Being a mum and working means endless mountain of the second most useless emotion - guilt (the first being shame..). You're guilty all the time. When you go to work, you’re guilty of leaving your baby behind. You think of her all the time at work, can’t get much done because you’re thinking you really ought to try and get the earlier train home, so you'd see her before bedtime, even if daddy is perfectly capable of getting her fed and bathed and ready for bed, and you know that showing up 15 mins before she falls asleep is counterproductive anyway.
You feel guilty when you ignore all the unfinished reports, project plans, cancelled student meetings, and the departmental meetings you never go to, never mind extra seminars (just for ‘learning’ - you barely get the essentials done) and just decide to work from home, so at least you can eat breakfast together, and walk her to the nursery at a leisurely pace, pointing at birds and cats and water droplets on leaves, and then you feel guilty for not getting a 'full day’s work in'.
When you manage to get something done at work, (surprisingly, despite the lack of sleep and the permanent fuzz that covers your brain cells and makes reading a simple paper seem an enormous task), a paper published or some grant money in, you feel guilty because to get to work in time, you've had to carry a crying bundle to the nursery in a rush to be left with girls who spend more time with her than you do, and probably have witnessed her speaking and walking and using the potty way before you do and have taught her all those nursery rhymes you can’t even remember because you're so tired all the time.
To be fair, she seems to like the nursery and enjoys all the fun stuff they do there - another reason to feel guilty, as they're clearly doing more fun things that you can ever be bothered to do, because the days you’re with her, are also the days the house needs sorting out, the laundry needs to be washed and hang up and folded away (rarely happens) and dinners planned and cooked, and food bought, not to mention the rotting veg patch you just never got round to clearing, where the beans still hang blackened by the autumn frost and your high ideas of home grown organic food withered away to
nothing.
And as you’re not very house proud (or even if you were you’ve given up on that), you let the mess build up. In any case daddy does more than his share of cooking and fixing and organising and shopping so really the chaos that mounts around you is really quite unfathomable.
Some evenings you look back and all you remember doing that day is sit in a middle of clean clothes, you started folding but she decided to 'reorganise', on the floor, by the potty, reading the same boring book for the hundredth time, or building a Lego tower organised by colours so she wouldn't leave the potty too early, or letting her sit on you, cwtching (the most wonderful welsh word for a cuddle), hiding under her favourite fleece blankie (covered in dried porridge) just sitting and singing row row row your boat. And nothing gets done, nothing is 'achieved' you just sit on the floor, and that's all you do and all you’re meant to do. Being a mum.
On a day when you find some more energy, you find yourself haphazardly getting things together at the first sign of sunshine (forgetting lunch or something else essential usually, but mostly remembering spare clothes and nappies) and heading to the beach, to dig a hole and wonder at the reflection of a flock of gulls on the glittering sand as the tide is going out. And dipping your and her toes in the cold autumn sea because shoes and socks are overrated. And laughing at a crab walking sideways.
Thankfully those moments create a blanket of happiness which wraps around you so tightly the guilt is forgotten... until you get a glimpse of the kitchen, or the tomato patch, or your computer, and wonder what excuse you could use this tim
e for not finishing that report - for the fifth time. In academia there is hardly any point working part time. You would just have to do the same jobs in less time, being more stressed but being paid less. Pointless! Your child being ill is an excuse, your child just being and you being there for her unfortunately is not.
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