It’s been a week

...contemplating a maternity leave of the soul

I broke the news at work that I’ll be leaving at the end of the summer to take a career break. I have to keep making sure people know it’s not because I’ve hit the big time and somehow writing is now paying my bills. But the financial stars have aligned to make it possible for a little while and I am taking the risk of leaving the security of my current job behind, banking on being able to get a new one when the time comes. I spent quite a lot of the week on the verge of or in tears pre and post conversations as the enormity of it took on concrete edges. It will be a genuine grief to leave behind the relationships I’ve formed at work; because I live alone I spend more time with my colleagues than I do with anyone else in my life.

I’ve had a job of some sort since I was 14. I started out as a Saturday girl in Savers drugstore, where I had to wear a bright green, midi length tabard with red trim. It fastened with press studs. I spent the day on the tills or unboxing stock or facing up the stock on the shelves. I became intimate with all varieties of Impulse and Lynx. I then got a job at Woolworths where my uniform was navy blue pinafore made of a fabric I can only describe as having a municipally-issued texture. I had a brief interlude working over the Christmas season at Next at the Metrocentre. Next really had ideas above its station, I was treated like I’d managed to bag a job at Chanel on Rue Cambon and seriously needed to up my sartorial game despite being given no clothing allowance. I worked in pubs and shops all throughout university and then entered into office work immediately after. I once had 3 weeks between jobs and in 2020 I took three weeks off to go to California but had to cut it short due to Covid. Other than that I’ve never had a break.

My first ever paycheck for £22.50 - I was paid fortnightly.

I don’t know who I am when I’m not working. I’ve never had the opportunity to re-texture my days. I go to bed just after 10, read a little and then I wake up around 7. By 8.30 I’m working, and the day’s agenda is all mapped out for me. I’m so entrapped in the rhythms of work I barely understand how they form. I have meeting after meeting, I review and comment on documents, I check in on how people are doing and what’s going on for them, I seek and offer advice, I try to decipher and respond to email trails and chats and motives and intentions. I get to the end of each day hoping I’ve nudged the right things forward but its frankly hard to tell sometimes. I often hear a phantom ‘be-boo’ sound of notifications long after I’ve logged off.

If you’re dependent on salaried labour to pay your bills the only way you can have a reprieve from it, other than some kind of magical financial intervention (inheritance, lottery win, a well-timed redundancy offer), is to have a kid. I can hear parents yelling at me here ‘it’s no reprieve’ so hold your horses for a minute. Parental leave, maternity leave, adoption leave etc are crucial and often inadequate provisions in our society to enable people to have kids while minimising the potential discrimination and inequalities they might face. It’s there to protect the health of the parents and the kid. I’m sure the provision feels paltry to parents, I know some people experience a shocking lack support from their employers, but in my industry (the public sector), where the maternity leave offer is more generous, I’ve often looked at it with a kind of envy. In the best-case scenario having kids is a positive choice you make, you plan for, you dream of. You’re getting to do something in your life which is about enrichment and fulfilling a desire. And hopefully, if you have a good employer, your job allows you to do that with no detriment. I can’t quite make a political case for a kind of ‘maternity leave of the soul’ – wanting to have a break isn’t a protected characteristic! – but I do wonder if we’d all benefit from the chance to take one. To step out of our structures, habits and work’s expectations to see what we can find there. I want my non-parenting pals to have a chance to work on their novel or build a garden or retrain in a new skill or convalesce or campaign on something they are passionate about. I have the good fortune to do this for a while and explore who I am without work-work. Discover how I write when writing is not subordinate to keeping a roof over my head.