After almost a decade and half of making my work flex around kids and not the other way around, I have just returned nine to five(ish), Monday to Friday office-based work, by choice, and boy am I having a dose of 20-20 hindsight.
For one, I can't believe how much energy I burned trying to make the jobs invisible to the kids, and the kids invisible to the jobs, twisting myself into various kinds of tricky knots. As you do.
You don’t need a handbag full of guilt, it won’t serve you as a worker, or make you a “better” mother.Credit:Stocksy
Except I can believe it: no one sets out to give their kids the scraps left after the job gets the juiciest bits of them, and no one sets out to give any job they also love the offcuts, either.
You muddle along from one stitched-together child care plan to the next, hoping the precious parachute fabric of your life doesn't get a catastrophic rip.
You cross your fingers things stay the same for more than a few months at a time, and hope just as hard that you end up with a bit of money left over after paying for child care/education expenses. (Lol to that, in the early years, and again in the secondary school years.)
All this time after I pieced together the first version of my work-life puzzle, I am still amazed at how alone mothers are left (let's face it, it is still mothers expected by most of society to manage the childcare issue) to patch together their own arrangement as best they can. And also that they/we are still widely expected to demonstrate that having kids does not make us lesser workers – which clearly it doesn't. I have never been more organised in my life.
As anyone who has left their jacket on the back of their chair overnight so no one noticed what time they slipped off to parent-teacher, or any one of a million other school/kinder things that are set up in flipping work hours, can tell you there is still plenty of guilt to be had by any employee who is visibly putting kids anywhere near top priority status.
That being the case – that it's every woman for herself still, rather than a solid structure women planning children know they can comfortably slot into like the one that exists in some enlightened countries – I thought it worth sharing some of my tips and traps from the human-macrame years. After all, a handbag of guilt doesn't serve you, your job or your kid (and you have all weekend to make them feel like they're the only person on the planet).
Pick your attendance battles
You may be dedicated to being at every creche, kinder and school event, plus parent coffees (lest you become known as "the absent one"), volunteering, committees and to doing your own baking for stalls.
You cannot do all that. You will make yourself stressed and anxious if you try to do even most of it, and you will only see the stuff you are not doing, not the stuff you pulled a logistical rabbit out of the hat to achieve.
Set everyone's expectations *including your own* to "do-able" from the start and when you find yourself chastising yourself over that Grade 3 sports day or swim carnival you can't take a half day to attend, see it coming and head that useless inner-voice of shame off. The alternative to perfecting this reflex is 12 years' worth of a perpetual sense of failure, which doesn't make you a "better", nor certainly a happier, mother.
I wish I had checked the kinder/school calendar for the whole year's main "special person attendance" events, asked my darlings which things they most wanted me at, and split the rest up in advance with partner, grandparent (auntie/uncle etc), forewarning the kids. If they know the plan, and the plan happens, they are fine with that.
Cut out this sentence and put it in your wallet: it really doesn't always have to be you that goes to everything.
Food groups
Coming home to the "second shift" was always a drag for the primary household cook, and being able to sit down and breathe for an instant before ploughing straight into work of a different kind makes a massive difference to your sense of "I can do this" vs "Beam Me Up Scottie (or beam me a scotch)".
Contemporary working mothers not only have the traditional night-time family meal hanging over them as they schlep in after eight hours, they are also haunted by the ghosts of Gary, Matt and George. Those MasterChef dudes have raised children's expectations to 11, and introduced a world of food angst to working mothers (or fathers, if they are the primary cook in the house, which remains uncommon in my world, but I'm open to being updated).
Of all the strategies I tried in the past 14 years, doing a bulk cook of a pasta sauce/cannelloni, a bake and a soup (or slow-cooked anything) on a Sunday afternoon helped the most, as I could then reheat and rest at night. Training the children to cook much younger would have been even better (then they know My Kitchen Rules isn't as easy as it looks).
Don't Feel You Need to Slink
I had a boss who set the benchmark for working very hard, but also for making it work if you are a parent with a primary (or early secondary) school-aged child. About 3pm she would stand up, unapologetically, and announce "I am on mobile if anyone needs me" and walk out with her head up.
No one questioned anything about this – her awesomely efficient work spoke for itself, and it was inspiring to see someone who clearly did not feel guilty and nor was she going to countenance anyone passive-aggressively trying. What she projected, she got back: confidence.
Standards
If a strictly ordered home environment makes you feel calm and relaxed, and like life is in control, you are going to need some other way to achieve that pleasant feeling. Unless you can afford a cleaner twice a week (let's face it, the joint is trashed again 24 hours after the cleaner anyway, so buy the shoes) you are on a serious hiding to nothing if you try to maintain your outer-order/inner-quiet equation. Learn to live with chaos is advice I wish I had had, and believed.
The thing that will make the biggest difference to your working-mother mental health, for mine, is letting go of the expectation you can keep clean benches, floors, baths and an empty wash basket mid-week. I learned it too late, but now am fully on board.
Don't even try to compete with the perfect ones
If you compare what you can physically do and be at with those who are not as time constrained as you, then it is so deflating as to cast a shadow over the lovely things you can do together with your child in "work" hours.
Avoid the comparison trap at all costs, which can be extremely difficult if you are unlucky enough to stumble upon that one person who wants you to know she has noticed you are not at everything.
This has happened to me, it hurt more than it should have; when I asked my daughter if she had felt my absence at the parent tour of the school's new building renovations (the event at which my absence was noted by the other mother) she laughed. Bless her. Still, I wish I had knitted my own virtual ear muffs much earlier.
After school activities pfffft
Please, please believe me on this one: 'erichment' activities are *so* over-rated. You will be tempted to compensate your child for the lack of yourself at the school gate at 3.15pm every day by enrolling them in every shade of add-on activity. Just don't. It will keep you broke, keep them too tired, and if they have no authentic passion for it, know this to be true: all you will end up with is a box of expensive tiny tap and ballet shoes/karate uniforms, beginner gymnastics participation certificates and/or the heaviest useless ornament you will ever own, a not-so-grand piano.
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