The HR Decoded: Episode 8
The Bottomless Capacity Nobody Pays For
“When I found out I was pregnant, I cried for three weeks.”
That’s Wamide Animashaun - senior operator and ecosystem builder, someone who has transitioned across five roles, earned an MBA, and built a career that most people would describe as exceptional.
She cried for three weeks because she believed the same statement most working women have been told in one form or another:
This child is going to ruin everything you’ve built.
It didn’t.
But here’s what nobody tells you about what happens after the crying stops:
You don’t just recover. You expand.
Wamide described it as “a bottomless capacity” — something that switches on when you become a mother and doesn’t switch off. The ability to hold more than you ever thought possible. To think in seven directions at once while making sure none of them fall.
She said: “It opens this bottomless capacity for you to do and juggle a lot of things.”
And then she said the part nobody puts in a performance review:
“There are some days I cannot give 1%, and he will eventually have to carry 100%.”
She was talking about her husband. The partnership. The actual infrastructure underneath the headline.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Welcome to The HR Decoded, Episode 8.
This one is for the working mothers. The ones doing extraordinary work inside extraordinary constraints, while the world debates whether they’re “committed enough.”
Let’s talk about what it actually costs to show up.
What “Having It All” Actually Looks Like
Ask most people to describe a successful working mother, and you’ll get something inspirational.
She’s organised. She’s present. She’s thriving.
What you don’t get is the 6:30 am school run, the lunchbox packed before the first meeting, the work messages answered after the kids go to bed, the mental load that runs on a background process so constant she’s stopped noticing it.
Kim Rohrer (HR strategist and former Chief People Officer at multiple global companies) gave this a name during a previous conversation I had with her:
“The Second Shift.”
You work 9 to 5. Then you go home and work 5 to 9. Then you get back on Slack or Teams when the house is quiet just before midnight.
Wamide doesn’t describe her life that way because she has built something deliberately different.
But notice what that construction required:
She had been journaling privately since 2008 (still in university, no husband, no child) about wanting “a career that gives me freedom and flexibility so I can be there for my family.”
She was designing for a life that didn’t exist yet.
By the time her son arrived, the flexibility was already built in.
Most women don’t get that lead time. Most are figuring it out mid-game, with a newborn and a performance review in the same month.
The Infrastructure Nobody Talks About
Wamide is unusually honest about what actually makes it work.
It’s not discipline or a miracle or being built differently.
It’s systems.
And at the center of those systems, she said plainly:
“My husband - we are partners in every sense of it. That foundation is the biggest factor for everything else that I do.”
She put a number on it: 70 to 80 percent of what enables her to show up the way she does at work is her partner.
A co-parent who handled everything while she was nine months postpartum and traveling for work.
“He can handle everything. There was no issue on the home front. It’s not like he could not find the milk or he did not know what food to eat.”
Then comes everything else: a school that provides lunch so she doesn’t pack one, a remote job, seniority that gives her control over her schedule, a cleaner, and a team she can delegate to.
She lists these not to brag. She lists them because she’s being precise.
Because if you ask a working mother, “How do you do it?” and she says “support systems,” she’s not being modest. She’s giving you the actual answer.
The problem is we don’t build workplaces around that answer.
We build workplaces that pretend the answer is personal willpower.
What Oyinkansola Did Not Say
Oyinkansola Edem is 24 years old. She is a wife, a mother to a one-year-old who hadn’t been well during the period we spoke, and a freelance content marketer building a global client base.
She does not describe this as extraordinary.
She describes it as her reality, and she navigates it with what she calls “the superpower of being a woman”: multitasking, emotional load management, and the ability to hold professional excellence and caregiving in the same hands at the same time.
But here is what she told me that I have not been able to stop thinking about:
When she was pregnant, she told some of her freelance clients.
They stopped giving her work.
Not officially. There was no email saying “we’re reducing your assignments because you’re pregnant.” It just... went quiet. The briefs stopped arriving.
On the other hand, she told another client, and their response was the exact opposite.
They responded by building the work around her; whenever she felt well enough, she worked.
When she later resigned of her own accord to rest, they renewed her health insurance anyway.
That happened. That is possible. It costs so little and means so much.
But it was the exception.
