Category Archives: LearnerMother

On being a Jack-of-all-trades

LearnerMother, , ,

I don’t have a trade or a profession, as such. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I was younger, I would have replied – a doctor, or a writer.  And, always, a mother. I wasn’t strong enough in the sciences to pursue the medical route; and I’ve never thought my writing was good enough to form the basis of a career.  Mothering – that’s a skill I’m still working on but it’s fair to say that I’m not as good at it as I thought I would be, though I sincerely hope I will turn out to be good enough.

I suppose I’m what might be described as a good all-rounder; ok at everything, outstanding at nothing. And that has served me quite well so far – respectable GCSEs, A Levels, and degree led to a respectable position training to be a Chartered Accountant…I hated it, and left as soon as I could persuade someone else to employ me. I think I might regret that now – I hated it, true, but had I stuck it out I’d at least be certain of always having a job.

After the almost-accountancy career, I joined the Guardian, selling ad space – (I might have had secret delusions of somehow managing to blag a job writing stuff, but they remained delusions) – and from there, sort of fell onto an advertising/marketing/communications type career path. I enjoyed it, without ever feeling massively fulfilled by it, and it paid for the holidays, which was all I really had to worry about paying for… and since there was always another job to go to when I needed a change, I didn’t worry too much. And just as I got to the point where I was REALLY fed up with it all, I fell pregnant – bonus!

As it happened, I didn’t stop working for that long – the husband was made redundant when our eldest was one; which led to us buying a coffee shop; and we followed that with starting up a board games shop from scratch. Running your own business means you have to learn a lot of things, very quickly, because especially when you start out, you can’t afford to pay for anyone to do anything. As a result I now know quite a bit about quite a lot.  Licensing law, employment law, Ltd company obligations, tax/NI, VAT, HACCP, PR, project management, e-commerce, m-commerce, PR,  event management, managing suppliers, starting a business from scratch, not to mention how to make an awesome coffee – I can hold my own in any of these areas, though I’m not an expert in any of them.

And therein lies the problem. Not an expert in anything….that didn’t seem to matter in my twenties and thirties, but now I’m the wrong side of 4041, and trying to get back into some sort of career, it’s a real problem.  I run a business, so I know how hard the last few years have been from the retail perspective; and I read the papers, so I have some awareness of how tough it has been from every other perspective too. But somehow I never equated that to how hard I would find it to get a job when I needed/wanted to. And with a rather large building project planned for next year, I can safely say that I VERY MUCH need/want to! I was lucky enough to get some work on a great project last year, but that contract is now coming to an end; I’ve been scouring the papers and the job boards, but there really doesn’t seem to be anything at all out there for anyone, let alone an ancient Jack-of-all-trades.

If push comes to shove, I can always go back to working in our own business, but at the moment, I don’t feel that is an option. Firstly, I’d have to sack someone to make way for me, and it just feels wrong to make one of our very committed team redundant -especially in the current climate – just because I can’t get a job. Secondly, working outside our own business has been good for our marriage – let me tell you, nothing kills the romance quicker than working together!

I’m not sure what to do now. The nuclear option would be to retrain – but as what? I really don’t know what I would be good at. And would it be fair to put my family through it, in terms of taking up my time and attention when I should be looking after them; and also I’d be draining our already stretched finances, meaning no chance of us altering the house so they can all have their own rooms…On the other hand, if I don’t retrain, am I just going to end up hopping from one job to another, competing with ever younger and brighter folk who can turn their hand to anything just like me, but faster and cheaper?

I used to like being a Jack-of-all-trades. It gave me freedom and kept me interested. Now I am beginning to wonder if I made a bad choice.

 

 

 

On the fear

Family, LearnerMother

The Fear.

For me, this is one of the things I struggle with most in my efforts to parent in a half decent fashion. I’ve always had slight neurotic tendencies, but managed to keep them in check when all I had to worry about was looking after myself. Now I am responsible for three amazing kids, each one far more than I deserve, the fear is there all the time, lurking and ever-ready to pounce. They get on their bikes – I immediately see life-changing head injuries. They run and jump and dance on the walk to school – I immediately see a mistimed skip, a tumble over the kerb, and I don’t even want to know what happens next. They build dens on top of the bunk bed and I am convinced that one of them will topple off and end up with a broken bone. Tomorrow, the eldest is off to a pool party – his first one – and I am desperately trying not to visualise all the million things that could go wrong from drowning (he can swim) to running along like the excited kid he should be, and cracking his head on the poolside. It’s not limited to possible accidents; if I wake in the night, I HAVE to go and check each one is breathing. And if they are not breathing assertively enough, I have been known to wake them. Just to check. Apparently this is quite normal for parents of a NEW baby – but my babies are 7, 5 and 3.

The Fear is not only in my head, but there’s a sort of physicality to it. I can see these events in glorious technicolour; I can feel them as if they were happening, for real, right now. It’s horrible, and it’s exhausting. My rational mind knows that it’s irrational, or at least highly exaggerated. But my rational mind spends a lot of time being sat on by my irrational one, so it’s not a great deal of help. It’s much worse when I am tired and stressed; though the panicking never really goes away, I can manage it much better if am feeling on top of things in my day to day life.

I try and hide this from the kids. I want them to grow up resilient, with a sense of adventure, with a can-do attitude, with a healthy and rational attitude to risk. I don’t want them to miss out on things because I am constantly catastrophising every situation we come across. I *think* I do ok at keeping it to myself – but I don’t really know what they are picking up from me. The husband balances me out in this respect – he has his demons, but the Fear isn’t one of them, luckily.

Am I the only one? Does it ever go away? Or do you just get used to it??

On trying not to multitask

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I have been making a conscious effort to be more ‘present’ with the kids recently, and to multitask a little less.

It bothers me that I have become really good at carrying on a conversation about the school day, at the same time as sending an email, checking the work twitter account, deleting spam from the shop facebook page, juggling money between accounts to avoid overdraft and checking what the weather will be like tomorrow. Admittedly all these things need to be done at some point, but probably not right now. My problem is that I’m very much a right now sort of person, and I do genuinely find it really difficult not to do something if I know it needs to be done. And smartphones – brilliant as they are – only make this tendency worse in me. So I’ve changed a few things – I’ve put my email on fetch rather than push; I’ve turned off @notifications beeps for the twitter accounts I am responsible for; I’ve taught the husband twitter too so he can deal with the shop account; but most of all I have tried to change this mental inability to switch off from work/shop life when I am at home.

Tonight, for instance. Tonight I was going to bang out a couple of emails while the youngest was watching the Night Garden, but I decided – no, I was going to leave the emails and watch it with him. So I put my phone to one side, out of temptation’s reach, and cuddled up with him on the sofa. Then suddenly up he jumps and runs to the other side of the room to bring me my phone.

‘No sweetheart, I don’t need my phone right now, I’m having some special time watching the Night Garden with you’.

I watch his little face, waiting for the beam of happiness that would surely come from having my undivided attention.

And I am indeed rewarded with a beam, a massive grin from ear to ear. A lovely warm feeling washes over me. Yes, I should definitely do this more often. Look how happy he is, just from having even a small amount of one to one Mummy time.

‘Really?’ he says, ‘Don’t you want to do Mummy’s work on Mummy’s phone?’

‘No, Mummy doesn’t need her phone now – Mummy can do her work later’.

An even bigger grin. Oh, how I am mentally polishing my mothering halo. And then, slowly, reality dawns as his grin gets bigger again…

‘Oh, good. That means I can play Angry Birds!’

angry-birds