Babies on Zoom, nursing between meetings and snotty clothing: The reality of returning to work after maternity leave in a pandemic

Shortly before 5pm on 6 March 2020, I walked out of my office in Central London for the last time until, I assumed, January 2021. Little did my colleagues know that just a few days later, they would walk out of the office for the last time that year as well.

When my son was sliced out of my stretch-marked middle in mid-March 2020, moments before the UK hurtled into the first lockdown, I thought I’d be a pandemic parent for a snappy three or four months before the world returned to normal. Ha!

The first lockdown was spent swollen and bruised vacillating between the sofa, the park and the supermarket, feeding my kid perched on pavements - using any excuse for a legal outing. Returning to work was very, very far from my mind; and as a travel editor, there wasn’t much work that I could’ve done anyway, given that all international travel was banned and London airports had all but shut.

When it came to thinking about returning to work, my mind ran through the usual things I assume most new mothers experience following maternity leave: how would I shift from full-time childcare to full-time editing again? Would everybody prefer my maternity leave cover to me? Would I remember everyone’s names? And one unique to 2021: what on earth would I write about given travel is still unilaterally banned?

I’ve been back in the office for two weeks now. Although it’s not actually the office, it’s my spare room and my bed, depending on whether it’s my husband’s turn to use the one desk we own.

When I left the newsroom last March, I expected to wriggle into Spanx, march onto the Circle Line and waste at least a few hours making coffee in the kitchen during my first weeks back, scrolling through pictures of my son to show colleagues. Instead I’ve got Zoomscapes, a 10-month-old baby still at home and I find my colleagues have swapped crisp shirts for hoodies and cats during conference calls.

I thought spending 12 weeks alone with a newborn in the first lockdown was hard work, but in a very 2021 twist my return to work coincided neatly with isolation for both my son and me, following Covid exposure on his first day at nursery. Thanks to quarantine, my world narrowed to three rooms, at the same time my brain was desperately trying to find the accelerator, never mind putting its foot down.

Covid stole my maternity leave, but it’s also stolen the reprieve from childcare most people have when they return to work. My first week back involved days finely organised between baby watching and working, with minutes so precious my husband and I swapped favours to go for a wee or make a coffee. The change in pace during my day is whiplash-fast. I go from frantic typing and editing in the morning to singing nursery rhymes, pointing out the bus going past the window or just sitting with my son while he plays with a rainbow stacking toy or a box of plastic eggs. At just ten months, he needs eyes on him constantly: there is absolutely no way I could get anything meaningful done unless I consider him falling down the stairs as an acceptable risk. The boredom is almost too much to bear.

All the cards have been thrown into the air this year. I’m not only wrestling with trying to remember the processes that go into office work, but the new layers of admin that home-working have made necessary. There are video calls (I still cannot work out how to unmute myself and have no idea how to set one up), Google docs, shared spreadsheets in lieu of face-to-face meetings. I can no longer pop my head over the desk to ask a colleague a question, or chew over a difficult story with them. I never much liked direct messaging and now I’m forced into extreme levels of nuance. This is now totally normal to all my colleagues, who adjusted to remote working some 10 months ago.

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Perhaps the most egregious thing of all is that I can’t wear baby-unfriendly clothes. I’m still kicking around in maternity leggings, still wearing faded nursing bras (because what’s the point?) and the one new jumper I bought to look presentable on Zoom already has a shiny glob of snot on the collar.

Some fellow pandemic parents I’ve met have gone part-time, or not gone back to work at all (entirely understandable thanks to nursery fees that are easily confused for telephone numbers). One nursery I looked at was surprised that I wanted full-time care for my son, and my health visitor commented obliquely that “babies need their parents” when I said I was going back to work full time. Tough nuts, kid, I’m the child of working parents and I turned out just fine.

Besides, there’s nothing like a paucity of time or resources to streamline the mind. I was promised extra efficiency now I’m a working parent, as if my brain would become the mental equivalent of a Toyota production line. I’m still hopeful.

Still, lots of colleagues have welcomed me back and seemed genuinely pleased to see me again, albeit over Zoom, from their bedrooms, with cats sprawled on their laps. On a Zoom call on my first day back, my son crawled up to the laptop and started banging the keyboard, grinning at the screen. Fellow parents tell of video calls with toddlers hanging off their legs. Our work/home lives are now almost indistinguishable, and it’s a weird sort of privilege to be given a window into your colleagues’ lives.

Of course, this is not normal. I can’t wait to throw away the milk-stained clothes and be more than five metres away from my child for more than a few hours. But for now, I can log off at 5pm and be giving my son his dinner just minutes later: a different sort of privilege that I’ll never take for granted.