Why, as a childless woman, I quit my job because I can’t bear to have to play catch-up for working mothers again at Christmas

Last Christmas Eve, at 6 p.m., I turned off the music system with Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, put on my coat, and locked the door of the high-end beauty store I managed.

It was dark and cold, and while I rang the last customer’s doorbell at 5 p.m., six colleagues and I had spent another hour taking down seasonal displays and preparing for the sale.

I’d been working flat out since Black Friday – November’s sales event – ​​and as I set out on the 40-minute walk to my home in Kent, which I share with my partner Dave, 43, I was overwhelmed by exhaustion.

It was already seven o’clock in the evening when I finally came in and went straight to bed after a glass of Sauvignon.

On Christmas Day I was too tired to enjoy the festivities – and on Boxing Day I had to go back to work.

This has been the case for decades. After going straight into work instead of going to university, at the age of 48 I have now worked in retail for 30 years, 25 of which were at management level.

As anyone who has worked in a store in December knows, it is very difficult. But there’s a reason it’s particularly unrelenting for me: I don’t have children. And it is expected that women like me will pick up work so that the mothers can have free time with their families.

A third of my team were mothers and as much as it pains me to say it, mothers can be unreliable. If their child is ill, they can take parental leave, that is the law.

But I’m the one who has to cover their work, and sometimes it’s hard to be around them when this happens repeatedly.

This fall, as another brutal Christmas approached, I realized I just wasn’t ready to carry the excitement through another festive period. That’s why I submitted my notice in October.

Some will argue that I was hasty in throwing away a good career. My store did very well and I met all my goals.

But it wasn’t just Christmas; I became disillusioned with the difference between the tremendous effort I consistently put into my career as a childless woman and the lack of recognition and reward I received for it.

As a society, we support working parents, but the same kind of support isn’t offered to people like me. My father is ill, but I knew I wouldn’t get any time off, paid or unpaid, in the run up to Christmas.

Legally, you can be granted leave to deal with an emergency involving a child, grandchild, spouse or parent, but they must be ‘dependent’ on you and rely on you for their care. Since my father doesn’t live with me, I wouldn’t qualify for time off to help him.

The decision not to have children was not mine either. I got married in my late 20s and my ex-husband and I tried and failed to have a child before being accepted for fertility treatment on the NHS in my early 30s.

It turned out that I couldn’t get pregnant naturally because my fallopian tubes were blocked by scar tissue from a previous procedure.

Yet we were so sure it would happen eventually that we bought a four-bedroom house in anticipation of the children we would fill it with. But after three useless fertility treatments we decided to stop. Every failure was a knife in the heart. No wonder we broke up 18 months later.

In fact, fertility treatment using my own eggs would never work because, I discovered shortly afterwards, I was going through early menopause.

I am proud of the way I managed to rebuild my life and find love again. But of course there are times, like Christmas, when my own children’s absence is felt particularly keenly – especially when social media is full of photos of families in festive pajama sets and personalized stockings over the fireplace.

Still, as I approach fifty, I want to pat myself on the back for coming this far and embracing what I have, rather than what I don’t. That’s why I’ve had enough.

Mothers often work part-time, which means there is understandably less loyalty to the team. When they or their children were sick, some mothers I worked with did not hesitate to call in sick, usually without notice.

There were many times when I felt obliged to postpone my free time or miss long-awaited celebrations. Or on my days off, I was only half-present with my partner while I was busy fighting staffing issues. I even had moms call in sick while I was on vacation at the beach.

I understand: what else can parents do? That’s why I want to encourage our society, business leaders and parents to think about their childless colleagues and how they can support us too.

It doesn’t help that since the pandemic I’ve noticed that the “disease” has gone through the roof. The lockdown seemed to make ‘going to work’ optional.

In theory, I got two non-consecutive days off per week. But having to fill in for a mom at the last minute often left me feeling burned out. I struggled with insomnia and anxiety. It got so bad that I was prescribed antidepressants.

Then there was the inevitable increase in absenteeism when schools broke up in mid-December. And that’s before we get to the thorny topic of who gets Christmas week off.

Parents are not allowed to get priority, but they inevitably do – or they simply call in sick when you put them on the schedule. Without wanting to sound like a martyr, I have worked every Boxing Day for the past twenty years.

While mothers point out that they have family obligations, they forget that I have them too: I am a daughter and an aunt.

I have a good relationship with my parents, both in their 70s, and I want to spend quality time with them. I want to be the one who cooks for them. I don’t want them to worry about me (and I know they do) when they see me exhausted and asleep on the couch on Christmas afternoon.

I also want to spend time with my nine-year-old nephew.

A year ago, an ex invited me to his mother’s fancy house for Christmas Day. I sat down on her beautiful white couch with a glass of wine. . . and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep and missed the meal.

People say it’s just a day, but when you’re working around the clock in the run up to the 25th and then have to go full steam ahead for the Boxing Day sales, it doesn’t seem fair that I don’t ever get to enjoy the Christmas magic.

When I told my managers I was resigning, I didn’t feel a twinge of regret; rather, it was exhilarating and liberating. The thought of another manic retail Christmas filled me with dread.

As a child I loved the run up to Christmas. Unfortunately, the more years you work in retail, the less you enjoy the season. You notice that it brings out the worst in people, whether it concerns customers or staff.

After being locked up for the last time at the end of October, I have no regrets. I have been able to stop taking antidepressants, my mental health is in very good condition and the physical pain seems to have disappeared.

I haven’t worked since and that’s only possible because I’ve been saving £500 a month since the pandemic, building up a nice nest egg. Childless women need to be careful in this way because for us there is no equivalent to paid maternity leave.

This Christmas I am reaping the fruits of my hard work. I had time to decorate my tree – something I never did before.

After some good quality time with my family this year, when everyone goes back to work in January, I’m going to take a flight to Thailand with my partner Dave and we’ll go island hopping in the sun for two weeks.

In the meantime, I don’t know what my career will look like next year, but having time to think about it has given me new life.

Six years ago I started a Facebook group for non-moms that is also on Instagram (thenonmumnetwork), and I am launching a website for childless and childfree women like me with the same name.

This is what I want my legacy to be: supporting and campaigning for equality for non-mothers.

Many of us end up saying nothing, quietly taking on the challenging side of Christmas, while other women don’t want to work. Well, not anymore.

• As told to Samantha Brick