some overtime – but request part-time work, and you’re out. This is when setting up as a freelancer becomes less about flexibility and more about necessity. With no job to return to following maternity leave, women might register as sole traders, or launch their own businesses that they can run alongside parenting. And these so-called ‘mumpreneurs’ contribute an impressive £7 billion to the UK economy each year.
It’s not always a smooth transition from PAYE employee to freelance mum, but once you’re up and running, it really does offer flexibility in terms of fitting your career around your family. I lost my full-time, well-paid copywriting job when I left to have a baby, which led to something of a career and identity crash. But I soon realised that my 9–6 Monday–Friday job in east London would have been incompatible with the type of mother I wanted to be. So I flipped my panic into productivity, and when my daughter turned one I launched a digital parenting and lifestyle magazine called The Early Hour.
Three years in, The Early Hour reaches 100,000+ parents a month. I’ve learned how to monetise my online platform and build a career for myself around it – including writing freelance articles for the Guardian, Red Magazine, Stylist and Metro. I’ve appeared on BBC radio and TV, and I spoke at Stylist Live alongside celebrity chef Jasmine Hemsley and the founder of Propercorn, Cassandra Stavrou. The Early Hour has acted as a springboard for me; leading to lucrative consultancy work, well-paid copywriting gigs and being made a partner at women’s app, Clementine. This has been my way of sticking two fingers up to the company who employed me as a copywriter but thought I’d become useless as soon as I gave birth. It was my way of saying, ‘you can take away my job but you can’t take away my power’.
That’s not to say it’s been easy. It hasn’t. I’ve had to learn everything from scratch: accounting, building a website, SEO (getting my website to the top of Google searches), how to do PR – after working out what PR actually is – networking, making contacts, social media, how to monetise my website … Basically, everything that running a small business entails. And all while looking after my two children, who are now aged four and one. But I quickly discovered that motherhood can give women the incredible tool of productivity; you find ways to squeeze work into tiny pockets of time you didn’t even know existed before kids came along.
The thought of leaving behind a salaried job, shared office and daily briefs might feel scary, but if you’re keen to spend more time at home than at work, this is probably the path for you. You might have clients or colleagues you collaborate with in some way, but ultimately, you are the boss. You decide your dress code, what hours you’ll allocate for work and how much time you’ll spend with your kids – or doing yoga, or going for a run. There will be no one checking whether you’re back from your lunchbreak on time. If you want to spend all day with your kids then work in the evenings once they’re asleep, that’s totally viable.
Ultimately, there is no easy option when it comes to balancing motherhood and a career. Leaving your child at nursery when you go off to work isn’t easy. Parenting full-time certainly isn’t easy. But freelancing, as a mum, might just be as close as you can get to finding a comfortable, guilt-free, work–life balance.
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