How I Make Work, Work
With Rex's mum and Sonnet Studios director Sophie Nettlefold
When Ready or Not started swirling around in my brain all those years ago, it was taking shape as a long form interview-style blog. I wanted to know what a mother's paid work day looked like from the moment she woke up to the moment her head hit the pillow, and I wanted to know how she or they felt about it, too. I also wanted it written down so I could refer back to it.
If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know that due to the current media landscape, it made more sense to launch Ready or Not as a podcast. But as a writer, I can’t help but come back to the written word.
So, it's long overdue, but today I'm kicking off a new monthly column: How I Make Work, Work.
This inaugural interview with my friend, Rex's mum and the founder of Sonnet Studios, Sophie Nettlefold nearly had me in tears on multiple occasions. I don’t think she needs any more of an introduction, because you’ll learn all about her through her own beautiful words. So, here it is: How I make work, work with Sophie Nettlefold.
Please use three words to introduce/describe yourself outside of being a mother and career girlie…
Three words to describe the me that’s at the intersection of mother and career are: expressive, faceted, affable.
Now, tell us about who you are as a mother and in business?
As a mother, I think I'm playful, tender, protective. I am unfortunately not very patient.
As a director, I have a high care-factor. I am explorative and open, and again, I am protective.
You run your own business – what did maternity leave look like for you, if in fact you had one at all?
I had all the client-facing wheels of my business turning and off-boarded to my angelic team, which left managing invoicing and the back-end ‘businessing’. I grossly underestimated what reconciling accounts might be like on negative two hours’ sleep.
I planned to take three months: one month offline and two months of admin from home while my perfect baby slept, but that plan went to shit. It was more like three weeks. My baby had colic and we lost two of our major accounts.
There were plenty of topless phone calls with tandem breastfeeding in the early months. In hindsight it was also really transformative, a growth experience that strengthened the team and the business because it opened the studio up for new opportunities, and allowed different people to flex into more expansive roles and projects. What a radical paradox.
And what did the return to paid work look like in the early days – biggest challenges and greatest joys?
We are an all-female team, the majority are mothers, and we are extremely close. The greatest joys in those early days were the solidarity, the compassion and the shared experiences. From letdowns in the middle of client strategy meetings to the mechanical “hee-haw’ of my breast pump overtaking the office playlist, the undignified and the chaotic was always met with total understanding.
I was anxious about how much I could truly give to my team and clients at the time - I was worried of being judged for not working as hard, not responding as quickly, or just meeting the project standard deliverables rather than going above and beyond, but it was a ridiculous complex. One of our longest standing clients (also a mother and a CEO) told me that her old boss said to her ‘no one works harder, is more efficient at multitasking, and gets more done in the time that they can than a mother returning to work’.
I tucked that comment in my back pocket.
As a business owner, what would you do to prepare yourself, your staff and/or your business for maternity leave with some hindsight?
If you have planned to have a family, try and save for your mat leave. I had a small amount of ‘going overseas’ savings to support my leave financially, but mostly relied on the government mat leave as my pregnancy was unplanned.
Next time, Mexico.
My son’s needs and priorities for caregiving have completely shaken the way I run my business and the way I define and enforce boundaries (in that, now they exist and before he came along, they didn’t) and I defined these as I went. I suggest you think about what your limits might be before the baby comes so you’re prepared for how you’ll split your finite resources, when you’ll be strictly ‘offline’ and what your days/hours will be.
In your business operations - what can be automated and outsourced? I really wish I hired a bookkeeper just for the year - the hours it cost me, the time I sent an invoice out, which was missing a zero - not worth it in my opinion. Outsource the number stuff.
Do not assume that you will have the time to do ‘x, y and z’ on your maternity leave, because you don’t know what kind of recovery you might need, what baby you might have - these experiences are so incredibly different! My own experience meant the ‘branding for social commerce’ e-book I assumed I would be quietly working on while my baby slept never got past an open tab - but it would’ve been a really welcome slice of passive income had I had the foresight to set this up before my son rocked my world.
