I Hid My Child to Keep My Dream Job
Sarah Harman spent years as a TV news reporter, working tirelessly in a competitive industry that, she quickly learned, could replace you at a moment’s notice. So when she got the chance to have her dream job, she was convinced the way to succeed was to hide the fact that she was a new mother. “As a rookie, your main asset is your availability, your willingness to say ‘yes,’” she writes in the exclusive essay below. “I knew few people in their right mind would hire a rookie correspondent with a tiny baby. So I said nothing.” In 2021, Harman left broadcast news and changed careers; her debut novel, All the Other Mothers Hate Me, about a single mother forced to become a detective to save her young son, was released on March 11 and is being adapted for TV. Here, she revisits her TV years—and explains why she has no regrets.
The moment I began to question my decision, I was in Indonesia, covering a tsunami. I was an international correspondent, reporting on the disaster for a U.S. TV network. My team—a producer, cameraman, and a local fixer—had decided to move inland, after a warning that a second wave might be on its way. My cell phone rang. It was my husband, back in London. Our son was 8 months old, and I could hear him crying in the background. “I think the baby has a fever,” my husband said. “I don’t know what to do.” I gazed out the car window at the watery landscape, imagining my husband in our apartment in the middle of the night. It was two days after Christmas—my son’s first Christmas, which I had missed to go cover this story. Panic gripped me.
“How high is the temperature?” I hissed. Adrenaline was flooding my body. If anything happened, I’d never forgive myself. “Not that high,” my husband replied, backpedalling. “I’m just really tired. Maybe it’s fine?” My worry was immediately replaced by irritation. “You have to figure it out,” I snapped. “If you’re not sure, go to the emergency room. I can’t do anything from here.” Then I hung up.
My producer looked at me. “Everything OK?” he asked, kindly. “Yup,” I lied. I didn’t say anything about my son being sick. How could I? No one knew he existed.
It was always a gamble, keeping my son’s entire existence a secret. And to be fair, I hadn’t planned it that way. It just sort of… happened. By the time my son came along, I’d spent a decade climbing the slippery ladder of broadcast journalism. It’s an industry where female reporters and anchors are constantly being reminded that there’s always someone smarter, younger, or cheaper not just ready to replace you, but positively chomping at the bit for the chance.
When I started interviewing for my dream job as a foreign correspondent for a major network, I didn’t mention that I was newly pregnant. The job was already such a long shot, I figured I didn’t need to give them one more reason not to hire me.
A TV newsroom is a very hierarchical place. Correspondents compete against each other for airtime and the opportunity to cover big stories. As a rookie, your main asset is your availability, your willingness to say “yes”—to working every weekend, to covering all the holidays, to flying in to “babysit” a story until a bigger name correspondent can show up and take over. I knew few people in their right mind would hire a rookie correspondent with a tiny baby. So I said nothing.
The day of the screen test, I stuffed my swollen feet into a pair of Jimmy Choos, pulled on a loose blazer, and hoped that everyone would assume I was just bloated. It worked; they invited me to New York for the next round of interviews. By that point, I was six months along, but due to my long torso, I looked more lumpy than pregnant. Plus, it was January. I wore a big coat. No one asked me when I was due, and I didn’t bring it up. The entire time, I was bracing for the moment HR would call me in for a chat, throw a knowing glance at my mid-section, and I would be forced to say, “Yeah, I’m actually pregnant.” But the moment never came. I flew home to Germany, where I was working as a news anchor, never having made my confession. The hiring process dragged on. By the time they made me an offer, we had negotiated the paperwork, and I’d gotten my U.K. visa, I’d not only given birth, but had enjoyed a decent maternity leave and was excited to be around adults again. My husband could see this was my dream job, and he was willing to be the default parent for a while. We packed up our apartment, hired a nanny, and boarded a plane for London: me, my husband, and our secret baby.
To be sure, there are female TV correspondents who manage to have kids and still cover big international stories, like Clarissa Ward at CNN, one of my career idols. But she’s a singular talent, not to mention a big star with a shelf full of Emmys. I, on the other hand, was a newbie, a nobody—and determined not to let a baby get in the way of my dreams.
“I knew few people in their right mind would hire a rookie correspondent with a tiny baby. So I said nothing.”
At first, the “secret baby” strategy worked fine. Better than fine, actually. The new nanny was amazing, and my son, now nearly 5 months old, was thriving. My husband was enjoying having more time with him. And my new job was just as exciting as I hoped it would be. My new coworkers were talented and hardworking—the best in the business. I got a second passport and packed a little “go bag” that lived under my desk, so I could hop on a plane at the last minute. It actually helped that the role was completely all-consuming, because it made it easier to compartmentalize. Back home, my mom friends were pushing prams in circles around the park, while I was boarding last-minute flights from Heathrow, bound for disaster zones in Asia, plane crashes in Africa, and terror attacks in New Zealand. It felt like I was getting away with something, like I’d stumbled on the solution to a puzzle I’d wrestled with for the better part of my twenties: how to have the baby I desperately wanted and also keep my career and my identity.
