Yet another blogging mummy

Did you ever really taste your boiled eggs  before having kids? After probably the two most challenging years of my life (although that's only up until now, mind you!) today I had a day off. Off work, off stress, off being a mummy. 10 precious hours of just..being...me. This summer, granted, I have had two days a week completely free, but mostly during that time I am rushing around trying to clean, cook, organise, sell, plan, and by 2 pm I feel exhausted, empty and unproductive, which leads to me lying down guiltily and fitfully for the next few hours until it's time to pick up Pickle again.  But last night, my superhero husband spent two hours cleaning the house, so that this morning after I had shipped Pickle off to nursery, I could come home to a clean house. Let me explain...a clean house to me, means that all the toys are shoved in more or less the same place rather than strewn lavishly and with wild glee in every conceivable space in the house, the potty, playdough bags,...

  The part-time trap The funny thing is, without us having babies, the human race would go extinct pretty damn quickly. And the planet would be overrun with rats and wasps and cockroaches. So why is it that our society makes it so hard, almost prohibitive, for women have children? I feel like I have been punished for having a child, and I am continuing to pay the price.  When I got pregnant, I really wasn't thinking about my career. I naively believed that I would waltz back into my role as a class teacher after my maternity leave had ended. What I couldn't have been prepared for was the scrabbling, panicked uphill struggle I faced trying to secure part time work when I went back. It was as if the governors and my head teacher saw me coming from afar, and as I approached, holding a newborn baby, they meticulously laid out an all but impossible obstacle course for me to navigate. No, they said, after months of waiting for their reply. There are no part time jobs here for you. B...

I am sitting at my desk on a warm but rainy morning, having just dropped my daughter at nursery. It is the first day I have had to myself without any pressures of childcare or work for a very, very long time. Too long, in fact. In my gratitude diary today (yes, I do that now) I have written "I am simply grateful to have time. But I am so, so tired."  Having a day off without recharging for so long doesn't mean, I discovered, that I bounced out of bed at 6 am, eyes shining with anticipation, and whizzed around like a mad Mary Poppins cleaning and sorting after running a 10k, or that I have boundless amounts of energy that will culminate in creative, life changing outcomes by the end of today. Quite the opposite. As I heaved myself reluctantly out of bed this morning following a night of constant wakeups as a result of a wailing little bean who was too hot to sleep, I felt surprisingly depressed. Even as I did my yoga just before I sat down to write this, I could feel that ...