Creative Labour

What it’s like giving birth to an idea after returning from maternity leave.

I’m in the loo.

I’m in the loo and I’m hoping that my baby girl, who’s sleeping in the bedroom next door, won’t start crying while I’m sitting here. I’m also using the Notes app on my iPhone to write down some ideas for a pitch creative review tomorrow morning. If I don’t write them down right now, they will be gone in a few hours. They’ll get lost in my post-pregnancy cerebral void while I load another baby wash or buy more nappies online.

When I finish this pee, I’ll batch cook portions of mashed vegetables and then I’ll sit at my desk. This is the only time in the day when I can get some work done: the three-hour gap between putting my baby to bed and the time she cries for a feed at around midnight.

An hour has passed and I’m highlighting keywords in the brief and writing whatever comes to my mind next to it. Since I got back to work, six months after giving birth, I stopped filtering my ideas like I used to. Before that, I’d be terrified of presenting something that wasn’t ‘good enough’. Now, I have a lot of respect for every little thought I write down. These are not just words on a piece of paper. These are the last juice of sanity that can be squeezed out of my brain after enduring long hours of baby crying every night, after being in endless meetings during the day, after commuting back from work when I barely have the energy to stand up, and while I fight the toughest enemy of all working mothers: germs.

Since my girl started at nursery, three months ago, I visited my local GP sixteen times.

We have both had two stomach bugs, conjunctivitis, tonsillitis, sinus infection, ear infection and the most uncomfortable thing I ever caught in my life: oral thrush. I thought you could only get this if you had AIDs or when you’re on chemotherapy, but my immune system was so weak that motherhood got me to experience this fungal disease.

Last week I presented some ideas on a pitch to my creative directors. One of them said that they were a bit boring. Fair enough. They were boring. My pre-maternity self would have been devastated to hear those words. Boring is the worst thing a creative can hear about their work. In my 20s, I’d probably gone home and had a little cry on the bus. But that day I was proud to be there, reading paragraphs out loud in a boardroom while trying to hide the disgusting and painful white spots on my tongue and the inside of my cheeks.

Now I’m struggling to read my own handwriting on a piece of paper. I’m so exhausted that I’m googling “How to work and look after a baby”. I feel like I’m in an episode of ‘Survivor’ — this is clearly a physical endurance test and I’m sure there’s a hidden camera pointing at my dark eye circles right now, broadcasting everything live on the internet. I want to go on Amazon and write a negative review of Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean in.’

Zero stars. Bitch, I can’t even keep my eyes open, how the hell am I going to break the glass ceiling?

I open Instagram on my desktop as a way to keep myself awake. I see pictures of Kate Middleton looking impeccable on another royal visit to a school or a hospital. I envy the fleet of childcare she must have back in the palace. My nursery costs the same as my mortgage every month. I can’t afford extra childcare. When work colleagues ask if I can’t leave my baby with my family, I have to politely reply: both my father and my mother-in-law recently passed away. Everyone in my family is trying to look after themselves at the moment.

I also think that I’m a free human being. I can just go to bed now and not do this. I can enter the boardroom tomorrow morning and simply say that I was too tired to do my job. They would totally understand. I’m lucky I work with a group of people who’d back me up if that was the case.

But the fact that I’m staying up is not because of my job. This is about me.

Thinking about something other than the difference between breast milk and formula poo is preventing me from going mad. I don’t care if these ideas are going to save the world. But for sure, they’re going to save me. Working as a creative gives me a sense of identity, something that got lost when I donated my time and my body to make and raise a human being.

It’s not that I don’t love being a mother. Trust me, it’s the best thing that has ever happened in my life. But now I realise that the oxygen mask announcement on the plane is a metaphor for parenting life. I need to put my own mask on first. If I attend another baby sensory class or I spend another afternoon talking about baby-led weaning, or if Baby Shark plays on my Spotify radio again, I’m the one who’s going to get suffocated. I need to work in order to be a good mother.

I get up and start walking in circles around the room. I feel like the big idea is coming. It’s so close to coming. I just need to push a bit more. As I’m about to collapse, I open a new Word .doc on my computer.

I start writing.

I don’t edit.

I just write.