As you start to announce your pregnancy, your news is the most important thing that has ever happened to you.  You cannot but obsess about who knows, when in what order and who tells them.  For what it’s worth, here’s how I did it:

1. Bottle direct approach and deposit memo on my CEO’s desk late one evening (before making a swift exit).  It reads: ‘I went to the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the NPG recently.  I was inspired not just by the photography but the fact that Annie had the first of her three children at the age of 51.  I returned home declaring this as an excellent goal not realising that I was already 17 years ahead of schedule.’. Thankfully he texts me immediately: ‘Congratulations, I am thrilled for you both’. Followed by: ‘And absolutely gutted for myself’. Then he phones to tease me for the cowardice of not telling him in person, and advises me to tell my team the following morning.  

2.  Attempt to deal with the fact that news spreads like wildfire (while leaving curious gaps). This is slammed home that evening when I run into the finance director of one of our UK agencies in Waitrose.  ‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ he says.  I back away from him into the dried pasta, reeling at the speed news has travelled. Clearly lots of other people now know too - and since babies just don’t sit well in the sterile, single-generationaI offices we work in, I’m not very comfortable with this.  I have a friend who objects to pictures of kids on people’s desks because they aren’t relevant to work.  I don’t go so far, but I do think that pregnancy is not an appropriate subject on which to start meetings.

3.  Try to cauterise the spreading of news.  I never mention it in a meeting, email or work-related phone call, and I make this policy clear to those around me.  This slows the flow of information.  (So much so, in fact, that several months later, some peoplewere still eyeing my belly questioningly and wondering if I’d eaten too much cake.  Oddly I interpreted this as success.)  

Many weeks later I watched someone else go through this process – which, in her case, involved a row about who had told what to whom when. Observing from a distance taught me a simple lesson: once the news is out there, let it go.  No one cares as much as you do. No one is as interested as you are.  You cannot control it.  You cannot change reactions to it.  But you must keep a grip on your own sanity and professionalism.  Find a pregnancy friend at work with whom to share the little stories you cannot suppress, and let everyone else go about their business as usual.

I am not good with tears.  So it was particularly strange, in the early days of my pregnancy, to suddenly become A Person Who Cries. 

I am not good with tears.  I rarely cry and find other people crying very alarming.  Especially at work.  If anyone starts to well up in my office, my initial response is to ignore it completely.  If that fails to stem the flow, I say ‘no’, gently but firmly.  Failing that I panic and tell them to stop. This has a much higher success rate than you might imagine.  On the occasion it fails, I propose we hold the meeting another time.  My team does a collective impression of this whole routine, screaming with laughter at my inadequacy.  

So it was particularly strange, in the early days of my pregnancy, to suddenly become A Person Who Cries.  Partly because I didn’t expect it, but also because no one else did either.  The realisation of this change dawned gradually; it came with the sickness. But it was brought into focus by a crisis. A colleague stumbled in my office clutching her mobile.  Something was very wrong; her doctor was on the line telling her that she needed to go to hospital right away.  I was outwardly calm; I spoke to the doctor, called our CEO, arranged for taxis to be booked, answered questions from her family, spoke to HR about private medical insurance.  She slumped to the ground gasping; her doctor wanted her to have a paper bag to breathe into to stop her hyperventilating, but we’re in an office not a greengrocer, so instead I tore the top off a windowed A4 envelope and handed it to her (even in this moment the oddness of this struck us both). Her sister eventually arrived and they headed off wrapped up in each other.

I passed on the news appropriately, cancelled the rest of the day’s meetings and left.  I arrived home and collapsed sobbing and shaking in the hallway.  My husband was staggered – unused to me being so lost, so overwhelmed, so unsure of myself and so completely beyond self-control. I couldn’t explain why and couldn’t calm myself. He gently guided me upstairs to bed.

Days later I was still reeling.  What the hell happened to my decisive ‘T’ for Thinking?  When the ‘Thinking’ and ‘Feeling’ Myers Briggs spectrum was described to us by our facilitator, she posed a hypothetical scenario to help us identify which we were.  It involved the possible rescue of a dog by the roadside.  Perhaps it’s because my father used to be a butcher, or perhaps it’s because of growing up developing countries. But I was truly stunned to realise that my colleagues were pulling over to load stray dogs into the boots of their cars.  Yet now those ‘Feeling’ types that I’d always found largely mystifying were suddenly the people who made sense.  

It took several more weeks to discover the upside of these heightened emotions.  It happened when I was in Rome, lying down between all-day meetings and a work dinner in a classically grand yet shabby hotel room, and I felt something stir inside me.  Slowly I realised what it was: the first conscious flutter of another, separate being.  I remember trying to grasp hold of the feeling, the way you reach for your wedding day to last forever. Overwhelmed by a strange love, unfamiliar and yet certain, I bounced to dinner in a cloud of secret joy that not even the copious Campari swigging of my colleagues could crush.

