From Maternity Leave to Redundancy: Navigating a Newborn & Job Hunting

Over 75,000 women in the UK lose their jobs during or after maternity leave.

I was one of them in 2024.

Recently, the charity Pregnant Then Screwed took the Government to court for indirect sexual discrimination, highlighting how anti-discrimination provisions of the Human Rights Act have failed women unable to work due to pregnancy or maternity-related reasons.

I want to clarify that my redundancy was due to a clear rationale: my team was closing. However, I can’t help but question the fairness of the process in general. Is it truly equitable to navigate job searches while adjusting to life with a newborn? Is it just to be overlooked for roles because you’re not at your best, juggling the pressures of financial strain and sleepless nights?

From the age of 16, I’ve worked diligently, balancing university and work in Argentina, where gaining experience alongside a degree and language skills was essential. I managed 14-hour days for years.

Over the past 12 months, I have taught myself influencer and affiliate marketing while caring for two toddlers. It’s been a year and a half since I learned my team was closing, and despite applying for numerous positions, I’ve landed less than 10 interviews during that period without securing a job that covers childcare costs.

This journey made me think a lot about my relationship with work ever since I had my first daughter, Violeta, 12 years ago. 

Maternity leave in my country is 3 months. You should take one before and two after, but most doctors would be happy to put a later due date, for you to enjoy more time with your baby. That of course, leads to most women having to work until the week before having their baby. Which is generally very tiring and painful. Everyone ends up relaying medical leaves.

That said, I went back to work when Violeta was ten weeks, and I remember that her dad and I would share the days being at home not to have to send her do a day care before she was even three months. 

I can recall myself sitting in calls, bounding from mute and unmute and moving her buggy with my legs. Just to end up in a million apologies and finally, getting her a nanny. 

I was only 25 when I had her, and most of my work colleagues did not have kids, at least the ones at my seniority level. Either because they were men or because it is not the age our generation decides to bring life into this world anymore. 

So I was on a quest to not let maternity overtake my career, I wanted to prove to everyone I would not let being a mum define me. I was still the same person, the same professional and the same girl they met before Violeta. But I actually wasn’t and it took years for me to accept it and even enjoy it. And give myself the needed praise for juggling everything. 

I became a single mum when she was only 4, and my job involved a lot of travelling back in the day. I had to also overcome the shame from being away for work, everyone judging your decisions and actions. If I would go out for dinner while being alone in a foreign country, I would refrain myself from posting in social media, because people would make comments on how I seemed to be enjoying too much and I should be home with my kid. A kid that was perfectly happy with her dad or my parents. But was it not allowed for a working mum to be okay and enjoy a bit while being working abroad? I also wonder, do we ever ask fathers about it?

I never heard anyone asking a father who the kids are with when he attends work events, or trips or even when they are in the office working. But I do, and I have, my whole life had to answer over that. 

My recent experience in the UK as a working mum was completely different, it does feel a lot like the system here is designed for mums to find it impossible to go back to work. Nurseries that do not take kids under 6 months but the legal state maternity leave is only a couple of weeks and not even full paid. 

With eternal waiting lists to get your kid into a school, and a government that changes the policies to give more free hours to the parents: but still lacks on the resources and funding for the nurseries. Still, the new policies do not deliver: the criteria to access the hours but also not solving the real problem. What are we supposed to do with our kids during the summer? how come the threshold to access in London is the same as in the rest of the country? The list can go on.
And this is particularly harder on women. Because it is us that historically make less money than man, and also, it is us that have to go through the whole work re insertion after having given our body and full energy to a new person for the past couple of months, if not years. 

I would never, ever, dare to judge the decision of a mum to stay full time at home. It is such of a hell of a job. Demanding, stressful, hardly impossible to see the rewarding signs on the everyday and you do not get paid - so even if your work is 24/7, your little boss or bosses do not align to any sense of reason, and you are being thrown food in the face and kicked a few times per day: you still have to get money from someone else and (most times) feel guilty about it. I may be generalising, but that was my experience while being unemployed. And I very much admire stay at homes mums AF and there should be End of the Year parties for them, bonuses, and even category promotions. Hands down the most difficult job on Earth.

But me, again, and just how this text started: I have only known a reality where I work, and changing that abruptly and not as a personal choice damaged my morale and my mental health a lot. 

The good note here, is that after a year of looking for a job, I found it: because trust me, looking for a job in this city, where it means you would have to pay for two full time nurseries is HARD. You would hardly see much money after the bill comes in, but still, I did it for myself. Because I needed to. 

Now my life juggles between getting a shower at 6AM before they wake up, tag teaming with my husband to get both toddlers ready and a pre-teen’s tie ready before 7.20AM so they can leave for school and I can leave to work. 

And it has been a couple of weeks of this life, and I have not struggle yet on the summer holidays - which can be a part II of this letter. I am still loving it.
I would love to tell that 25 year old that was desperate to prove everyone she knew that she wasn’t just a mum, that she was not. She was a lot more than a mum, but essentially a mum.

That she grew a career into advertising and saw the world, that she met so many interesting people, that: before 40 she will find herself with the most beautiful kids she can ever dream of, the most loving and supportive husband, living in the city of her dreams and having a job that is the perfect combination of everything she ever did and wanted.

So she can stop worrying, because being a mum is not a thing we should hide at work. It makes us  more resilient and, better professionals.