So after being tied to the sofa for 60 minutes, I have a further 60 minutes to achieve everything else, from ‘Muuuuum, wipe my bottom!’ to ‘Yes of course I can have 1,000 words to you by next Friday.’ No matter that I probably can’t spell my own name at this juncture, let alone opine on the state of breastfeeding across the UK for a page and a half. I was so sleep-deprived I put the phone in the fridge three times today alone.
Boy One isn’t helping matters. I spent a significant chunk of the end of my pregnancy trying to persuade him to eat something other than scrambled eggs for breakfast, lunch and supper. I know that most toddlers go through food fads but this was ridiculous, not least because a diet consisting almost solely of eggs and chocolate created some serious poo issues. On one occasion I found myself bent over the loo trying to – ahem – relieve the pressure in his bum with my little finger. It’s at moments like that when I fervently wish I was back in the office.
But blocked plumbing aside, the food fads were annoying because every attempt to create a fresh and wholesome meal was rejected, leaving me furious at the wasted time. I’d been determined to get him out of the behaviour because I couldn’t stomach the thought of trying to make five different meals a day and feed a newborn. Shortly before Boy Two was born I thought we’d cracked it, having expanded the repertoire to include cauliflower cheese, fish fingers and even pasta with pesto. But now we’ve regressed. And this time the only acceptable dish is cauliflower cheese (though we will accede to chocolate spread for breakfast). It’s a bugger to freeze, or even keep in the fridge, meaning a fresh dose of cheese sauce twice a day, which takes about 20 minutes and is an affront to Boy Two, who demands that Mother should be available for his exclusive use whenever he should feel the need. Which is always. Sigh.
Despite all this, I’ve hardly noticed that the Husband has gone back to work. I wasn’t filled with the sense of dread that I thought I’d be. In fact, despite his doing his very best to smooth the way for the last few weeks, it actually seems a bit easier without him here. Without shouts of ‘Where’s the—’ every ten minutes, I can get on with my own work, such as it is, even if it is in 60-minute bursts. Boy One is at pre-school for the morning, Boy Two is sleeping, if intermittently. So, I fire up the interwebulator and start to look for ideas to earn money from home, particularly ones that are a bit more long term than freelance writing, and that pay better. What are other women like me doing to earn money and stave off boredom? There is only so much conversation you can wring from the disposable versus terry nappy debate before rendering yourself unconscious.
Friday 8 February 2008
Barely a couple of weeks back at work and the Husband is already full of doom and gloom. As a research scientist whose ultimate aim is to cure breast cancer, you’d think he’d be highly prized. Instead he and his colleagues are routinely stuck on three year contracts in which they have to cure it, or hop it. With his current contract running out in June and many younger, cheaper scientists competing for the same positions, there is a very real possibility he could be out of a job by June. Though it seems a long way off, it took the best part of five months to find this job and the thought of going through all that rigmarole again is depressing him and, by extension, disturbing me. With the whole waiting-for-baby tenterhooks, plus Christmas celebrations, he’d pushed it all to the back of his mind. Now that life has returned to normal he can’t put it off any more. It’s time to get back on the jobseeking treadmill. I know from bitter experience this will cause him weeks, if not months, of existential angst.
Last time we went through this was, coincidentally, just after I’d had Boy One. Instead of enjoying our babymoon, I spent every night listening to his tales of woe and unemployment predictions, and wondering if we were about to go broke. I’d hear that he’d chosen the wrong career, the wrong project, he should have been an industrial rather than academic scientist, his papers were wrong, his experiments went wrong… Every night he came up with a litany of disasters and reasons why he would never be employed ever again.
In the past I’ve tried to be the upbeat voice of reason. ‘Something’s bound to turn up,’ I’d say. ‘If Oxford University want you, you can’t be that bad.’ Sure enough, in the nick of time, something has come through. This time, though, I’m finding it difficult to sympathise. With two kids and my own job that is barely worth going back to, I can hear a voice in my head, saying: ‘Come on, caveman – provide! Hunt, gather, bring bacon… Pull your finger out!’ Of course, what I actually come out with is: ‘There, there, it’ll work out. I can always go back to the office early if the worst comes to the worst.’ And in the back of my head I scream, ‘NOOOO!’
I’m already having a hard time contemplating the return to the office after 12 months of maternity leave, but now here I am faced with the prospect of going back in little more than three months’ time. Whereas before I’d had visions of pottering about at home, writing the odd article and doing a bit of selling on eBay, I now have to think of some proper, bona fide and above all financially sound reason not to rejoin the rat race prematurely.
Of course, I could get a part-time job in the village shop or work in the pub, but have I really spent six years at university, four climbing my way up the greasy PR pole to account director and then another seven meeting the great and the good of the business world as the associate editor of an international marketing journal to go back to my student job? Having children is supposed to liberate, not lobotomise.
In a way, I’m lucky. The skills and experience I’ve picked up over the years are eminently adaptable to working for myself, using little more than a computer and the dining-room table. But am I cut out for working for myself? The idea of being self-employed has always scared the hell out of me: the fact that I might have to borrow money, then go bust (as about 12,000 do every year) and not be able to pay it back; the fact that I’d have to figure out tax and national insurance and other financial things with my barely scraped D grade maths from school; the fact that no mortgage company will touch you with a bargepole unless you have more than three years of accounts. All this when I could crawl back to the security of a big company that will figure all this out for me, provide me with nice normal payslips and a vague feeling of security.
Writing for a living is an obvious one. I’ve been doing that for nearly ever and sometimes people even pay me. But there’s never really been enough in my pool of freelance contacts to constitute a regular salary. Books are nice but, again, hardly a gold mine unless you’re Jordan and your twin marketing assets come in a 32DD. And you only get paid twice a year. I have trouble getting to the end of the month without a cash injection.
Before journalism, I was a moderately good PR. The definition of ‘moderately’ being getting clients coverage and not annoying the journalists. If I took the time to build up contacts in the regional press I could perhaps get a few local companies to employ my services – ‘Local waste company bins the suit’ sort of thing.
The problem with PR is that you spend a lot of time working on contacts and networking to begin with, before you see any money. And unless you’ve got a superstar client that every journalist wants a piece of, you spend your days doing little more than begging. And out here in the boondocks, the pool of stellar clients is vanishingly small, although celebrity chef Anthony ‘Wozza’ Worral-Thompson and famous consort The Lovely Debbie McGee™ both live up the road.
So I do what I always do in times of stress and head over to Other Mother of Boys to whinge. Other Mother’s Boy One is exactly the same age as my own and they’ve grown up together since birth. We met at the local NCT antenatal classes. I thought she was a grumpy northern tomboy and she thought I was, in her words, ‘a gobby media tart’. Naturally, we became fast friends, uniting in our ridicule against the knit-your-own-yoghurt brigade and insisting that champagne in our hospital bags was much more important than lip balm or whale song. Whenever one of us needed to bend the other’s ear, we knew we could relegate the urchins to the back room to murder each other while we chewed the fat in the kitchen.
I quite envy Other Mother’s approach to life. Of solid northern stock, the idea of a seat-of-your-pants, boho way of