So she did not tell her other clients.
She worked. She kept working. She was on calls, delivering content, and meeting deadlines.
She stopped working the week before her scheduled C-section.
That was when she finally sent the email.
“I’m about to go in for surgery next week. I’ll be taking three weeks off and will resume after.”
Her client’s response?
“You’re pregnant. You’ve been working all this time?”
Yes. She had.
Because the alternative (as she already knew firsthand) was watching her income dry up for being audacious enough to grow a human being while also being a professional.
I want to pause here and sit with that for a moment.
She did not do that because it was the heroic choice.
She did it because telling the truth had already cost her, and she couldn’t afford to lose more.
That is not a hustle story. That is a structural failure wearing the costume of individual resilience.
The Man Who Left Because She Was a Woman
Ruth Adelakun works on the Global HR Operations team at Bloomberg. Before that, she spent years doing recruitment and people management in Nigeria.
She told me about the time she became a manager and one of her junior colleagues resigned.
Not because she was bad at the job.
Not because of conflict.
Because, in his words, he was a married man and could not report to a “small girl.”
At the time, Ruth said, she didn’t escalate it. She didn’t report it or raise a flag. She just moved on.
Because in that environment, that was normal.
“In Nigeria,” she told me, “the only diversity I knew was being a woman.”
It was only when she moved to the UK and joined Bloomberg that she started learning the vocabulary: diversity, equality, inclusion, lived experience.
She said something quietly devastating:
“We don’t even pretend to care about the other discriminations. We just do them openly. That’s just Tuesday.”
But the man who quit rather than report to her? He is not an isolated incident.
He is every hiring manager who passes over the competent woman because she “might go on maternity leave.”
He is every CEO who offers the role to someone else the moment a candidate mentions a young child.
He is the contract clause (and yes, these exist) that says a woman cannot get pregnant within her first year of employment.
Working mothers carry the weight of that bias before they even get through the door.
The Invisible Tax on Ambition
Grace Alfred runs Urehgab Consulting, a recruitment agency she built after years of watching how candidates — especially women — get chewed up by the hiring machine.
She told me about working on a role for a client who, among their requirements, stipulated: no Igbo candidates (you’ll recall this from Episode 1).
That same client also had a history of treating executive assistants with contempt so severe that word had spread through the recruiter community. Grace knew about it before she placed anyone. She warned candidates. Some went anyway.
One lasted eight months.
The EA would be made to stand outside events while her employer went in. She would walk through Balogun market in the heat while the client didn’t offer her water.
She would finish at 11 pm and be told: If you don’t want to work, you can leave.
Grace said:
“She would call me, crying. That woman is harassing her.”
This is the part of the working woman’s story that doesn’t make it into the LinkedIn post celebrating “resilience.” The harassment that masquerades as demanding leadership.
The environments that are specifically hostile to women who need anything (flexibility, leave, basic dignity) that men in the same roles often never have to negotiate for.
And the reason it persists is the same reason discrimination always persists:
There are no consequences.
As Ruth put it: “In Nigeria, you can get away with almost anything.”
What the Workplace Was Actually Built For
Kim Rohrer said it plainly in a previous conversation I had with her (and I’ve been quoting it in my head ever since):
“The ideal worker prototype that most knowledge work and office work is based on is based on a man who has a wife staying home, taking care of the kids.”
That’s not a theory. That’s the blueprint.
Nine to five was designed for someone who doesn’t need to take a child to the doctor.
Whose partner handles the school pickup
Who doesn’t carry the mental load of knowing when the nanny’s shift ends, what the paediatrician said, and whether there’s food for tomorrow.
When companies talk about “commitment,” what they often mean, unconsciously or not, is: are you available in the way someone with no caregiving responsibilities is available?
Wamide escaped that trap by building a career with freedom and flexibility before she needed it.
Oyinkansola escaped it by hiding her pregnancy and working until the week before surgery.
Ruth navigated it by crossing an ocean.
These are not solutions.
These are workarounds.
Expensive, exhausting, personal workarounds to a problem that should have been solved at the systems level.
“Don’t Let Fear Be the Thing That Holds You Back”
I want to come back to something Wamide said near the end of our conversation.
