The perfect job

One of the things that happens when you suddenly stop working 20 hours a day 7 days a week is that you have a lot more time to think. Not about work and page views and headlines but about family and real views and heart lines.

Naturally, given that I am slightly neurotic and an extreme over thinker , I’ve spent a significant amount of my newly discovered time worrying that somehow I missed out on my family during my years of 20 hour days.

Let me just preface everything I am about to say with the fact that I support/respect/admire/love women that work outside the home just as much as I support/respect/admire/love women who don’t.  This is not about judgment or privilege (even though I realise what I privileged position I am in), this is not about pointing fingers or blaming the patriarchy or the feminist movement– it’s just about me, my position and the way that I feel about my own experience.  Read this paragraph again and again every time you feel like I may be judging you, talking about working women in general or your own personal situation.

I don’t resent the job that I did and I understand that it was as much my pursuit for perfection, as the role in a 24/7 cycle site that contributed to the fact that I had no life outside work for at least three very long years.

And I can’t help thinking and stressing and ruminating and worrying about my son.

It’s not that I believe that he missed out on anything while I was stuck in my laptop. He has an amazing father who plays as significant a role in his life as I do, he has an awesome and supportive extended family who have shown him unconditional love and support, and I have the kindest most givinng friends who have loved him as their own.  Added to which he goes to a school where the pastoral care is above and beyond the call of duty. So he’s been fine. Loved, cared for, stimulated, educated and supported.

But I worry that I missed out on him.  I worry that there were things about him I don’t even know I missed.  I worry that I nearly missed him growing up while I was watching the world go by on my laptop.
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Every week there seems to be some flare up in the media about working mothers – either they are really good or they are impossibly bad. But overwhelmingly I read the online comments that mothers make saying “mother’s deserve a break” and “working mothers make better role models” and “child care provides the best alternative for mothers and children” and, at the risk of sounding like the middle class white guy complaining about persecution, I almost feel bad to admit that I am happier not working full time, I am actually much happier to be parenting full time and working part time only when my child is at school. It’s not that I don’t want to work – I’m actively looking for work. But work that fits in with my son. I don’t want him to try and fit in with my work.

I don’t think we’re being anti-feminist or going back in time if we allow women to acknowledge that they want to stay at home with their kids.  I object to working mothers telling me that the mothering experience is lesser, especially those working mothers who have never known any different – if it’s my choice it’s not lesser for me.

If feminism is about choices I want to feel validated in my choice to look after my family. I want to be able to say to people – I choose not to work full time because I am lucky enough not to have to and because above all else I want to be a mother.  Children are children for a short time.

The other morning I confided to my husband that I feel awful that I have become the kind of mum that drops her child at school in her gym clothes and then spends the morning between a treadmill, a coffee shop and sometimes a meeting or two. I told him I didn’t feel like I was contributing.  In the best husbandly fashion that he exhibits on a regular basis he just looked at me and said: “You are making a bigger contribution now than when you were working full time – you are the family glue”

I didn’t feel offended or indignant being referred to as the glue. I didn’t fight with him about the fact that women don’t get to choose the work or family option because of the patriarchy because, more than anything, I want the family option. I feel loved and validated and grateful beyond words that I can be giving the biggest part of myself to my family.

It’s sad that I can’t say it out loud without worrying that someone is going to take offence. But you know what? I’m happier being a mother than I am being any other role and I am trying not to be ashamed to admit it.