lauren works four days and genuinely means the fourth day off in a way she would not, she thinks, have been capable of before.
She doesn’t think maternity leave changed her values. She thinks it clarified them — the way a long illness sometimes clarifies what you actually care about, by removing the noise. The noise had been significant. She’d been good enough at her previous work for the noise not to matter. Once it was gone, what was underneath surprised her.
She’s been told, twice, by well-meaning people, that she’s set her career back. She considers this view, and finds she doesn’t share it. She thinks she’s changed the definition of forward. It’s a different metric. She prefers it.
Your values don’t have to look the same after having a child as they did before. More in our Career section, including your rights around flexible working.
