Work at Home Madness

Years ago, before I was married and had kids, my career was very important to me. Starting off as a young journalist I saw my road in life pathed with front page stories, I pictured my byline in lights, I imagined myself making and breaking the news and being a bigwig reporter, one of those fancy pants reporters who use gold pens, not biros, to scrawl indecipherable symbols into their notebooks.
Then my first son came along. That passion for all things career orientated were more or less designated to the back seat (alongside the baby seat, the pram, the mountain of stuff one must carry to sustain a tiny individual).
I took six or seven months off when he was born and, truth be told, I almost went crazy with boredom within two weeks. Yes my days were filled with baby-related duties and looking after this beautiful little boy, but I’m the type of person who needs mental stimulation – and Jeremy Kyle just didn’t cut the mustard.
It was during these first few months of my son’s live that I decided to think about starting my own business. It stayed a dream for a few years until my second son arrived and I made it a reality.
I have been a working mother for seven years. I have been a Work At Home Mum or a WAHM for maybe five of those years.
I have a fancy office in town. I even have a nice big black leather chair and cool motivational frame pictures on the wall. But most of the time I choose to work from my home office. So I guess that makes me a sometimes work at home mum or SWAHM, which sounds rather like an exotic disease.
I know many mothers would love to work from home and I know that I’m incredibly lucky to be able to. But let me tell you, it’s not all rolling out of bed and sauntering up to your desk in your jammies. It’s not all two hour lunch breaks, a sprinking of Loose Women a smattering of Doctors and perhaps a bit of light computer work in the afternoon. It’s certainly not, as one former colleague put it, me typing with one hand and operating the chip pan with the other.
It’s actually really hard work, dare I say it but slightly harder work than your average nine to five job.
This week the three boys had chickenpox and still my working life had to roll on regardless. So I went to meetings drowned in Chanel to try and block out the smell of Calomine lotion, tried to stay awake at my desk even though I hadn’t slept for four nights, tried to take business calls from clients while several spotty children hollered loud demands from another room.
I know, having been on the two sides that being a working mother of any description is incredibly tough. When you have a normal nine to five it’s just that – clock off at five and wave that Godforsaken place goodbye for the evening, go home and be a mummy.
When you’re a WAHM you have no clock off time. The lines between work and home are so blurred that they are almost non-existent. I work in the morning straight through to school’s end. I sort homework, dinner and bedtime routines in between making calls, finishing jobs and meeting deadlines then it’s back to just plain old work, sometimes until 1am. I get up and do it all over again the next day.
My life is a bit of a head spinner. One minute I’m a business woman, taking calls and organising important goings on, the next I’m breaking up a fight between two boys who think that they have more right to be the red power ranger. One minute I’m deciding what picture should go on the front page of a magazine, the next I fishing a child’s dummy from the toilet.
Glamorous? These bags under my eyes scream ‘I think not’. Easy? These extra wrinkles are not actually laughter lines.
But this is the life I chose and I wouldn’t have it any other way.