As the months passed, however, the adrenaline began to wear off and was replaced by a bone-weary exhaustion. Working across time zones, dealing with jetlag, and the pressure to be camera-ready at all times was hard enough. Throw in a secret baby who didn’t always sleep through the night—well, it was rough.
Meanwhile, my son was becoming more of a person and less of a potato every day. It was hard not to gush to my colleagues about him, especially since I was beginning to forge real friendships with some of the producers and camera operators who I was spending long days with in the field, sharing hotels and cars and transatlantic flights. But after a certain point, there’s no easy way to casually mention, “By the way, I have a secret baby.” I was still self-aware enough to realize how cravenly ambitious the whole charade made me look. What kind of mother keeps her baby a secret to get ahead at work? A bad one, that’s who. I felt riddled with shame, like a liar. Which, objectively, I was. Plenty of women have no choice and have to return to work sooner than they want in order to support their families. But me? I was actively choosing this—choosing to leave. Not only that, but I was forcing my entire family to orient their lives around my ambition. “You’re so lucky,” friends would say, referring to my husband. “A lot of men wouldn’t go along that.” They meant it as praise, I think, but the implication was unmissable: What I wanted wasn’t normal. A good mother, I was convinced, would want to be at home with the baby all day. So I kept mine a secret.
I was still convinced that my hard work would pay off one day. That’s the lesson we’re taught as young women, isn’t it? Hustle, grind, work yourself to the bone, and one day you’ll be rewarded. It would get easier, I told myself. Eventually, I would move up the ranks, have more standing to pick and choose assignments. But right now, I had to say yes to everything. That was the job. That was what I signed up for.
So when the bureau offered to send me to Los Angeles for several months, I didn’t hesitate. Professionally, it would be huge: I would get to cover earthquakes, mudslides, and maybe even some fun stuff, like the Oscars. Personally, it was not ideal. For starters, the corporate apartment where they housed visiting correspondents was a one-bedroom—a tricky situation for someone bringing along a husband, a secret baby, and a nanny. Still, I was convinced; it would all be worth it one day. So off to Los Angeles we went. My husband commuted back and forth between Los Angeles and Berlin, often rising at 3 A.M. to work on European time. We rented the nanny an Airbnb nearby our apartment and promised to fly her back to London for Christmas. I was essentially spending my entire salary on child care just to remain employed, but that’s the kind of career math women are often forced to do. Besides, I had already scarified too much—missed too much—to give up. Classic sunk cost fallacy, but I felt I had to stay the course.
Then COVID happened. One minute, I was doing live shots at the arrivals hall in LAX, telling viewers about a mysterious new virus, and the next, I was back in London, trapped in my tiny apartment while the entire county went into lockdown. The bureau moved quickly, setting up the correspondents with lights and cameras so we could do live shots from home. Anyone who had to parent small kids through COVID while working from home has a horror story or two. But hiding a secret baby—now an active, mobile toddler—as our tiny apartment turned into TV studio? Well, it was nigh on impossible. As the boundaries between workplace and home collapsed, the barrier I had created between my personal life and my work life began to crumble. Then our nanny—the linchpin in this entire bonkers situation—resigned. I couldn’t blame her one bit: She had a pre-existing condition that required her to self-isolate for her own safety. It was impossible to hire another nanny mid-pandemic. With international travel shutting down, my husband, our toddler, and I were trapped on an island with no family support in the midst of a plague. My carefully constructed house of cards was falling. The months that followed were one long, horrible blur of Zoom calls, 5 P.M. gins, and hours of pushing my son around the ghost town of central London while dialing into bureau conference calls on mute. My husband and I passed the baby back and forth, shushing him during live shots, each of us trying to do the bare minimum required to remain employed, keep our son alive, and not completely lose our minds.
When my contract ended, I was a shell of my former self. No one at the network fought to keep me. I was, as I had long suspected, very replaceable. There was no point trying to explain what was really going on, so I left, ashamed I hadn’t been able to make it work but deeply relieved that it was over. I took my secret with me.
While it might sound strange to admit, I don’t regret any of it. I always knew I was replaceable at work, because I watched countless other women be replaced before me—after they had kids and weren’t as flexible, or developed a chronic illness, or gained weight, or maybe just staked their fortunes to the wrong corporate overlord. I knew that a job would never love you back, and I wanted it anyway. And for a brief, shimmering moment, I had it all—a baby and my dream job—if only because no one knew what I was getting away with.
Almost two years after I left, I worked up the courage to confess to my favorite producer—my “work wife,” who I had traveled all over the globe with—that I’d had a secret baby the whole time she’d known me. It was an awkward conversation, made only slightly easier by a generous amount of wine. But she responded with so much kindness and understanding, it almost made me wish I’d told her sooner. If I regret anything, it’s this: lying to other women who I came to consider friends; women who, as individuals, might have understood and supported me, even if the institution probably wouldn’t have.
I wish we lived in a world where keeping your baby a secret didn’t seem like a semi-logical way for an ambitious woman to retain her career after motherhood. Even more, I wish I had been brave enough to work to change the workplace, rather than just try to claw my own way to the top. Mostly, I hope that whichever reporter took my place never feels like she has to do what I did to keep her job. And if she does, well, I hope my confession at least makes her feel a little less alone.
elle
