Senior marketing leader and single mum of three Jaz Brace on sitting her final exams eight months pregnant, building a career around three kids, pushing through a presentation that ended with a hospital stay, and what she's learned about asking for help.

Full Show Notes Jaz Brace always pictured herself in a big London office, career first, everything else in the traditional order. Then she fell pregnant at 21, in her placement year, and sat her final exams eight months pregnant. She describes her first reaction as fear and dread, and the question that followed her for years: how do you still get to be you?

She went back to work early, built a career across agencies, and had two more children. Then a separation left her responsible for everything: the finances, nursery fees of around two grand a month for her two boys, and every school-sickness phone call. In this episode she talks honestly about running on autopilot through that period, telling almost nobody at work, and the ear infection she kept pushing through. She delivered a big online presentation before finally going to hospital, where the infection had spread to the lining of her brain. She spent two and a half weeks in hospital, unable to see her kids, and six weeks off work in total.

The conversation is as much practical as personal. Jaz walks through what a day actually looks like with three kids and a full-time senior role, why she'd rather spend the evening with them and work later, the village that holds her family together (including a free school minibus), and what she's had to give up: the gym, festivals, evening networking, and a social life that currently runs on lunchtime dates. She and Hannah also get into the gap between family-friendly policy and how managers apply it, why ambition doesn't switch off just because life gets harder, and what it means to be called "a mother" as if that's the whole of you.

Topics covered:

• Planning a career in a London tower block, then finding out you're pregnant at 21
• Sitting final exams eight months pregnant, and going back to work early
• Being told by a colleague that "mother" was her first and last job
• Separation, losing the day-to-day support, and doing it all alone
• Pushing through illness, an online presentation, and a hospital stay
• Learning to ask for help, and why mental health days still feel hard to take
• A typical day with three kids and a senior role: "organised chaos"
• Village life, the school minibus, and how much you can really ask of neighbours and family
• What single parents give up that dual-parent households don't see
• Policy vs practice: why a manager can make or break family-friendly working
• Why you can have it all, but not all at once

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