Deferred Womanhood

For years I absorbed a version of legal practice that was never explicitly stated, but constantly reinforced through silence, timing, and observation; that to be taken seriously, you must delay your life. That partnership is earned through endurance. That family is something you “fit in later,” once you’ve proven yourself.

I believed it too.

Not because anyone directly said it to me in those words, but because I watched how the profession rewarded sacrifice and quietly questioned anything that resembled balance. I internalised the idea that ambition and motherhood existed in tension, and that if I wanted one, I would inevitably compromise the other.

So, I structured my early career around that assumption. I have treated my twenties like a race against an invisible clock that I had not agreed to, but felt bound by nonetheless. I also carried another, more private, narrative.

I have Type 1 Diabetes and Stage 3 Endometriosis. Since the age of 15, I have been told that falling pregnant would likely be difficult and that it might not happen easily, or at all. I lived with that possibility as something I had to quietly prepare myself for, even while telling myself I was too focused on my career to think about it anyway.

When I found out I was pregnant, I experienced two truths at once. Relief and terror.

Relief, because something I had been told might not come easily had arrived. Terror, because almost immediately my career consumed my mind. Not in a superficial way, but in a deeply conditioned way… Have I just derailed everything I have worked for since I was in high school?

That question came from the myth that seriousness and success in law is measured by how completely you can subordinate your personal life to your professional one.

The assumption I had carried, that pregnancy would be a professional setback, was not the assumption my colleagues held. In fact, what I encountered was a level of normalisation, support, and pragmatism that challenged the internal narrative I had been carrying for years.

It forced me to confront that much of the limitation I had felt was not externally imposed in the way I had believed. It was cultural, yes, but also internalised. A story I had inherited from a profession still negotiating its relationship with care, gender, and longevity.

This is where feminist theory is not abstract; it is operational.

The legal profession has long been built on an implicit model of the “ideal worker”: uninterrupted availability, linear progression and an assumed absence of caregiving responsibility. Feminist scholars have written extensively about this architecture of work, where neutrality is often just masculinity made invisible. Pregnancy, caregiving, illness, these are treated as deviations from the norm, rather than part of the norm itself.

But what I am experiencing now is something that sits outside that older framework. Do not get me wrong, my experience is not that of another, and my experience may be one of isolation. However, I am still a lawyer. I am still progressing. I am also pregnant. Those identities are not in competition; they are coexisting.

The more important shift has been realising that the environment you work in determines whether that coexistence feels possible or penalised. The profession is not a monolith. Firms are not interchangeable. Culture is not incidental; it is structural.

Working in a firm where colleagues do not treat pregnancy as a professional liability has reframed something fundamental for me; ambition does not have to be conditional on postponement of life. But, that only becomes visible when you are not constantly defending your right to exist fully in both spaces.

It was never just about whether I could sustain a career while building a family. It was about whether the profession would allow me to believe those two things were allowed to exist at the same time. And perhaps more importantly, whether I would allow myself to believe it too.

I am still learning that ambition does not require erasure, that professionalism does not require self-abandonment and that the most radical shift is not choosing between career and family; but refusing the premise that they are mutually exclusive in the first place.