An open letter from a working mum: What it feels like to come back

Yasmin Quemard, creative director, UM Studios
By Yasmin Quemard, creative director, UM Studios | 26 February 2018
 
UM creative director Yasmin Quemard.

My name is Yasmin Quemard and I am working mother. And now breathe. 

This public declaration has been many months in the making. My son is nearly two.

If anybody should be proud to be a mother, it should be me. My son was born at 25 weeks. He courageously fought for me to enjoy the privilege of calling myself a mother.

So why the reluctance to share my new-found status at work?

I am afraid. I am afraid you will write me off. I am afraid I will write myself off.

Do you still think I can do the job and handle day-care pick-ups? Can my brain switch from “choos choos” to one-pagers and concept rationales? Should I share with the business a five year plan for my ovaries?

There are a lot of questions I have on making it work as a working mother. I feel like I am teetering in this unique ravine where personal and work life continuously collide. It’s a space fraught with the risk of an inappropriate response – both from myself and management.

I wish there were more obvious role models I could call upon. The ones I know of are exceptional. And I am just not interested in exceptional. Sorry.

Being exceptional comes at a cost I am not comfortable with. Exceptional doesn’t seem complementary to balance. And what’s wrong with wanting to be a passionate creative and a loving mother/daughter/partner and Zen-like master of chilling out?

The type of reassurance I am seeking doesn’t just come from HR, nor does it solely come from a company-wide paternity and maternity policy. Reassurance predominantly comes from culture. Working parents need companies to move beyond policy-making to culture-creating.

And why is culture so important? I like to think of culture as the living and breathing version of your company values. It’s not what a company wants you to think it is, it’s what a company actually is. It’s an unspoken acceptance of what’s normal.

I would really love to feel normal. Ironically, I spent most of my twenties trying to convince everyone that I was far from normal. But now, after surviving a major shift to my identity by becoming a mother, I have landed on a 'new normal' and I’d like to carry this through into my working life.

I want to feel normal about leaving before six because it’s a given I’ll get done what needs to be done after normal work hours. I want companies to acknowledge it's normal for employees to have children and that’s why, at the very least, they should post their paternity and maternity policies online, so you don’t have to 'out' yourself before you’ve even begun. I want to feel like job-share, part-time and working from home are all normal work arrangements on offer, not by individual request, and not exclusively for parents.

Creating this normal culture is so important to the future of our industry. Talented people may want to produce talented offspring one day. And we want to keep them. (Not their offspring, although that is definitely a long-term eye on employee retention!)

Many are on the way, but I often wonder why agencies can't have the same progressive cultures as the Spotifys, Facebooks and Googles of this world?

I’m not sure how you go about creating that culture in an organisation, but in the meantime, I’ve been looking at what I can do. Just me.

So this month, I have put a photo on my desk with a picture of my son and his daddy. It’s hopefully a simple signpost for others: Hello, I’m your unexceptional role model of a working mother. I’ve also embarked on a personal public service announcement. Every day at around 5pm I announce 'Goodbye everyone, I’m off to pick up my son.'

It sounds simple, and it is easy to do, yet it has been many, many months in the making. I feel brave, yet exposed. It’s a very public declaration of a life outside of work. And I do wonder at what cost. Who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised.
I want to be.

We'll hear from two more working mums on their experiences coming back to work later this week.

Do you have thoughts on how agencies can be, and are being, more flexible?

Yasmin Quemard is creative director at UM Studios

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