Foreign travel when pregnant can be a mixed bag. Sometimes it's great; sometimes it's a nightmare.

On one occasion I arrived at Lisbon airport, running, running. A security guard stopped me, babbling questions in Portuguese. After thirty years of flying, my brain was telling me one thing: Be Nice To Security. I smiled.  ‘Baby’ he said, pointing. ‘Come with me’.  He took my bags, and led me through a side door to a queue-less security point where I was sent around the scanner. My mind cast back to the anaconda-queue through Terminal Three the day before, when the BAA security guy blanked my anxiety about standing for so long. Although it’s not just BAA – looking back, that was the only time in perhaps twenty or thirty flights when my pregnancy was obvious that I was shown around a queue.  

On that same flight out of Lisbon, the BA air cabin steward confidently sat down next to me. ‘So they told you about the meals then?’ Apparently they were short of meals in business, and I had been ‘selected’ not to get one.  I had not been told. I clarified that they had specifically ‘selected’ the pregnant lady. All the other business travellers were male. 'Well obviously... had I known... oh dear.'  He faltered, his earlier assurance crushed. To my shame, I was overwhelmed by tears; too exhausted and too hungry to be polite (I'd been up since 5am).  

Eventually he says I can have the pilot’s lunch. But a hungry pilot strikes me as a worse idea than the sobbing pregnant lady in 2C. Meanwhile the other passengers were mortified; so much so, in fact, that a kind man donated his lunch to me.

By contrast on another BA flight, this time to the US, the BA head of cabin services came over to introduce herself. She asked when I was due, adding with a conspiratorial smile, ‘I’ve done all the training... just hoping not to have to try it out tonight’. She was very warm and made sure I had kind and attentive service.

During my final work trip, my colleagues and I got off the Eurostar in Paris to find (as usual) an enormous taxi queue at Gard du Nord.  We hesitated for a moment, wondering how late we were going to be for our meeting, when I was pointed at and summoned to the front by a man in uniform.  He pushed me into the first taxi in the queue and my colleagues scuttled in behind me, suddenly thrilled by the perks of travelling with the fat lady.

There are two things I do notice. Nobody on planes ever helps with my bags. I don’t object: if you’ve signed up to travel, you must be able to manage your luggage.  More importantly, it’s not because my fellow passengers are impolite: if you load on and off planes frequently you do so in invisible bubbles that protect you from the anxious hordes bustling around. You have to, if you want to stay sane.

I also notice that, despite the requirement of a medical letter giving you permission to fly after 28 weeks, no one ever, ever asks for it.

Motherhood isn't a crisis of who we are. It’s a chance for a rethink and an expansion.

When we first become mothers, we undergo an imperceptible transformation. We might not realise it, particularly at first, but with a baby to care for, the centre of our universe moves and things we might once have taken for granted as our most important goals become, suddenly, inconsequential as we try to get a handle on what our priorities need to be.

Research has demonstrated this too: according to findings from Dr Lynne Millward Purvis, women – particularly working women – undergo three ‘identity shifts’ when they become mothers. Before giving birth, we begin to feel increasingly invisible and undervalued as we prepare to go on maternity leave. After giving birth, we are forced to acquire a ‘mother identity’, which causes our goalposts to move. And as we return to work, we find we need to redouble our efforts as we seek to revalidate ourselves, both as employees and as mothers. In my experience of maternity coaching, women approaching maternity leave see these coming and find it helpful to discover others feel the same.

Findings by Professor Daniel Stern are more challenging. He rocks the self-image of the ambitious, self-sufficient woman – deciding instead that new mothers are preoccupied by three internal conversations: with herself, with her baby and with her own mother. Stern says a new mum is more concerned with women and less with men, more with her emotional growth and development and less with her career, more with her ‘husband-as-father-and-context-for-her-and-the-baby’ and less with her ‘husband-as-man-and-sexual-partner’. In short: more with her baby and less with everything else.

It is only after crossing the irreversible bridge to motherhood that most of us recognise or accept this. There are good biological and societal reasons why it might work well for many of us to adapt in this way. Our job is to accept that, for a while at least, we’ll be spending most of our time focusing on the growth and survival of the baby, our relatedness to the baby (including living up to social norms – even where we don’t buy into these), establishing suitable support for ourselves and, crucially, allowing our identity to adapt to all of these.

And it doesn’t last forever – the baby takes centre stage for 12 -18 months, then our usual set of themes swims back into view, with career moving back up the list. But while the transition lasts, here’s how we can be kind to ourselves:

• Establish a support network of other mothers, and accept the need for this. If we have a male partner, recognise we may be looking in a stressfully inappropriate place (for both of you) for the support we need if we lean fully on him. Other mothers are vital, and it’s a while before some of us tap into this, especially at work. What can you do next week to develop your support network of mothers at work and outside?

• Accept the normality of how harshly we judge how we’re doing at nourishing our babies, and at loving them. We tend to have a built-in fear of failure, but we thrive best if we recognise both that the pressure we feel is deeply normal, and that ‘good-enough’ will do – and is more successful than perfect.


Dr Lynne Millward Purvis, the Transition to Motherhood in an Organizational Context is available from Ingenta, while Prof. Daniel Stern’s the Motherhood Constellation: a Unified View of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy is available from Google Books.

When you're pregnant, travelling on public transport becomes a study in complex sociology.

The first few months are the worst.  There’s no outward sign you’re pregnant, but you feel vile and dread the Tube.  You feel a fraud asking for the ‘less able to stand’ seat without a bump – despite feeling sick, dizzy and tired.  Wearing a badge that says ‘Baby on Board’ is not possible for so many reasons, the obvious one (apart from misplaced vanity about wearing a stupid badge) being that colleagues don’t know yet. One morning I was fighting dizziness when a man, perhaps in his 60s, gazed over for a moment thoughtfully, before getting up and saying quietly ’You need this more than I do’.  I regretted not being able to express the depths of my gratitude.

As the bump starts to show, women are more likely to move for you: they are better at spotting the signs (and more willing to take the risk that you might be just fat). When nobody can mistake it, young men leap to their feet and insist you sit even if you are only going one stop. Particularly young Indian men – we must thank Indian mothers for their being so beautifully brought up.

During the middle stages, a subtle game of Top Trumps is played to select who takes a free priority seat. Elderly lady versus pregnant lady (how pregnant, how elderly?). Man in a neck brace versus pregnant lady. What about two pregnant ladies? What about a sweating man with a foot in plaster, carrying a large bag?

What’s really interesting is that somewhere beyond our conscious thought we have a code for this. Sociologists can probably give you a precise list.  Eye contact is exchanged for the briefest of seconds, and a deal is struck.

Towards the end, as you commute London carrying an extra 8 kilos, swollen ankles and a powerful internal travel radiator, you feel more entitled to your irritations about the failures of London transport.  You HATE the DLR for its lack of seats and design that ensures everyone can avoid your eye. The platforms don’t even have seats. When it’s 90 degrees and you give up on the stairs, you realise that the station lifts are perfectly designed to mimic the kind of dark hole where a sick cat would choose to die.

By contrast, you can forgive the Jubilee line anything for its good connections, the loos at Canary Wharf, and generous travellers who always do the right thing.  Even if you sometimes wonder whether it’s because everyone is watching. Before you get pregnant, you don’t even notice most of this stuff. Afterwards, the world has conspired to form a complicated obstacle course – without, in reality, a single detail changing.