Society Has a Plan for You the Moment You Become a Mother. You Didn’t Agree to It.
Alexia cleared her own tokophobia and developed a method that has helped women clear theirs for more than 10 years.
Nobody sat you down and asked you to agree to any of this. There was no meeting. And yet somewhere between the positive test and your first day back, a plan switches on. How much of yourself you’ll be expected to hand over. How your ambition will suddenly need explaining in a way it never did before. How “flexible” starts to mean “less serious”. How a colleague asks when you’re coming back before you’ve even left. You didn’t sign anything, and you’re not sure you were consulted. But the plan is real, you can feel it, and you’re right to be wary of it.
I say that because most of what women in your position get offered is reassurance that the plan won’t apply to them – that they’re different, their workplace is different, that if they handle it well enough they’ll be the exception. I’m not going to tell you that. It mostly does apply. Your fear here isn’t catastrophising. It’s pattern recognition, and you happen to be good at pattern recognition, which is exactly why it’s so hard to live with.
What happens, and why nobody argues with it
The clearest way I can describe the system isn’t through statistics – there’s a separate piece coming that does the numbers properly – but through the small, ordinary moments where it shows itself. When a child is ill, the school rings the mother. Even when she’s a director. Even when the father is also a director. He probably doesn’t get the call. She does. When someone has to leave work early for the appointment or the pickup, it’s usually her. When a life has to be reorganised around a small person, it’s her career that’s assumed to flex, her diary that absorbs it, her head that holds the running list of everyone’s needs.
Almost none of this is ever decided out loud. It isn’t a policy anyone wrote or a conversation any couple sat down to have. It’s simply assumed, until a woman who thinks for a living stops and asks who chose this, and finds that nobody did. It defaulted to her, the way it defaulted to the women before her.
She’s usually watched it happen to someone a few years ahead. The colleague whose great opportunity evaporated the week she announced. The one who came back to a role that had quietly been redesigned around her absence. The one told, kindly, that everyone would understand if she wanted to take a step back – which is not a phrase anyone has ever used about a man’s commitment after he became a father. None of this is imagined. It shows up often enough in the research to have a name, the motherhood penalty, and often enough in my sessions that it rarely surprises me any more.
Where it gets personal, and bodily
There’s a sharper version of the same fear that shows up when women picture the birth itself: the sense that in a clinical setting they’ll stop mattering as a person the moment the priority becomes the baby. That the decisions will be made to protect the child, and that she’ll be treated, as women have put it to me, as the wrapper rather than the sweet. As the means to someone else’s end. It’s a fear of being written out of her own story at the moment it’s most physically hers.
That knowledge is accurate information about a system that wasn’t built with her in mind. And holding accurate information about something you can’t fully opt out of is tiring in its own particular way, because you don’t get to stop noticing it just because noticing is inconvenient.
The mental load starts before the load does
The negotiation starts long before there’s anything obvious to negotiate about. In most households and most workplaces, the assumption is that reorganising a life around a child will be hers to run. Because it’s an assumption and not a stated position, it tends to set into “just how things are done” before anyone notices it was ever a choice.
I’m wary of turning that into a neat instruction, because I don’t think there’s a clean fix and I won’t pretend there is. But a default that runs silently and a default that’s been said out loud are not the same thing. Naming it – with a partner, an employer, yourself – before it hardens turns it back into a conversation, something two people are deciding rather than one person quietly absorbing. It won’t guarantee the school rings anyone different. It does mean you chose your arrangement instead of inheriting it.
And if you’ve decided not to do any of this
This piece isn’t only for the woman heading towards motherhood. It’s just as much for the woman who has looked at this same system and decided, quite reasonably, that she doesn’t want to hand herself over to it. That decision doesn’t need defending, and I’m not going to treat it as a wound to heal or something to make peace with. Some of the clearest-thinking women I know made this call precisely because they did the analysis I’ve just described and didn’t like what it told them. It’s sound judgement applied to real information, the same as any other decision she makes for a living.
