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.