Pregnancy: one of the few times you feel justified in systematically deceiving and lying to your work colleagues...

As the sickness decreases, my anxiety about colleagues finding out and the burden of keeping my pulsating secret grows. Particularly as I try to conceal exhaustion, fragility and a sudden hatred of tea (creeping out of my office into the open plan to tip cold mugs of it down the sink, to avoid alerting my eagle-eyed team).

My professional world view is distorted; everything is examined through a new lens, especially time. As work project deadlines and travel plans are reviewed, I simultaneously calculate how many weeks pregnant I will be, whether I’ll make it and, if I don’t, who would take the project over.  

An email arrives:  'Great news: we’ve got you a place on this year’s international training course in Boston'.  I absorb the two date options, dialling first BA and then my GP. If I take the first session, and everything is progressing well enough to get a letter of approval from the doctor to fly transatlantic, I can go. 'Thrilled, I’ll be there'.

Our CEO asks about plans for the annual client conference that I organise and host, the biggest event of our year. I stall, my mind double-processing.  I am no Rachida Dati, and hosting a global conference for a few hundred staff and clients with a four (***, four) week old baby seems optimistic.  'Perhaps...' I grope for a direction... 'Perhaps with the downturn it would be, er, unwise to commit to the conference at this point... Perhaps we should aim for 2010?'  There's a questioning silence and a thoughtful stare: he assesses this out-of-character ambivalence for a moment before passing over it.  

I meet an old colleague for lunch. ‘If you keep wearing floaty scarves like that people will think you’re pregnant', she announces cheerfully. I crumble and confess. She promptly bans me from wearing anything midriff-covering. Apparently, it’s a dead giveaway; the girls at her PR agency keep their eyes peeled for it. This made me wonder who else had already clocked it - particularly when a senior PA reported in jest that she’d heard a couple of our senior team discussing if and when I might get pregnant (I tried to look neutral but instead froze her with a tortuous Gordon Brown-ish smile).  

It's very difficult: our GP is fiercely adamant we should tell no one before twelve weeks, but when it starts impinging on your work, as it inevitably will - because you're knackered, or your habits change, or it affects your forward planning – your secret invades your mind and presses hard on your conscience. Then there’s the worry about who to tell when and in what order. And, however hard you try, you sense that you are scattering clues all around you.  The people you work with know you extremely well.  And you have never been more acutely aware of it.

Christine is blogging for MT about her experience of being pregnant at work. She wrote this when she was eleven weeks pregnant.

Vogue's Alexandra Shulman apparently thinks so. But most working mums I know see it very differently.

Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman's Daily Mail piece on working mothers raises many questions (not least why Vogue, the most famous women's magazine in the world, has an editor who seems entirely unsympathetic to her own sex).  Alexandra believes that the law is weighted too far towards working mothers. She is frustrated that Ms Pregnant in her office holds the cards, while she is left trying to manage a business around her demands for flexi-time. It's a valid point, and a reflection of how many employers feel.

As someone who manages a team of women in their 20s and 30s - and who is typing this with one hand while breastfeeding my two-month old - it strikes me that the tragedy of this situation is that working mothers don't feel good either.  Far from feeling supremely in control, at liberty to exploit generous maternity benefits and flexible hours, they mostly feel stressed, exhausted, cash-strapped and bloody guilty about everything.

So, after so much progress, why do both sides still feel painfully hard done by?

Time is the first problem. Professional women may get paid from 9 til 5 but most are expected to be on the Blackberry from the start of the Today programme until after the final bongs; throw in some travel and a couple of business dinners and it's easy to rack up a 70 hour week without even trying.  My parents worked full-time but were always home by 6 pm for dinner.  How many of us can now say the same?

Money is another.  Women - like Alexandra - are often the breadwinner of the family or at least contribute an equal and essential amount. So there's more financial pressure: most of our mortgages are based on the expectation of two salaries. Often mums have to work whether they want to or not; they can't afford the luxury of part-time.

And then there's childcare. As a newcomer to the horrors of finding somewhere appropriate for your child, I can confirm everything you read about it. Waiting lists, expense, limited choices, ridgid hours and that queasy feeling you might be making a terrible mistake.

