I roll out of bed as silently as I can, anxious not to stir my sleeping ten-month-old baby next to me. I’m now on the floor on all fours. I pop my slippers on and stand up. The baby is still asleep. First mission accomplished.
I stealthily creep downstairs. Unfortunately every step creaks. I make it to the bottom, grab some cereal and flip open my laptop to read the news whilst munching away. These could be my blissful moments of calm. But no, I hear a creak on the upstairs landing. My heart sinks.
My three-year-old has woken up and is now descending the stairs, coming to see what I’m up to. I shut my eyes, take a deep breath and muster some cheer in my voice, “Morning darling, shall we go and get dressed?”
I’m now into the routine of dressing and breakfasting whilst plotting whether, if I popped him in front of some cartoons for a bit, I might still have time to send some emails before the baby wakes upstairs and screams for another feed.
This is how I work; frantically in the windows of time available when my children sleep. The baby is still exclusively breastfeeding so at night, when I go to bed and feed him to sleep, I sometimes edge away from him in the dark, get my laptop from under the bed, and do a little bit more work. It’s a lottery. Some nights I manage a productive few hours. Other nights he wakes up, catches me and howls. He hates that laptop glowing in the bed. Fair enough, it’s not healthy. I’ll then end up feeding him to sleep again, trying to work, stopping to feed him to sleep again. On those nights I manage to do around twenty minutes of work whilst spending hours resettling the baby and it’s just not worth it, irritating all involved.
One of my dear friends recently observed that when you have children, all work happens under exam conditions, but you don’t know how much time you have for the exam. If I’m working during nap time, I’ll be typing away, with adrenaline coursing through me, glancing anxiously at the clock, aware that at any minute there could be a wail in place of the bell to signal that it’s over. The baby will cry or the toddler will shout. To be honest, whenever it comes, it will never be enough. And if there is a magic interval when both children sleep for a long time, then I’ll curse, and think ‘If I knew I’d have had a clear hour, I could have written an article, not just got up to date with my emails’.
It’s difficult to work when you have young children. There’s a good reason for that. Looking after small children is more than a full-time job because they require round-the-clock care. You can pay someone else to do that job for part of the time, so you can do another job, or you can do the job yourself. The tragedy is that if you choose to do the work of looking after your own children, few will acknowledge that as work because it’s unpaid.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a mortgage broker about renewing our deal. As a self-employed journalist and full-time mother, my earnings have been pretty low for the last few years as I’ve just taken on odd jobs whilst mothering. As I read out the numbers on my tax returns, the broker audibly sighed, signalling disappointment. I explained that my earnings have dropped because I’ve had two children. A double negative for him; now I had two dependents against my name, while earning less. He then asked, “Do you think you have the potential to earn more?” I was affronted. “Yes, I have the potential to earn more, but at the moment I don’t have time to work more because I am choosing to look after my own children”. He then asked again, “but do you think you could earn more?” I ground my teeth together. His was a mind attuned to calculating the price of everything but knowing the value of nothing. Later in the conversation he cheered up when we got to my childcare costs - they’re close to nothing, as we only use the free nursery hours provided for our three year old. He seemed surprised the outgoings for my children were so low. I grimaced, hating to repeat myself: “Yes, well we don’t pay for childcare because I am caring for them, though nobody pays me”.
The unpaid care work that holds society together is invisible to the money-men.
Whilst I manage to cram fragments of interesting journalistic and campaigning work into the margins of my life, I worry that I’m contributing to a culture which marginalises parenting. Every time a well-intentioned friend congratulates me on getting so much ‘work’ done, I feel a deep unease in the pit of my stomach and fear that I’m perpetuating a toxic ‘doing it all’ myth.
You cannot have it all. When I’m over-committed to external work, I compose messages and emails on my phone when looking after my children. This reduces my eye-contact with the baby. He’s looking at me for validation, for interaction, to see himself reflected back - and he’s building brain cells all the time. What happens when he looks at me and I’m looking at my phone? What happens when that’s a repeated pattern?
My older child regularly asks, ‘Why are you so angry?’ I didn’t think of myself as an angry person until I had children and now I’m livid. Frustrated, irritated, furious. Sometimes I’m angry because my child takes so long to decide what he’d like to watch - “Not ‘Raa Raa the Noisy Lion’, not ‘Moon and Me’, not ‘Kiri and Lou’…” As I hold the remote control waiting for his decision, I start seeing the emails I’d wanted to write disappearing, the time ticking away before we need to leave the house and I’m already calculating how I’ll compensate for that lost work. His voice cuts back into my thoughts, “Mum, why are you so stressed?”
Children luxuriate in the nowness of the now. My mind is too often elsewhere. I hate myself for that. I’ve had enough older people clutch my arm in the street, look at my children and urge, ‘It goes so fast you know. Enjoy it’. I feel the truth of what they say in my bones. Sometimes it has me blinking back tears. The utter preciousness of this fleeting time. The overwhelming love for my children.
I am torn. I love researching, writing and campaigning. I’m lucky that my vocation is something which I can do from home whilst my children sleep. Few jobs have the same perks. I’m impatient to engage with the world now. There is so much to learn and write about and try to change. And I want to help shape the wider world for my kids. I can’t wait for five years until my youngest child starts school and I reclaim hours of time for my own pursuits. But I question my grandiose justifications. The articles I write, which feel so vital to me at the time, will fade away and be forgotten. Today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s chip paper. The foundations of a child will last a lifetime. The real work is everywhere.