Going on maternity leave? Don't expect it to be a bundle of joy
I felt, back then, if not quite shame, then certainly, a sharp awkwardness describing my fears of maternity leave as my due-date neared. Because, really, I had it good. The fact I had maternity leave at all, and a job to come back to, felt like a privilege. In the UK up to 74,000 women lose their job each year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, a figure (reported by campaign groups Pregnant Then Screwed and Women In Data) up from 54,000 a decade ago. In America, women get no federal paid leave, no guaranteed financial support and no universal services. But beyond the practical, there is the idea that this is meant to be a simple and beautiful time.
It's talked of as a blessing, a dreamlike window of love and rest and milk, but much of my first maternity leave was shadowed by loneliness and fear and a series of identity crises that crawled over me in the night, without work, without sleep, without time to wash my hair. I found it hard to remember what I was for, or who I was – nurses insisted on calling me 'Mum'. And I know that even those who didn't scrabble through grimly like this will have had days of boredom, or anger, or pain, or insecurity, watching their colleagues become enamoured with their replacement. In the same way that it has slowly become acceptable to admit, radically, that there are parts of parenting that aren't delightful, Barnett is insisting we acknowledge that, regardless of what people regularly tell new mothers, we don't, in fact, need to 'make the most of every second' of maternity leave. That there are parts of it that are simply shit and that's OK – it doesn't make you a bad parent to say this out loud, and it doesn't make you a bad person.
I recently returned to the columns I wrote about that year, my closest thing to a diary, and was shocked to realise I'd been describing postnatal depression. I wrote of the baby, 'The thing I feel for her is physically painful. It's an awful love… A bruise being pressed, continually, by a strong thumb.' I was talking about the kind of love that was, 'two centimetres from grief,' an inescapable, destabilising thing that followed me round the early-morning east-London streets and unmoored me from the person I'd been. So I was determined to make sure my second maternity leave was different.
After some gruelling administrative mishigas, eventually I got an appointment with a counsellor, scheduled for the week I'd go on maternity leave. We planned to talk about birth trauma, mental health and how to populate this maternity leave, so it felt as different as possible to my first. While there were many things I couldn't plan, there were some I could – I would schedule time alone, we would ensure our care responsibilities were split more equally, that sort of thing. Shared parental leave was introduced a year after I had my first child. It was designed to give fathers a greater role at home, but research by economists shows the policy has fallen flat, so it's still on parents to structure their families in equitable ways that, at the very least, don't leave one of them seething blankly at windows.
Anyway, everything was in place. The baby was due, the counselling booked and then, the day my dreaded second maternity leave began, the country went into lockdown. All bets were off, we were spitting into the wind. And, despite everything – despite the five-year-old at home, despite my mum not being able to visit – the maternity leave itself turned out far better than my first, partly because everybody else in the world was similarly unmoored, and partly because it couldn't have been more different.
Barnett is right – the cultural idea of maternity leave is not fit for purpose. There are plenty of things employers and government can organise in order to make sure it doesn't feel as though women are disappearing when they have a baby, including introducing real flexibility, legally required data collection to track how they're being treated around maternity leave and an enthusiastic embrace of paternity leave. And, of course, if women's postnatal bodies were celebrated, and their conflicting feelings around motherhood and identity were understood, it might be easier to advocate for policies that protect and support them.
Maternity leave takes a strange bite out of a life. You leave work, you leave youth, you leave your body, somewhere in a room in Archway. You leave a part of yourself behind and are not sure for some time quite what's left. But while it's certainly not always the dream it's pitched as, there are plenty of opportunities to make maternity leave less of a nightmare.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
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New Statesman
06-08-2025
- New Statesman
Britain's swan song
Photo by Jacky Parker Photography The swans seem to have a premonition that they're about to be temporarily plucked from their Thameside home. The small family glides to the other side of Chertsey Lock, once the stomping ground of Lord Lucan, trying to evade their inevitable fate. 'The darn swans have disappeared on us!' laments a local man next to me. But on marches a flotilla of rowing skiffs, their crested flags looming ever closer. A burly man, sporting dazzling white slacks and a scarlet polo shirt, leans over the edge of the boat and lifts one of the birds into the air. 'All up!' the crew roars. It's a Monday morning in early July and I'm in Runnymede for the Swan Upping, an annual ceremony which sees a group of 'swan uppers' round up birds along the Thames, tag them and send them back on their way. Maybe, if you're a swan, it's a little like a yearly trip to the dentist. A small gaggle of swanoraks spectate the cygnet census alongside me, eager to witness this quintessentially British eccentricity. The cut-glass warbles of Radio 4 waft out of a narrowboat, hitting the humid air. On the riverbank, I meet David Barber, the King's Royal Swan Marker; a towering man with a dulcet voice worthy of cricket commentary. 