“When I had my second child I’d been running my gardening business for two years. I had a handful of regular clients and I was trying to do it all – keep the business going, breastfeed, raise my son – without telling the clients for fear they would go with someone else with less baggage or boobage.

I often asked for power to be left available to me to use the mower – more important than ever, now I also needed power to be able to plug my breast pump in for a quiet 10 minutes’ pumping. On one occasion I arrived at a garden, it was raining and the client had left the power cord so that it didn’t reach outside and short their fuses. They left a note to say to reach through the cat flap and plug in there.

My breast pump cord was only about a metre long, so I had to crouch in the rain on the back doorstep, totally exposed, with my breast nearly poking into the cat flap, while it ugh-ugh-ughed away, pumping the precious milk. If I’d felt comfortable communicating my needs to the client, the whole thing could have been avoided.

Open communication in the workplace is essential. There isn’t just one rule when it comes to parenting – clubs change each term, children get sick or have appointments… But it also might be that you want to go on one of the school trips for once or help set up the summer fair.

If your team can see diary commitments but also be aware that those dates are flexible, there’s much more scope to fulfil parenting duties, while also getting paid to do the job. This creates a trust and respect and feels like we are all pulling together.”

Seonaid, gardener, mum of two children

6 working mums on how the way we work needs to change