career | Semantically driven

In part 1 of ‘How to combine a career and kid and a kid and stay sane‘ I focused a bit on the work and the daily routine aspect and said I’d talk about the switching off from the career and kid bit this time.

I think the best way for me to do that is to get a night out. When I’ve read similar things to what I’m about to write I thought easier said than done, but it is totally worth doing. That is, finding a regular babysitter and getting some time out.

It’s taken me nearly seven years to get this stage mind you. I’m finally comfortable booking the babysitter and then organising a night out whereas previously I would organise babysitting around a night out.

I got home recently after seeing a great show at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival – ‘Intimate Apparel’ and realised how grateful I was that I was able to have nights out sans child. It makes a HUGE (and I hardly ever write in all caps so I really mean it) difference to my parenting if I’m not parenting all the time.

The paradox is, of course, that some nights I find myself just talking about the quirky things that JJ’s done recently. One story I’ll probably tell my friends when I catch up with them is that JJ asked a group of Spanish people at the backpackers we stayed at recently, how do you say ‘vagina’ in Spanish. I was slightly embarrassed that he chose this word but they thought it was funny.

I’ve learned not to worry about only getting a few hours sleep before I have to do the pickup in the morning, although I’m a lot better now at drinking more water inbetween the alcoholic drinks. On my nights out when JJ was a baby and a toddler I’d get to bed after a night out and then freak out at how late it was and have a hard time getting to sleep, therefore making the situation worse. Now I look at the clock before going to bed and think, oh well at least I should get four hours sleep. And I also think of how little sleep I survived on when JJ used to keep me up all the time.

It’s now been a few weeks since I’ve had a JJ free night, and it’s about time I organised a night out.

A while back Jeanie asked how I combine a career and a kid and stay sane? The fairly short answer is that I don’t always stay sane.

The other morning found me red-eyed in the bathroom silently screaming ten minutes before I had to leave for work. These episodes fortunately don’t occur too often. Once JJ’s dropped off at school if we’ve had a tough morning for whatever reason I can take numerous deep breaths without hyperventilating and once I’m at work forget about it for a while.

One morning I got to work and announced that I was very glad to be at work that day because my son was giving me the royal shits and a colleague couldn’t believe that a gorgeous boy like him could be such a pain to make me want to be at work. I tend to laugh comments like this off and get on with my work. This colleague isn’t a parent so one day, perhaps, she’ll know but I didn’t say that to her.

I work four days a week and often maintain that there’s no way I could work full-time and be a full-time parent. Now I’ve got the work part-time bug I can’t see myself ever going back to five days a week. Although I also maintain that I do a full-time load and that employers usually get more out of their part-timers than they might realise because we’re there to work and don’t have the time to have down time that most full-timers get.

I do hope that one day workplaces and specifically the people within (at all levels) will be more sympathetic to people wanting to work part-time. Even employers that are supposedly work/life balance friendly have a lot more to do for this to actually happen. For instance to change from full-time to part-time work while keeping the same job is really hard. Of course this hits women the most after they’ve had a baby.

When I went back to work after having my baby I was given a different job and the person who’d filled in for me kept my old job. I worked three days a week and he worked full-time. I had to really negotiate the type of work I’d be doing and stand my ground about what I would and wouldn’t do. The job I was given was okay, but it wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing when I went back and I wasn’t really that happy about it. I lasted a year before I moved on. My suggestion to job share was rejected without being considered.

Despite all that I’m pretty happy with my current work but I’m not able to stay past my allotted hours because I have to be at after school care by 6pm to do the pickup and I’m not able to start any earlier, around 9am. When I’m not busy at work this works out okay but I’ve been really busy the last month or so and it’s been a bit hard to switch off.

I can’t switch off when I get home because I keep working to put dinner on the table, do reading with JJ, organise whatever he needs for school the next day, and other assorted household tasks. By the time I plop down in front of Big Brother at 7pm I can feel the tension in my shoulders and it’s hard to get rid of that sometimes. After I’ve rested for that half hour that Big Brother’s on, JJ is out the bath (see I time it well) and he pretty much goes to bed straight away. I then do whatever else I have to do like wash dishes and then relax before going to bed.

Of course I haven’t included the time I spend blogging etc in this. Truthfully with work and child both being full on at the moment, blogging and other online activity has taken a nosedive. Honestly I’d prefer it to be the other way around.

So with all of this I need time to completely switch off and try and maintain some sort of work/life balance to stay sane. I’ll tell you how I try and do that next time.

How to combine a career and a kid and stay sane – Part 2

How do you combine a career and a kid and stay sane?