When childminders go AWOL, and other perils of being a working mum as the summer holidays approach

Sometimes I feel like I’m outsourcing my children’s entire childhoods so I can provide a roof over their heads. I get angry when I haemorrhage money for them to do fun activities with someone else who in less intimately involved in their best interests.

Sometimes, I feel like superwoman, seamlessly sewing together the various facets of my children’s social lives, while cherry picking the highlights of their development, having adequate resources to pay someone else to do the boring bits – the ironing, the homework, the taxiing to after-school clubs.

What I’ve found difficult to achieve, is getting the best of both worlds all the time. Either I give up on my own ambitions and feel martyred and resentful with every after school trip to the park, or I juggle climbing the greasy pole (believe me when I say I have experience) and guilty spending in full knowledge I am compromised on time both for myself and for them.

Frankly I feel burned out, the candle snuffed at both ends, where I’m wretched getting them out the door in the morning and overcompensating by having “too much fun” on rare nights of escape.

Striking a balance is much harder than it should be, and it’s only recently I can afford to be more flexible (for all the compensatory yoga I guilt myself into doing in an attempt to stay of sound in body and in mind). My workplace has agreed to a temporary hiatus for which I’m eternally grateful, whereby, through the month of August where I can drop down to three days a week, and spend some much needed time with my kids when I would otherwise be paying through the nose for someone else to do it. It’s more or less even stevens, moneywise, which beats the month I spent as a 30 year old intern, paying my childcare more than my minimum wage, while I got to grips with an industry that, in this day and age, had better prospects than journalism.

On days where all is going well, I feel I’m winning, beating the system by having children young when I could more afford to spend time in their company, able to relax a bit now they are old enough to genuinely enjoy it. On other days, I feel I have been discriminated for my choices, taking roles a peg or two down from my peers who did not, like me, take an early hit on their career development.

These days, even though I feel things are fairly buttoned down, it doesn’t take much for things to come undone. My childminder has left, after a series of holidays that had me scratching around for short term measures. I’ve patched things up, but even with my temporary part-time arrangement, the long summer holiday ahead is looking increasingly precarious. And to cap it all, I miss my kids.

Not for the first time have I left them in, all likelihood, perfectly friendly company, who I’ve only just met the once. But it worries me. People are not all nice, and when Ava declared she didn’t like her latest short-term carer, my suspicions were aroused. Probably it is little more than a disagreement about ice cream, but maybe it is something else. I can’t relax, and a quiet week on the job has made me restless and anxious. When Jonah, forced to go to a friend’s house, whose elder daughter is known for winding him up, and whose mother tends to take her daughter’s side, lashed out in colourful terms yesterday, I felt like probably the gig was probably up.

I didn’t tell him off too heartedly. Lord knows he doesn’t like change and he has had his fill of it, and I may have also had enough of finding ways to get out of my nature-ordained role. The guilt has got to me, the career trajectory seems too steep and I’m shirking responsibilities left right and centre just to get some time for myself.

Hold tight, Tom said, it’s only a week or two more of covering our backs and then you will be able to hang out with them more. I know, I should be grateful, many more cannot afford to spend even half the time I have done with my two in their short lives. But I feel like things are hanging by a thread, to which I’m gripping for dear life.

And after the summer, what then? Resign myself to arrested career development and curtailed hours so I have the joys of half completing my daughter’s homework, which suddenly appears to be coming home in droves; of letting go the cleaner who I adore for sparing me the need to sip from the poisoned chalice of my own mild OCD, who irons more beautifully than I could ever do with bile steaming from my ears. Lose further ground amid my peers, and make myself unemployable by taking more time out to follow my instincts?

Keep calm and carry on, then. It is the English way. But inside I’m in bits, and the outward injuries from one too many last hurrahs are starting to pile up. It’s tough to be a mother who earns just enough to make it worth not being one, most of the time. The best things, they say, in life are free, but the worst thing in the world is worrying about money.