“You Don’t Behave Like a Mother” And Other Workplace Compliments That Aren’t.

A colleague once said to me, with a straight face, “You don’t behave like someone who has kids.”

They meant it as a compliment. That is the maddest part.

What they were really saying was this: you are not inconvenient. You are not soft. You are not distracted. You do not leak motherhood into the workplace in ways that make other people uncomfortable.

And they were right. At the time, I couldn’t afford to.

I was working in a male-dominated industry, going toe to toe with men who had stay-at-home wives, uninterrupted careers, and the luxury of being praised for “helping out” at home. I knew the unspoken rules. No sick days because a child had a temperature. No visible juggling. No hint that my life outside work might ever interfere with my output inside it.

I could not be seen as letting the side down.

So I performed competence with a side of invincibility. I left parts of myself at the door. Especially the mothering bits.

Motherhood, of course, is not soft. It is one of the most demanding leadership roles on the planet. High stakes. Long hours. No switch-off. You are responsible for shaping nervous systems, values, resilience, empathy, and confidence. All before breakfast.

It is deeply impactful. It is profoundly rewarding. And it is almost entirely unrecognised.

There is no LinkedIn headline for it. No bonus. No applause. No annual review saying, “Excellent work keeping a small human alive while teaching them emotional regulation.”

In a society obsessed with visible success, motherhood doesn’t stand a chance. We measure worth by titles, salaries, square footage, and which multinational you’re leading. If it cannot be monetised or turned into a keynote, it barely counts.

So women end up feeling lost.

I get more DMs than I care to count from professional women who step out of paid work to have children and suddenly feel invisible. They go from being high performers to “just” being at home. As if raising the next generation is some sort of extended coffee break.

They tell me they feel smaller. Disregarded. Like the world moved on and forgot them.

And here’s the uncomfortable bit. We helped build this culture.

Why do career women feel the need to minimise the child-rearing aspect of their lives for fear it will affect their promotion prospects? Why do we talk about kids like they are a side hobby rather than a core responsibility?

Because we know how the system works.

We know that ambition with children attached is seen as diluted. We know that commitment is still measured by presenteeism and availability. We know that saying “I need to leave for my child” carries a different weight to saying “I need to leave for a meeting”.

So we adapt. We hide. We overperform. We pretend nothing changed.

But here’s the bigger question society keeps avoiding. If parenting is continuously discounted, who exactly is supposed to do it well?

You cannot tell people this work is vital, foundational, and sacred, then treat it as economically irrelevant and socially invisible. That contradiction catches up with us. In burnt-out parents. In anxious children. In workplaces full of people pretending they do not have lives.

Why can we afford immense respect to a corporate high-flyer but not to a stay-at-home mum doing work that literally holds society together?

This is not about choosing one path over another. It is about recognising that both matter. That parenting is not a personal indulgence but a public good.

Society should do better.

Until we give parenting the credit it is due, women will keep contorting themselves to fit systems that refuse to see the full reality of their lives. And we will all pay the price for that short-sightedness.

Frankly, it is time we grew up about this.

Rant over for now.

P.S: Feeling swamped by the juggle? If you’re a career mum who wants to get back in control, let’s chat here.