What she still carries is a version of the same fatigue. The baby shower she’s expected to attend. The maternity cover she has to plan around. The assumption she’ll want to hold the newborn. The “when are you going to…” question from someone who never once wondered whether it was theirs to ask. A different way into the same building, and just as tiring to keep walking past.
The decision that gets made for you
The picture isn’t only made of clean decisions. Alongside the woman who chose is another woman who never quite got to choose – the one for whom the matter was settled quietly, years before she could examine it, by a fear she couldn’t yet name. From the outside the two can look identical: no children, a life arranged around other things. From the inside they are not remotely the same.
My co-host JJ, editor in chief of this publication, is the second kind, and she has spoken about it openly. For most of her life she carried what she describes as a settled, wordless certainty that motherhood simply “wasn’t going to happen” to her. Not a weighed-up no children, an innate one, in place long before she could account for it. Hand her a baby and she’d pass it back as fast as she politely could. When a first marriage reached the question of children, she steered it towards adoption; when a second reached the same question, the marriage ended, because her husband wanted children and it had become clear they wouldn’t come from her. It was only in her late sixties that she understood the certainty had a name – tokophobia, rooted in her own frightening birth and that an unrecognised fear had made one of the largest decisions of her life while she assumed it was simply who she was.
I’m not telling you this to unsettle the woman who did choose. Her decision is hers, and it’s sound and nothing here touches it. I’m telling you because the two women get filed under the same heading while the world charges them the same social toll.
And that toll is real. JJ is blunt about it: people treat you differently when you don’t have children, and they assume all sorts of things. A doctor she went to about severe period pain told her to “just have a couple of kids, you’ll be fine”, and looked at her as though something were wrong with her when she said that wasn’t the plan. Friendships thinned as the women around her had babies and their lives reorganised without her. “You just wait,” people told her, kindly, for years. Then when menopause finally shut the door for good, a grief arrived that caught her off guard – not for the unborn child but for the possibility now permanently denied her.
None of that is an argument for having children, or against it. It’s just the honest weather around the decision, whichever way it went, and whoever or whatever turned out to be doing the deciding.
What to do with an accurate fear
I’m not going to tell you the system will change fast enough to matter for your own decisions, because it probably won’t, and false comfort isn’t something I trade in. What I will say is that naming it accurately – this is a system, not a personal failing; a plan you’re reacting to, not a fear you invented – changes what you can do with it. You can negotiate specifics instead of absorbing defaults. You can decide, on purpose, which parts of the plan you’ll accept and which you intend to push back on, rather than finding out the terms after you’ve already agreed to them by saying nothing.
It’s also worth checking, on your own time, whether the position you hold on all of this is one you reasoned your way to, or one that arrived fully formed and has simply never been questioned. Both are allowed. But it’s worth knowing which is which, because a decision you made is yours in a way that a decision made for you never quite is.
You didn’t agree to any of this. You’re allowed to say so, out loud, and then decide – on your own terms, with accurate information – what you’re going to do about it. That’s what the rest of this section is for.
JJ has read and approved this account of her story.
About the author: Alexia Leachman has specialised in tokophobia and reproductive anxiety since 2015, and has personal experience of tokophobia. She is the founder of Fear Free Childbirth and hosts its podcast. She developed the Head Trash Clearance Method, which she uses in her work with women and teaches to perinatal professionals. She is the author of Fearless Birthing and Betrayed By Your Biology and a contributor to Childbirth, Midwifery and the Media. More about Alexia ›
Read next:
- The Working Woman’s Birth Fear Isn’t What You Think It Is
- Your Mother’s Birth Is Already in Your Leadership
Fear Free Childbirth is a publication and is not a substitute for medical or mental-health care. If you’re struggling to cope or in crisis, please contact your GP, midwife or a qualified professional.
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