Full Days, Leisure Time and Headcheese (Guest Post)

Very pleased to continue my series on moms and work today, in which I invite mothers to consider these questions: how do you manage to work and also care for your kids, both in a technical sense (how the time is divided up), and an emotional one? (Be a part of the series: send me your thoughts!)

Today I welcome guest blogger Deborah Churchill who discusses how much effort it takes--or should take--to do the work of a mother. Does reading the Little House books make you feel weary, or, as it does Deborah, quite lucky?

Full days, Leisure Time and Headcheese

I’ve been feeling that my days are pretty full. That is, until I read Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (shameful: I’d never read it before, but I am British).

There’s a chapter in it about butchering the pig. It’s full on. The pig is slaughtered, scalded and scraped. The meat is butchered, salted and smoked. Then, just when you’d think that, really, they must have had enough of the pig-work and surely it’s time to catch up with a box-set (excuse the anachronism), Ma chops and boils all the last scraps making the (to my mind unspeakably unappetising) headcheese. It got me thinking.

On Mondays I get in at 8 and do a short day at the office. I’m contracted for a three days week but I’m lucky enough to be flexible with my hours. It means that on all but one day of the week I get to pick my kids up from school when they finish at 3.25. I leave almost no contingency for the journey time; it’s pre-rush hour. I almost always get away with it.

So anyway, Mondays, we execute a swift turnaround. Snacks, wees, goggles and head to the pool. It’s fun; a family swim followed by Felix’s lesson. Then it’s back home for kids’ tea, spellings, handwriting practice, put a load of washing on, put a load of dry washing away, make tomorrow’s packed lunches, unpack the dishwasher and chivvy and chide the children to clean teeth, wash faces and get ready for bed. All climb into my bed for cuddles and stories. (Side note: I thought Little House might be too advanced for my youngest. Imagine my gratification when halfway through the chapter on maple syrup he asked a technical question about sap extraction.)

You know what? By the time it hits 7: I’m finished. I call my partner and ask him to bring something home for dinner. I’m pretty relaxed about this. I’ve done enough for one day, right? 

I can’t help wondering what Ma Ingalls would think about my sudden collapse of effort. Of course our times and situations are very different. But you don’t have to go back far in my family to find a much tougher lifestyle. My grandmother (95, oldest of 10, with six children of her own) had a far more gruelling day than mine. Not only were all her household chores harder to do, the expectations were also different. She cooked three meals a day, every day, for at least 8 people for many years. It would tip me over the edge in less than a week.

I have no intention of signing up for the servitude endured by countless women. But, next Monday, I’m going to take a moment to remember that I’m living in a very privileged place and time. The idea of leisure time is so ingrained that I consider it my right. I’ll try to feel less hard done by and, who knows, I might even cook dinner. If I do, I’ll consider it the headcheese.

Deborah Churchill lives outside London in Kingston-upon-Thames and works part-time as the editor of a property magazine. She and her partner Allan have two children, Annabel, 7 and Felix, 5. She’s recently become interested in preserving food and made 10 jars of marmalade over the weekend. An interest that can only be reinforced by reading more Laura Ingalls Wilder.

How Does She Do It? Embracing Chaos

To paraphrase radio host and viral blogger Matt Walsh, being a mother is hard work. So it is for moms who are the primary full-time carers of their kids, as well as for those who are juggling paid work, full-time or part-time, in or out of the home, with the demands of raising happy and healthy kids. 

So how does the modern mom do it? The answer is obviously: a hundred million different ways. To get a taste of some of those ways, and to give my own voice a break, I asked a few friends a simple question: how do you manage to work and also care for your kids, both in a technical sense (how the time is divided up), and an emotional one?

My first taker is the talented and eloquent Clare Jacob, lawyer-turned-novelist and mom to three. In the piece below, she explains how her career evolved, and the challenges of working around her children's schedules. Thank you, Clare.

Embracing Chaos

When I started having children I was a lawyer.  There were not many women where I worked, and no new mother had taken more than three months off.  There was a kind of bravado about how quickly the women came back to the job, how little the arrival of a baby had changed them and how seamlessly they picked up their careers again.  Even before my son was born I guessed I wouldn’t be like this. Six months, I said I needed, not because it corresponded with a planned and managed retreat from motherhood but because that was the longest time I thought could get away with.  

When my son arrived and demanded constant feeding at my breast I was all too ready to give in.  His affection and will prevailed over my ill-defended proposal.  How I remember the bitter-sweetness of those first nine months, the sense of being, at last, really needed, but also of being adrift from the world that had filled my days. It was like being cast up on a desert island with no company but a very friendly animal. I was half infantilized myself; in the evenings my husband cut my meat so I could eat one-handed over the baby’s head. 

But by the time I did go back to work my son had become all too human, full of sounds and games, and leaving him felt like an act of violence to us both.   I was back in court but now I couldn’t prepare my cases at home in the evening or early mornings; I’d be sucked back into the feeding and cuddling. The next day I staggered through work only half present, worrying because my child refused the bottle and seemed so miserable at my departure.

By this time I’d acquired a nanny and it seemed natural to have more children now I was accustomed to chaos, to dashing in and out of work and motherhood,  to finding all barriers broken down.  So I had another child almost straight after going back to work, and then, very soon, another. ‘You are like a machine!” a friend said, but I felt more like an overflowing pot of porridge. And a new fear ate away at me: that I wasn’t doing anything well. There was too much crying. The first nanny said she was jealous because my son loved me more than her.  She couldn’t cope with three kids on a bus. Nor could her successor. It all seemed strained and wrong.

At the same time something else was growing inside me: a realization that there was something more that I wanted to create, something I could do without leaving the house, without the tears and panic when I was stuck at court and no one was at the nursery at pickup time. I wanted to write.   

It took some years before I made the transition from lawyer to writer, and my children, now old enough to have opinions, were initially skeptical.  These days they ask me how many words I write in a day and then use their arithmetic to tell me that I should on their reckoning have finished three books in the time it’s taken  to do one.  They fail to factor in two key things: 1) how much I chuck away and 2) how long the school vacations are which stop me writing altogether.  My problem now is not that I arrive at court with sick on my collar but that I’m abandoning a half-done scene to bicycle to school or I’m putting aside a book just as I reach its crisis because it’s holiday time again.  

This is the rub. You break your link to the work and then can’t find it again. You go back, you spot weaknesses but lack the momentum to make the right change and so your confidence ebbs. You lose your will and your focus. But not always.  Sometimes my children's words, stories and characters feed the imagination. After all, what a waste it would be to confound ourselves with love and chaos and not to make it our own.  

Clare Jacob, criminal lawyer turned writer, reveals the pleasures and disasters of law and family in her novel  Ophelia in Pieces.

[How do YOU do it? Be in touch, I'd love to hear your story of balancing family, work, and life.]