“Sorry, that’s my son arriving. I’m really embarrassed. Sorry.”
Those were not my words as my son careened around my agent’s office, pulling open filing cabinets and throwing raisins across the floor.
Not my words when my son pulled down my top, hunting for a nipple halfway through a live radio broadcast.
Not my words when, halfway through a Zoom call to a group of American execs, my son ran naked and bath-pink down the hallway behind me.
Because, I no longer apologise for having a child any more. And I refuse to be embarrassed.
The apology came, in fact, from journalist Deborah Haynes as she was interrupted live on Sky News last night by her son coming into the room and asking, quite understandably, if he could have two biscuits.
Why was she embarrassed? Why did she apologise? Why did her interviewer, Mark Austin (who has children himself), treat the interruption like someone had just asked to piss in his shoe?
You know what I’m going to say: it is a foul, three-egg omelette of gender inequality (because the majority of childcare in this country is still undertaken by women), harmful workplace culture and patriarchal bullshit. The sulphuric mess that tells us, so early and quietly in our lives, that we hardly have a chance to question it, that having a family is unprofessional; that having a child and having a career are antithetical; that we need to keep our work life and our home life entirely separate. It is the myth that in order to get ahead we must pretend that we are not human and do not exist outside of our money-making role.
For perhaps a year after my son was born, I strove to walk this nonsense tightrope. I would schedule meetings or interviews only at times when I knew my son would be asleep – and then spend an hour preparing for that meeting by feeding, changing, walking, rocking and sshhhing him until he could be left, alone, in a dark room while I worked.
I would take him to the swings at 9am just so I could push with one hand and answer my emails on my phone with the other. Or I would beg friends to roll round the block with him gurgling or howling in his buggy outside a building where I was having a midday work meeting because I couldn’t afford nursery and didn’t want to impose my child on that company’s bright white conference rooms.
I would wake up at 4am and try to do all my work, in the dark, before he woke up. Or I would apologise at the beginning of emails for replying at 3am or 9pm, or after an unforgivable two hour delay, without explaining that this was because I had been entirely occupied keeping a small, helpless and screaming mammal alive since they had got in touch.
I begged my mother to pass up a day’s supply teaching so she could play with my son in a park while I recorded a radio feature mere metres away. Or I wrote at my kitchen table while my son ripped apart an entire loo roll at my feet because I simply couldn’t think of any way around it.
I was doing this in 2018, when Corona was just a beer and a virus was just what we called our colds. So, it is with a strange, guilty delight that I now see my own compromised work situation played out across the nation.
When shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodd’s daughter walked in on one of her early television interviews, when Joe Wick’s daughter trotted into shot during one of his morning PE Lessons, when Dr Clare Wenham was interrupted during a BBC interview about lockdown procedure by her daughter brandishing a picture of a unicorn; I cheered. Because you’re all in my boat now. And I have some advice to give from behind my oars.
Firstly, silence the voice inside that tells you that you must hide away your family, your blood, your body and your life in order to succeed. If success means the elimination of those things from your life, then it isn’t success at all.
If you are pregnant, have a child, have just lost a baby, are caring for a relative, are suffering a physical or mental illness, then that does not make you unprofessional. If you can still do your job while weathering those storms then, frankly, you are twice as professional as those colleagues who juggle just the single ball of paid work.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if I worked in recruitment I would give all the biggest jobs to single parents, carers, the parents of several children and people living with long-term illnesses. Because when it comes to logistics, efficiency, motivation, stamina and self-sacrifice, those guys know how to get shit done.
Secondly, be the change you want to see at work. Engage with other people’s lives as you wish them to engage with and understand your own. Be honest about your juggling, explain your parameters, hold firm on what you can and can’t do. BBC News anchor Christian Fraser’s response to Scarlett and her unicorn drawing was great, not just because it showed humanity but because his genuine interest and attention was precisely what Scarlett needed in order to move on. It allowed an informed, professional and erudite woman – Dr Wenham – to make her point. He showed us all how to do it.
Finally, keep pushing. We all want to return to something like normal when lockdown lifts, but shouldn’t it, couldn’t it, be better than what came before? Now that so much of Britain has actually experienced 24-hour childcare, has seen the juggle involved in making money and simultaneously looking after family, has been stripped back to the bare bones of coping, are we finally ready to embrace a better workplace culture? One that gives decent parental leave, subsidised childcare and flexible working?
I’d take that over two biscuits any day.
Nell Frizzell is a journalist, writer, columnist and mother.