Jennifer Liston-Smith responds to Suzanne's question about how ambitious parents can 'press the pause button on their career for a couple of years' while their children are small.

Thanks Suzanne – very apt question. Yes, it does require willingness on the part of both employee and employer to make flexible working work, both case-by-case and as a culture. It's a huge topic, but here are some pointers to start with, relating to staying more or less in the role you have:

- Managed return to full-time:
Sometimes a phased return from maternity leave helps to smooth the transition back to full-time (where part-time is not an option or not wished). Managing Maternity works in quite a few settings in which it’s becoming accepted to use Keeping in Touch days (10 are possible during maternity leave) to begin a phased return to work (say working two KIT days a week for 5 weeks). Also: the use of accrued holidays (say, to have each Friday as holiday within a full-time role).

- Applying for part-time / flexible work:
One of the key tips here is to set out the business case for your proposed work pattern. Yes, you have a right to apply as a parent of young child and a right to have your application properly considered, but it is on business grounds that an employer may turn it down.

Will it work for the business for you to work in a different way? Are there areas, time, types of client / work that you can actually cover better by working differently? Are there cost savings to freeing up / sharing office space in new ways? What about the benefits overall of your enhanced commitment, productivity and loyalty through achieving this new working pattern? Can you propose trialling this way of working before formalising it? What review criteria do you propose?

Sympathetic champions of this approach within organisations advise that if / when you do succeed in achieving a new work pattern (such as working from home part of the time, working different hours), remember you may be viewed (still!) in some ways as a pioneer within your organisational culture. So it’s important to be highly responsive to things like internal emails as they come through to your home, so as not to give rise to rumours that you are in fact putting on a load of washing, feeding the baby who is sitting in the room with you, etc etc.

- Quality part-time / flexible work as culture:
Where the employer is willing, at a high level, certain organisations have been visionary enough to create (or at least countenance) senior roles which can be done part-time, by allocating project work and client contact in such a way that the role is do-able (e.g. you may not easily be available to teleconference with Washington from UK within the hours before nursery pick-up, but your role can be managed in such a way that after pick-up, bath-time and bedtime you are able to do an hour or so report-writing / email at home.)

Apologies if, at the stage some readers are at, this sounds madness; it is the kind of pattern that quite a few City lawyers, bankers etc develop once settled back into work. Often this kind of arrangement goes on ‘under the radar’, informally, which in some ways is a pity as it misses the chance to create ambassadors and champions for this style of working.

Do add more comment, Suzanne. And others please join in. Have you a success story to share on this? Learning from others is so crucial in this area. As we can all see, one of the dangers here is that you do a full-time role in part-time hours and pay. How have any of you managed to manage this?

Jennifer Liston-Smith on how companies can avoid losing highly qualified people after they have children.

Hi; I’m Jennifer Liston-Smith and I’ve been invited here to share my experience of working with individuals, managers, HR & Diversity teams and leaders on this subject. In 2005, I co-founded Managing Maternity Ltd (with client services director Anna Hayward) to help employers support and retain women and men through pregnancy and return to work.

For us, bridging that transition is a critical element in women’s leadership: this is a point at which many highly-qualified people are lost from the workplace, or from a chosen career path. Often, we leave because there is not enough quality part-time work, or because the culture at our workplace (e.g. valuing presenteeism, rewarding ‘face time’ rather than outcomes) is at odds with what we want to offer alongside motherhood.

But the working world and the workforce is changing, as is what we expect from our work. It’s not just a women’s or parents’ ‘issue’. There are some stats, insights and practical solutions here, from the investigation into the Transformation of Work led by the former Equal Opportunities Commission. (Let me know if you’d like more links like these: there are quite a few).

Christine’s brilliant accounts highlight some classic challenges of motherhood at work. Her ability to grapple with the complexity of the working motherhood agenda - and her willingness to resist worrying overly about what others think - are key skills!

I’ll be adding thoughts here as we progress, to sit alongside Christine’s insights. And I’ll be sharing links, best practice knowledge and practical pointers. Are there questions you’d like to raise? Please join in the conversation. Let’s make this a community of support, ideas, resources, tips, and encouragement for people who get the point of both career and motherhood, though we may be struggling with one or the other (or both) at times.

I’ve got two boys, aged 9 and 6, and 20 years’ experience in organisational consulting, training and coaching. I’ve practised the circus tricks needed to be who you want to be, and get things done, in both worlds. I know how easy it is to catch ourselves getting it wrong, instead of noticing how amazingly competent we are quite a lot of the time!

For now, to start with, some infrastructure: for clarification on your rights and benefits during pregnancy and on return, the definitive government guidance is here:

For employers: http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file34286.pdfhttp://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file34286.pdf

...and for employees: http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file34285.pdf