'We've had a few catches from last year, which is an improvement. But the amount of cygnets with each family is quite small,' he says, carefully adjusting his feather-encrusted cap. Barber's concerns signal a waning swan population. Last year's Swan Upping recorded just 86 cygnets, marking a 45 per cent decline in two years. In the winter of 2023, mute swans across the UK dipped to their lowest level for 25 years. There's also been an 86 per cent decline in Bewick's swans over the last 50 years, with fewer of these more diminutive swans migrating. But it's not just a numbers game; the swan, a storied creature, is facing an identity crisis, their plight ignored by the majority of the apathetic day at the Bishop's Palace, in Somerset, resident swans Grace and Gabriel ring the bell for food, continuing a tradition started in the 1850s. Its tolls sound more ominous than ever. It's a far cry from the lofty status they once boasted. Swans have attracted myth and lore since the era of Ancient Greece, when Zeus disguised himself as a swan to court Leda. Zoomorphic trysts aside, their form has often been used in art to symbolise monogamy, based on their tendency to mate for life. And they were once the muses of many operas and ballets, from Lohengrin to, of course, Swan Lake. It's no wonder: with their graceful bundle of brilliant white plumage, marbled eyes and bright orange bill, they exude an enigmatic grace. Since the 12th century, swans have also been ennobled as Royal Fowl. This status put them on the menu at feasts. 'It dates back to the 12th century, when swans were a very important food served at banquets. If you owned a pair of swans you were very, very wealthy in those days,' Barber tells me. This went out of fashion in the 18th century and perhaps it was for the best. 'I imagine most people would not want the bother of looking after wild swans, and probably wouldn't wish to eat them anyway – apparently they taste like fishy chicken,' a spokesperson for the Dyers Company says. Dyers', a 550-year-old livery company in the City of London, is one of just four British bodies that can officially own swans. The first is the King, who can turn any mute swan into his subject. Then, alongside Dyers', fellow livery establishment the Vintners' Company helps maintain the population. Finally, the Abbotsbury Swannery, in Dorset, offers visitors a chance to walk through a 600-strong bevy of mute swans. Like much of British tradition, ownership is hereditary – the guardian of a new cygnet is determined by its parentage, making it a nepo baby of sorts – something I see first hand at the Swan Upping, when the stripy-shirted rowers of the Dyers Company inspect fuzzy cygnets. Power-walking towards Staines, trying to keep up with the flotilla, I stride alongside a flock of local enthusiasts. There's an appetite (of the figurative kind) for swans, but there's something different in the water here compared to London; in this verdant suburbia, where Oyster cards go void and extensions are seemingly built on to extensions, an environmentalism seems to dominate. 'It's part of our heritage. So many swans appear on logos of the Thames and local cricket teams. They're on the Runnymede flag,' says Alex Schofield, a Scout leader I get chatting to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But life for swans now isn't all plain sailing. Last year, avian flu wiped out swathes of the population. In addition, 'Pollution, primarily on lakes and canals, [where] the water is slower moving, causes disease and death,' says Cindy Smulders, a board member of the rescue charity Swan Lifeline. Other animals can also prove dangerous: 'Mink attack swans and take their eggs; their numbers have increased as they have no predators. Foxes also prey on swans and their numbers have increased.' Call it revenge, but swans are increasingly interfering with human environments; they are entering cafés, trespassing on train tracks and colliding with planes. And they are increasingly becoming a political football. In the early 2000s, the Sun baselessly claimed that asylum seekers were stealing swans to roast them, fuelling xenophobic panic. This urban myth has been recently revived online by the hard-right group Turning Point UK, an age-old tactic of othering immigrants through their cuisine (made more ironic by the fact that it was the British ruling class, of course, who used to roast swans). Brutally, the swans are also under attack from us. Some of this isn't entirely intentional; rubbish and fishing lines can cause havoc. Other incidences are more targeted. 'Children are fuelled by social media. There is a WhatsApp group that promotes catapulting attacks on swans, pigeons, ducks, geese and waterfowl,' Smulders tells me. 'Catapults today are huge, with large pellets. They are easy to buy online for less than £20 and no proof of age is required. Legislation is needed to change this practice,' she says. These catapult scalps are on the rise, causing dozens of swans to be maimed or killed by ball bearings. 'It's not necessarily a loss of love for swans but possibly swans are seen as a 'trophy' target as large birds. There is probably an increase in lack of respect for wildlife in general,' Smulders thinks. In April 2023, the flappable Priti Patel was bizarrely photographed beaming next to a memorial bench dedicated to a family of swans killed in a pellet attack – a mawkish gesture, but one that displayed a growing grief from enthusiasts towards swan attacks. While urban myth has long represented swans as dangerous arm-breakers, the suburban truth is that we are more likely to be the aggressor. This change in the aura of the swan is best captured by the offbeat artist David Shrigley's series of 'Swan Things', sculptures that turn the animal into an amorphous, gormless being and swaps its umbrella-handle neck for a straight, erect column. It neutralises the dark beauty the swan has mythically held. 