My partner had a supportive parental leave scheme, which helped. Tom could take four weeks’ paid leave and then took leave days every Friday for a number of months to share the caregiving responsibilities. My mum even took a week’s leave in the early months. I had friends take Rex for a drive or out in the pram so I could have Zooms in the middle of the day. I was incredibly lucky and grateful for our village.
In many ways, experiencing motherhood can make paid work seem easier. In what ways has this been true for you?
The first year of my son’s life defined my paid work in a time economy – my most precious resource has become time. It’s been a catalyst for change in how I assess a creative project’s completion, letting perfectionism go, and writing emails with less fluff. This has honestly has been a long time coming.
It also felt impossible to say ‘no’ until motherhood said it for me. Rex affirmed that “The girl-boss is dead. This is snail-girl era.”
I think there is some deep patriarchal internalisation that prevents us (women, mostly) from being able to say no for ourselves, until we become mothers and our priority shifts to caregiving, so there’s this powerful affirmation to say no — for them. For ourselves. Our children kind of validate our worth — I was everything my son needed — it felt like the validity to start easily saying ‘no’ that didn’t exist before.
I love it when I think ‘the work can wait this time’, it’s like yes, be free, go you radical working mother. Be free of 24 hour turnarounds*. And more often than not, I'll show up better for the work.
Note to Lucinda: *The irony that this response has been a 6-week turnaround not lost on me.
On the flip side, in what ways has paid work remained challenging?
It’s really challenging to trust yourself. It’s really challenging to let go of the anxious belief you need to prove yourself, or deliver a five-day workload in three days. This is a daily practice, to feel you’re ‘enough’ in paid work and in motherhood.
Business challenges like cash flow, finding and hiring staff and rent will always be there, and when they’re compounded with starting solids, Googling ‘stringy poo 6 month old’ at 2am and delivering brand identities wearing a milk encrusted shirt, it all becomes utter chaos.
Like the tagline of your podcast, you just try to make it work.
Run us through the day in your life on a paid work day (if you’re okay with it, I want the whole damn thing from waking up with Rex to getting home that night)
Is this the entire gritty chaos and domesticity you wanted?
Monday morning usually starts sometime after 2am, as Rex still doesn’t sleep through the night at 18mo. We have a blanket rule that anything said to each other/whispered under our breath between the hours of midnight-5am isn’t real.
Unfortunately the first thing I do when I open my eyes is usually check my phone - I wish it wasn’t. The cool thing about having Rex is that I haven’t had an alarm on my phone since 2022.
As an eternally sleepy person, I rarely wake up before Rex. Tom is an eternally early rising, workout-at-6am-er so he’s up with the birds. Rex has started to sing out to me in the mornings, which I must admit I absolutely love. I scurry in like the little personal valet that I am, missing him like a limb I lost in the night.
Then we begin the morning's dance - Good morning bunny, fresh nappy game, weetbix, not weetbix, toast? smoothie? Yes please coffee thank you Tom Iloveyou, do I have time for a shower before you leave? Discarded toast crusts 4eva. Some amazing mornings I have overnight oats (usually a sign of a wholesome quiet weekend). Clean/chuck everything in the sink. Daycare bag is packed the night before because I learn from my mistakes. ETD 5 minutes? Slick bun and giant man's shirt work uniform. Mass exodus by 8am as dad takes Rex to daycare drop.
I drive the 7 minute (I know) commute to work and it’s time for hair and makeup (in the carpark).
My office is conveniently located next to our local coffee spot so I usually grab a second and an egg cup because I deserve a little treatie just for getting myself there in one piece.
I meet the team, banter about the weekend. I’ll open my laptop as a sign that I'm getting serious about work now. We discuss the day's priorities in our WIP and our creative director, graphic designer and content strategist kick off on their autonomous trajectories for the day in companionable silence peppered with outbursts of conversation, it's an easy flow. I am so sick of all our work playlists, but so happy to be here! It's so nice to tick things off!
