The things we do for our kids. Three years ago I had a group comms role in a great agency working for an inspirational CMO as part of a fantastic team of people.
But, inevitably, the juggle of two small children and a hefty commute combined with a few speculative enquiries from would-be employers tempted me away to the freelance life.
I mean, who wouldn’t trade it all in for a job with no financial security, no pension contributions, no holiday or sickness pay, no team, no subsidised artisan coffee and no IT support, all in the name of spending some quality time with the kids each day before and after school?
And yes, by quality time I mean answering emails on my phone while they eat tea, shouting at them from my desk to stop sloshing water over the side of the bath, and outsourcing bedtime stories to Andy the minute he walks in from his 12 hour day in London.
But on the plus side they avoided five days a week in breakfast club and after school club (which they love for all the Coco Pops and 1980s kids films on VHS) and I managed to side step yet another slice of mum-guilt. Like I say, no brainer.
Thanks to circumstance, luck, right-place-right-time and - you know - a few years experience, I have been lucky enough to have a steady flow of clients since day one.
Then in March the country went into lockdown and all that changed. Much of my work dried up as my clients were forced to make savings thanks to the drastically altered climate in which they were operating. I work in the advertising industry, managing PR and ghostwriting for businesses whose job it is to handle advertising for other businesses. When those businesses stopped advertising because no one was using their services (such as airlines, taxi companies, restaurant chains and so on), so my clients lost the income with which to pay me. You still following?
But with the promise of service being resumed once ‘this’ was all over, I didn’t get too stressed.
After all, I suddenly had plenty to occupy my time, from Year Two maths to pre-school reading to keeping a crawling baby from drinking bleach/eating soil or launching himself down the stairs.
But then in May I picked up two new clients and shortly afterwards I picked up four days a month work copywriting, which is the dream because I just get sent content to turn into prose and I’m happy as a sandboy because I’m good at that and I don’t have to speak to journalists who, all my many journalist friends aside, are pretty rude and unbelievably condescending.
So suddenly I found myself with six live clients and three live children (more through luck than anything else, on all accounts) and then one day I tried to come up for air and found I was a bit too deep for that.
My to-do list goes over two pages and more gets added on than gets crossed off. In a good week I will do the work I used to get through easily in a single day.
On one hand it is a good time to be freelance - no risk of redundancy, no fear of furlough, no excruciating Zoom team drinks every Thursday at 4pm - but on the other it feels like the worst decision I ever made.
I essentially have six bosses, all of whom are firing deadlines at me with scant disregard for any other work I might have on my plate. There are no colleagues who can pick up the slack if I’m snowed under, and no one to whom I can call in sick, or who I can email and say, FYI, I’ve got loads of holiday so I’m taking Friday off, see you later losers.
And, bizarre as it is, barely any of my clients have primary school aged children who need amusing, supervising or pulling apart for 12 hours of every day. Until you have been shut in a house with three feral little humans who behave as if they’ve downed five cans of Red Bull and some Pro-Plus (remember those?) by 8am, and couldn’t leave you alone for 15 minutes if their lives depended on it, there is no way you can fully appreciate what it’s like to try and conduct any level of competent work in amongst that.
On Monday Henry began two glorious weeks back at school. Bella has begun a month of afternoons only at nursery (it was all they had available, trust me). And sometimes Xander sleeps for 90 minutes of the three hours that Bella is out. So I am now enjoying 90 minutes of uninterrupted focus every day. (Except yesterday when I went to Sainsburys like an idiot.)
I have a friend who has recently resigned just because at the end of 12 weeks of lockdown she cannot handle 8 weeks of summer holidays doing the same juggle. We can all just about get through the usual 6 week summer holiday managing work and kids because it’s a novelty, it’s brief, we have grandparents on hand to help, possibly a foreign holiday to look forward to, and we don’t mind the kids watching a couple of hours TV a day because they’ve not done that all term, they’re knackered from working hard at school and they need a break. Not this summer.
I won’t be resigning my clients and I know full well that though I’m working 8-11pm more nights than I’m not in order to try and keep on top of things, I will take on more work should it be offered. Because I don’t have a pension or holiday or sick pay and I don’t even have any official contracts so I live week to week hoping no one discovers quite how poorly I’m holding it together and decides to relieve me of my duties.
I think I have now accepted, albeit with some difficulty, that I have nine more weeks of suffocating in mum guilt, reading emails while I water the garden at 9pm, typing a sentence then going to sort out a tech issue, going back to type the next sentence before untangling someone from a swing, returning to my computer for another crucial paragraph before stopping to prise a pair of scissors out of Xander’s hand or fish a stone out of his mouth.
But can you imagine the joy of September? Two children in school five days a week, the third in nursery for as many days as I can emotionally justify. (That's all assuming schools actually open and stay open but I’m not in the right frame of mind to consider any other scenario.)
It will be like every Christmas, every birthday, every holiday, every first day of the summer holidays when you’re nine and have endless glorious weeks of nothing stretching ahead of you, all at the same time.
I went freelance so I could spend more time with the kids. Never has the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ been quite so pertinent.
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