I wish someone had told me the real challenge of a work-from-home parent

“I wish someone had told me” is a series of posts that feed into our inquisitive nature at CN&CO. Each week we hear from someone in our network about something interesting or surprising that’s recently happened or occurred to them – or lessons they learnt. These blogs are a way to pay it forward and form part of CN&CO’s belief that the world can be a better place – and we all have a responsibility to make it so. This week’s post is by Josie.

I wish someone had told me that the challenge of working from home and being a part-time-mum, part-time-career person, is not the lack of time, as much as it is the complete polarity of the functioning of your brain from one moment to the next.

In the morning you sit and throw stones into a dam for 20 minutes with your two year old, you sit for 30 minutes and spoon porridge into two little mouths pretending to be a bird or a monkey or a Gruffalo.

You do the school run and sing “the wheels on the bus”. You stop to inspect the frog that got squashed in the road that morning.

Then 20 minutes later, you sit at your home desk and need to consume 45 pages of a company’s business plan and decide on the marketing strategies appropriate to attract 75% increase in medium size clients over the next 20 months. You only have 90 minutes until Harry wakes up so goodness me you have to be quick, no easing into this one!

Five minutes into this, there’s a disaster downstairs as your child, who woke up with a snotty nose, has bitten her sister and you need to send one to time out whilst you comfort the other.

Then its back to the desk and gosh… which page was I on?

Some days are great, the nanny arrives early, the kids are all healthy, you can nip out after the school run for a gym session to get your game face on, sit down at a café with great coffee and great Wi-Fi and focus in for three hours and BOOM, you actually feel like the intelligent contributing member to the economy that you once felt like every day, dressed in the Country Road shirt you used to be able to afford! You nail six hours of graft in three hours because you absolutely have zero time to mess around.

Holy crap, how is it already 11:30? Fetch the kids, and switch on the mum button. The one that needs to be patient, that needs to be slow, that needs to let the children dictate the pace.

Three o’clock and you rush the kids out to the park with the nanny so you can jump onto that conference call with the client in Geneva to update the project plan.

But you know what? I would choose this over and over and over again. Because I get to be there for all the moments. I get to wipe the tears, and see the joy. My kids get to see that their mum does work, that she has a life besides them. I get to contribute and stimulate the part of my brain that will one day flourish again when they are old enough to not need me so much.