I asked her about the women she knows (corporate professionals, many of them) who say they don’t want children.
She said she understood where they were coming from. She had cried for three weeks herself.
But she made a distinction.
There are women who genuinely don’t want children.
And there are women who want children but have convinced themselves they can’t have them because of the career, the timing, the finances, the lack of a partner who will actually show up, the fear of becoming invisible in a workplace that punishes pregnancy.
Those are different things. And conflating them costs people something real.
She said:
“If you really want kids, don’t let fear be the thing that holds you back. Because what that fear really is for is to push you to want to create the thing you really want. It is not supposed to hold you back.”
She was talking about intentionality.
About building toward the life you want before you need it. About the difference between making a decision and making a decision under duress.
That’s not advice you can give someone who is drowning.
But it’s advice worth building toward.
What Actually Needs to Change
This is not an article about what working mothers need to do differently.
They’re doing plenty. They’ve always done plenty.
This is about what workplaces need to stop pretending.
Stop pretending “commitment” is value-neutral. When you penalize availability gaps caused by school pickups and sick children and maternity leave, you are penalizing women at a structural level. That’s a policy choice disguised as a performance standard.
Stop performing support. International Women’s Day posts from companies that don’t offer paid maternity leave — let alone parental leave for non-birthing partners — are not support. They are branding exercises on someone else’s suffering.
Start building for real lives. Wamide’s list (remote work, flexibility, delegable workload, adequate seniority) is not a luxury package. It is the baseline that allows any parent, not just mothers, to be fully present at work.
Companies that build this don’t do it out of charity. They do it because retention is cheaper than rehiring. Because burnout costs more than flexibility.
Because the best talent has options, and it chooses workplaces that treat people like people.
Take parental leave seriously. Kim Rohrer made this point with data and personal experience: when fathers take real parental leave, everyone benefits. The mother is not left as the default parent. The father learns from his child. The child has two present parents. And the workplace loses the excuse that “she’s the one who chose to take six months off.”
Equal leave is not a woman’s issue. It’s a family architecture issue.
And stop asking women about pregnancy in interviews. Full stop. It is none of your business. It has nothing to do with the role. And if your business model cannot survive someone taking three months of leave, your business model has a problem that is not her problem to solve.
One Last Thing
Wamide told me she had written in her journal in 2008 that she wanted a career with freedom and flexibility.
She said: “That’s my reality now.”
I think about what it took to get there. The intentionality. The partner she chose and the partnership they built. The career she shaped early, deliberately, with her future life already in the frame.
Most women don’t get to plan that way. Most are responding, not designing.
But here is what I believe after spending time with these four women:
The bottomless capacity is real.
What’s also real is that it was never meant to be exploited.
It is not a mandate to do more for less.
It is not permission for an employer to give a woman two people’s work because she’ll find a way to do it.
It is not a performance metric.
It is what human beings are capable of when they love something fiercely and build around it carefully.
The question for workplaces is simple:
Are you building something worth that kind of love?
Or are you just counting on the fact that she’ll show up anyway?
See you in 14 days.
Best regards, Isaac, son of Adewumi.
P.S. Wamide, Oyinkansola, Ruth, Grace — thank you. Not only for the hours you gave me, but for the honesty you brought to them. This one was different to write. I hope it’s different to read.
P.P.S. To the working mother reading this who cried in the bathroom before a client call and then went back in and delivered anyway: that’s not a flex. That’s a cost, and you deserve better. If you’d like to chat, my DMs are open.
Because silence is permission.
And I’m done being silent.
Are you?
"that’s not a flex. That’s a cost, and you deserve better." PREACH.
Awwwww... This was such a wholesome and relatable read. And you have my fave Wamide on there. I have been fortunate to work in places that valued staff and cared. 3 months paid maternity, 4th month without pay, twin births 5 months paid leave, close by 2pm for 3 months after your maternity ends, and when your child is sick or you need time off to attend to family, they don't make you feel guilty. I have experienced both ends and so I know the difference. I have worked where if you have mad cramps you will be afraid to tell your line manager.
I always let my line manager know that while I will give my all on the job, things may come up with the kids and I need you to be understanding. Thank you for sharing this and to the women that contributed. This is real life conversation we should be having.