'As a child I was told to keep away from swans because they are 'vicious bastards'. This is advice I have always heeded,' Shrigley says. 'Swans are among the most graceful of creatures but they are for admiring from a distance like all the beautiful wild birds we have in the UK.' Back on the banks of the Chertsey Lock, Barber is also jaded by the violence: 'We have a lot of vandalism from youngsters.' But his mission since becoming the Royal Swan Marker, taking over the role in 1993, has been to educate children about the importance of ecology. It's not always easy to get the information across, as one tale he regales illustrates. 'I asked if anybody could tell me what a male swan is called. Silence! And there was the BBC [next to me]. I felt pretty cranky. So, I said, can anybody tell me what a female swan is called? Nothing, but then a little girl at the back put her hand up… and she says: 'Is it Margaret?' Perhaps, I think, as I make the journey back to London, the swan has become entangled with its own symbolism, emblematic of the demise of royalism; with just 35 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds supporting the monarchy, the bird's connection to the Crown may prove costly. Barber's favourite memory of Swan Upping is hosting the 'most delightful lady' Queen Elizabeth II onboard in 2009. But this reliance on tradition risks imbuing the swan with a sense of elitism, a haughtiness unafforded by, say, the more humble duck. Schofield smartly thinks that swans can be remarketed for the present day – we can brush off these dustier layers. 'You don't have to be a royalist or anything. It's just cool and quirky,' she says of Swan Upping, arguing that the tradition needs to embrace platforms like TikTok to move forward. It's far from the most leftfield approach to saving the swan. Anders Fernstedt, a nomadic 57-year-old man known as the 'swan whisperer' who lived in Hyde Park, was banned from the park in June after being seen cuddling and kissing the swans, cycling into a resident and swan volunteer who tried to intervene. The judge imposed a restraining order on Fernstedt. But he also noted that they had more in common than they might think. 'The sad thing is all three of you have an interest in the welfare of birds but different views about how this should be achieved.' In a sense, the swan has become a scapegoat for society's own ruffled feathers and a victim of a collective ennui. Yeats's grave vision of 'when I awake some day/to find they have flown away' may soon be realised. Their demise would be a crying shame. But there are glimmers of hope. In July, a row erupted in Oulton Broad, Suffolk, after the local authority put up wooden 'safety' fences that prevented resident swans from reaching their feeding and resting area. Local human residents tore it down for them. 'They've got their freedom back – that should never have been taken away from them,' Peter Rix, a local retired builder, told the BBC. And a few days after my trip to Runnymede, I hear some positive news. The five-day escapade ended with 115 young swans being found, up from last year's tally of 86. We can hope that swans are not singing their dying song just yet. [See also: English cricket's greatest record] Related
Cambrian News
03-06-2025
- Cambrian News
Wales' rail infrastructure in ‘severe need of investment', Ceredigion Preseli MP says
Plaid Cymru is calling for the reclassification of HS2 and the East West Project (Oxford-Cambridge) as England-only infrastructure projects and a minimum of £4 billion in Barnett consequentials to be paid to the Welsh Government as well as a 'recognition that transport should be a matter for the Welsh Government, ensuring decisions are made in Wales and reflect Welsh priorities, not a continuation of a top-down approach from Westminster.'
The National
03-06-2025
- The National
New poll shows Scots overwhelmingly back independence over direct rule
A Norstat survey, for which the Wings of Scotland blog contributed a question, found that 63% of Scots would back independence if the other option was direct Westminster rule. 37%, meanwhile, said they would back direct rule again. The question asked, specifically: 'If there were to be a second independence referendum tomorrow and the ONLY options on the ballot paper were full independence or the permanent closure of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and a return to direct Westminster rule, how do you think you would vote?' READ MORE: Scottish MPs panned over up to £3500-a-month taxpayer-funded London homes Interestingly, Labour voters during last July's General Election are quite split on the issue – narrowly backing direct rule by 51% to 49%, according to the survey. The same Norstat survey, which was initially commissioned for The Sunday Times, found that overall support for Scottish independence is at 54% but would rise even further if Reform UK's leader, Nigel Farage, were to become the next prime minister. Data from the poll, which was published Saturday evening, shows the Yes side has opened up an eight-point lead, sitting at 54%, when undecided voters are excluded. But this would rise to 58% if Farage were to be in power. It comes after the Clacton MP hinted that he would scrap the Scottish Parliament's funding mechanism if he were Prime Minister. Asked during a rare appearance in Scotland on Monday about whether he would get rid of the Barnett formula, which is used to fund Holyrood, Farage said the mechanism was 'out of date'. He added: 'What I'd like to see is a Scottish Government that's able to raise a bit more of its own revenue and a Scottish economy that's actually got genuine growth and I don't believe that can happen without this sector [oil and gas] booming. 'I think, you know, the Barnett formula goes back to the 1970s. Is there an argument it should be looked at again? Of course there is.' Norstat polled 1007 Scottish adults between May 27 and May 30.