But traditionally 'feminine' skills - team working, good communication, listening, caution - are increasingly valued in the workplace.  The very idea of us being excluded from the workplace is unthinkable. (Imagine Alexandra trying to run a fashion magazine without the input of women of 'childbearing age'). So what to do?

First, we have to enable better communication between employers and working mothers.  Legislation has been drafted with the very best of intentions, but it's a blunt instrument - and fear of litigation seems to hold people back from having honest conversations about what really can and cannot work. Without honesty, there'll be no progress.

Second, to address Alexandra's concern that nobody will hire women of a certain age, at some point parental benefits will have to be equally available to fathers too.
 
Thirdly it's no good changing the law if the childcare options aren't available to make it work. We have to do better at this. Unless we do, neither employers or parents will be happy.

It'll never be perfect.  But if both sides are flexible, and honest about the realities of modern working life, we can work it out. And it'll be good for all concerned. In our forties and fifties our time management, life skills and confidence will benefit our employers and repay their commitment to us. The two most senior people in our UK business are women and mothers. They're there not because we're the most progressive employer in the land; they are simply the best people for those jobs. 

I always thought morning sickness was largely in the mind. Not any more.

Monday Morning Tummyaches are an established euphemism in our family for the desire not to go to school. Ever since, I've tended to see isolated sick days - blamed on various bugs, sore throats and headaches - in emotional rather than physical terms.

Prior to experiencing morning sickness, I might have guessed that it fell fairly close to this camp. So its arrival blindsided me. The name does no justice to the day-long punch of body and spirit-crushing nausea. Your entire world is reset in darkness, bile and tears.

Mine hit hard while we were still in New Zealand on holiday; we drifted from pharmacy to website seeking answers. The same message came back time and again: 'It will pass'.  I was outraged.  If anyone in the general population were this incapacitated, the medical profession would DO something.  We slowly realised the awful truth: doctors are thrilled you have morning sickness. It means a lower chance of miscarriage, and they don’t want to treat it to avoid losing this benefit.  

As you read this, feeling well, that sounds perfectly sensible. But when you’re lying curled up on your kitchen floor wailing in the semi-light, you can’t view it rationally. Because morning sickness is far more than mornings and far more sickness; mine encompassed all day every day, obliterating every simple pleasure in life. I’d have tried anything to make it stop.  One website suggested a diet of bananas, brown rice, apple sauce and something beginning with a C which escapes me.  Anyone who could be in a room with a banana does not have what I had.  I couldn’t get past the trolley selection stand at the supermarket without being overcome by the stomach-turning stench of fruit.   

So, months later, when a colleague took four weeks off for something that a year ago would have baffled me, I was overwhelmed with empathy.  As it slowly became clear why, I couldn’t look at her pale face and fragile demeanour without revisiting my own sickness.  I urged her to stay at home and, after an incident being stretchered by paramedics out of Liverpool Street Station, she had no choice.  Her scan showed up twins; I entirely understood when she confided that she struggled, at that point, to be thrilled.  

In some respects I was fortunate to be on holiday for part of my sickness (with the downside that, having been sick in most of New Zealand’s national parks, I can't think of the place without tasting bile). Getting back to the office was shocking. I couldn’t concentrate; I couldn’t eat, despite being very hungry; I slept badly, waking up with an awful acidic taste in my mouth. Even my usual love of Earl Grey was lost; when the open plan area was quiet, I'd sneak out of my office to tip two or three cold mugs down the sink so as not to be spotted by my eagle-eyed team. And that is the real kicker: before your twelve-week scan you're very strongly advised not to share news of your pregnancy (especially with colleagues), because the chances of miscarriage are still so high. So you can’t even explain to anyone why you are so utterly desolate.

These two factors – the impact of the symptoms and the inability to explain their cause – create problems at work for those who suffer and those who manage those who suffer. As a sufferer, all you can do is give in and wait. As a manager, likewise. But you can reduce your confusion about your previously productive colleague who appears to have lost the plot by paying careful attention to those Monday Morning Tummyache calls. On reflection, it strikes me that the only sensible course of action for both sides is for anyone who has it badly to stay at home until it passes.

It turns out the doctors are right about one detail: one day, to my utter joy, I woke up to find that the lights were back on.  The relief washed away all my other anxieties about pregnancy. For a while.