What no one tells you about agency life and parenting
Agency life is fast. The pitches, the deadlines, the clients, the culture - it's high-octane by design, and most of us chose it precisely because of that. The pace, the ambition, the fact that no two days look the same - that's absolutely the point.
Then you add a family into the mix, and the fast lane gets a whole lot faster.
I asked someone recently: if there was a miracle shop, what would you wish for? Without hesitation, they said time. I thought about that a lot. There are still only 24 hours in a day. Seven days in a week. And yet somehow, the older my two kids get, the more we cram into those hours - not less.
It's making a Rotten Roman costume for World Book Day from scratch at 10pm after finishing a piece on Aboriginal Procurement Policy, both due by morning. It's slipping out of a conference call to leg it up the road and watch your daughter dance to Mariah Carey in the nativity. It's rushing for a train, throwing kids into school, holding a philosophical debate about what SpongeBob SquarePants actually is - and always, always forgetting the cardboard box for the craft workshop.
Nobody warned me about the logistics. The invisible second job of keeping two small humans alive, on time, fed, and vaguely happy, while also showing up fully for a career you love.
Five years of doing both has taught me three things. They all begin with C.
Lindsay Neyjahr, client experience director, EMEA, at Identity
Lindsay Neyjahr, client experience director, EMEA, at Identity
Compromise
I don't believe in work-life balance. The ideal is beautiful in theory and quietly brutal in practice. The moment you set an impossible standard, you've already failed it - and the guilt that follows is relentless. Was I present enough at home? Did I give enough at work? The answer is always no, because the question is rigged.
What I've learned instead is strategic compromise. Going to bed at 9pm so I can run at 5:30am before the chaos starts. Accepting that I can't do every nursery pick-up, but three times a week is still three times a week. Letting go of the guilt around missing sports day, or being five minutes late to a meeting because drop-off ran over.
But here's what I want to say loudly: you cannot do this alone, and you shouldn't have to. The compromise only works if you have the right people around you - at home and at work. A company that genuinely supports you isn't a luxury. It's the whole infrastructure.
Communication
No one prepares you for the logistics of childcare. The revolving door of illness. The nursery that closes for a training day with 48 hours' notice. The way a single sick night can detonate an entire working week.
For a long time, my default was to push through. Over-caffeinate, say I'm fine, and eventually crash by 3pm. Then, early on at Identity, I sat in a room and just told the truth: I've had two hours' sleep. My child was up all night sick. And instead of silence, there was laughter — because half the room had been there too, last week, last month, last term.
We struggle in silence because we're afraid of being seen as less committed, less capable, less serious. The truth is, saying I'm not okay today takes more courage than pretending — and it opens the door for everyone else to do the same. Honest communication isn't a weakness. It's how you build a team that actually functions.
Compassion
You rarely know what someone is carrying. The colleague who goes quiet on a call. The one who leaves bang on time. The one who seems distracted, or says no to things they used to say yes to. Behind every one of those moments is a full, complicated, demanding life you're only seeing a fraction of.
I haven't always understood that. In my early twenties, I rolled my eyes at a colleague who left on time and missed meetings after returning from maternity leave. I genuinely didn't get it then. I do now - completely, in the way you only can when you've been that person needing to get home for pick-up.
Compassion doesn't mean lowering the bar. It means understanding that high performance and hard circumstances can exist in the same person at the same time. The best leaders hold both - pushing for great work while creating space for honesty.
If I'm in a position to shape culture, to make it even slightly easier for the person behind me, I'm fully into it. Not the performance of having it all together. But leading with curiosity before judgement, asking before assuming.
My anchors are my kids. Yours might be something else entirely. This isn't about motherhood - it's about the full, complicated, glorious weight of being a whole person while doing great work.
So if you're tired, stretched, wondering if you're doing any of it well enough: you are. The cardboard box you forgot doesn't define you. What defines you is that you keep going.