I start missing Rex about 10:30am and might text Tom to see how the drop went. Absolutely fine, he skipped in. He’s extremely social. It’s about time some facet of parenting went fucking smoothly for us. I try not to have any meetings in the mornings as this is my best deep work time.
There’s 12 projects on my list and it’s a six-hour work day and I have two one-hour meetings booked and I need to eat lunch today..
I have a habit that I've practised forever. I’ll re-write my to-do list after midday with the 2 or 3 items I'll actually be able to achieve. Copywriting, brand identity design feedback, client strategy meeting, content writing. Tick tick tick.
More projects added to the list after the client meeting means you’re nearing 3pm and the list of items is back to 12 again. The old me would absolutely have to get this list down to 6 or 8 in order to have job satisfaction but the transformed working mother won’t fall for that efficiency trap. Efficiency to me now means doing the most important things first, keeping the team energised and creatively fulfilled and then making it on time to pick up my son from daycare, usually between 4-4:30pm.
It’s a huge perk of being self-employed that you can re-write Dolly’s lyrics from 9-5 to 10-4. I live for the moments spying on Rex and the other tiny people in the yard before he notices I'm there. Can’t help the pang in my heart that he lives these entire days without me, having experiences I'm not a part of. We try to do something fun now, because I'm a fun mum. The park? Again? Grrrreat.
Home at last, and this next two hours we have down to an absolute tennis duel between Tom and I. They water the garden or play, I cook, we eat, they bathe, I stare, we do nudie runs, read Magic Beach for the 600th time, and then we take turns doing bedtime while the other cleans the kitchen. Afterwards, we bark at each other depending on who’s on their phone at the time, or we watch our show, read our books, talk. The old me would open her laptop and try to get the list down, but the transformed mother absolutely relishes these quiet hours with Tom and I can’t let work creep into the intimacy and the domesticity of it all.
If there’s no urgency, it’s not coming into the living room. I like to think of it as my little factory reset - and this is the time of the day where I'm not a mother or a director, I am Just Me. Seems like a nice little note to end my day on.
You’re over eighteen months into motherhood now – what does parenthood currently feel like to you compared to the early days?
I came to know myself differently in the early days, and now eighteen months in, I definitely trust myself more. I think there have been too many times to count that I've said to Tom ‘I can’t do this’, but you are doing it.
And it’s a bit of a contradiction, mothering and paid work, but it’s also kind of practically mothering yourself, your ambition, your creative outlet, providing for your family. I think I'm a better mother knowing that.
QUICKFIRE ROUND
Describe motherhood in three words. Sublime new dimension
Navigating motherhood and paid work is… nuanced. And never perfect.
I wouldn’t be able to navigate motherhood and paid work without… The Village. Accepting help. A very helpful partner. Weekends.
My go-to mum-friendly office uniform is… Blanca Studio shirts to wear forever. Nagnata for pieces that grow with your waistband. Sister Studios for the best-cut pants. Bassike for mostly everything (on sale). And I find that I only wear slides or sneakers these days.
The best way to help a new mum is… Feed her
The best way to help a mum returning to paid work is…Feed her
If I could solve one problem for working mothers, it would be… guilt abolishment, gender pay gap abolishment, superannuation gap abolishment.
To get out of the door in the morning, I need… to be pushed.
My biggest current challenge in making work, work as a mum is…How do I optimise my time to better connect with the team, our clients, and still produce meaningful work?
My biggest focus for 2024 is… My focus in motherhood is to write things down more, I want to remember his funny little vocabulary forever. My focus at work is to launch a product I've been working on. A very, very slow burn in the background, but it’s for mums!
I hope you love this new column! I sure loved reading Soph’s answers and I can’t wait to explore this with more mothers. In the meantime, shop our Go To Guides here, follow us on Instagram here and listen to the podcast here.
The description was Monday was the best and most accurate thing I have read. Never have I felt more seen as a mother!