Why is flexible working so hard to achieve when unproductivity is the fallout from overwork?

This week has been the perfect storm of illness, Tom working away, my childminder going on holiday and Polish builders turning up at 7.30 a.m. I shouldn’t complain about these by-products of middle-class working parenthood, but I will. To cap it all, the exciting news we’re buying a holiday let has come with an unfortunate side effect. It means that with it, any hope of working more flexibly – workplace inflexibility being largely the root of my problems, indeed one at which I’ve been bashing my head against for nigh on a decade – has been all but sold.
Having recently passed my probation at a new organisation – a far friendlier one to those fly-by-night agencies I’ve previously subjected myself to – it still feels too dangerous to ask the question – especially now, with my mortgage about to be hiked up to my eyeballs. 

The dilemma that’s marred the entirety of my working life – that I am by far the more ambitious but least well-paid of my marital (and economic) partnership- has left me and my career taking the hit every time. I am so disillusioned with the working world – taking jobs beneath my skill level in order to leave on time, and still getting penalised as a young mum in a workplace culture that prizes round the clock availability over efficiency. I know that even asking to work from home more regularly, compress my hours or go part time means I will be pigeonholed as a ‘work to live, not live to work’ person, and stuck with the grunt work that managers, who are far more capable of negotiating flexibility in their hours and tasks, funnel down to me.

Even within an organisation with a robust flexible working policy as standard, it still feels said flexibilty is still entirely dependent on role; and despite high profile examples of this working successfully in my company (part-time mothers being among the most efficient in the workforce), I’ve little doubt that, should I achieve it, I would be subject to more scrutiny, criticism and probably the same amount of work over fewer hours – for less pay. It may even see me off, as has happened previously.  Those who’ve been at their workplace less than two years are largely unprotected against dismissal, for all that asking for flexibility is apparently protected by law.

Hey ho, but I could have foreseen this week’s meltdown a mile off – from the day I asked the recruiter about flexibility  six months ago, and she told me to “wait until I’d been there a while”, to the moment my last boss said that working from home was “mainly for those who lived a long way away” – for all that getting up and getting out is at least half the battle most women face in their working day, with more pressure than men to look polished and get the kids out the door before they even get to work.  I may have passed the first hurdle – after the many there always are to jump before you get your feet behind a desk. But I also, after six months getting used to everyone, have another new manager, who seems nice enough. But the pressure to prove myself all over again has, this time, proved too much. So here I am, sat at home on a weekday, recovering from a chest infection from too much e-cigarette, back pain from six months deskbound and a gin-fuelled emotional storm, when Tom returned from a European work jolly with a hangover and twisted ankle, that left me with puffy eyes and a tension headache.

If I had more time for self-care, (doing too little exercise, eating less well and drinking more than I should the side effects of too much pressure) these meltdowns would be far less likely  to happen and I would be far less productive. But trying to womansplain this to a self-confessed workaholic with no kids of his own feels like I’d be talking myself into a corner – that I’m not coping, despite craving more responsibility; that progression isn’t an option, for all moving up the rungs often means a delegation of duties, particularly of those more onerous tasks that no one else wants to do; that I’ve failed by falling apart despite hoisting myself on the petard of trying too hard.

It’s hardly surprising I’m fed up and distracting myself by finding options I hope offer an additonal income stream for the long term,for all it’ll make things tighter and more challenging in the meantime. It just feels that, by the time I get all this sorted and manoeuvre myself into a working patten I feel comfortably suits my family’s needs, my children will be too old to benefit from it, and I’ll be kicking myself that I’ve spent so much of their childhood stressed out, absent or guilty; or worse, simply missed it all. But how Ireconcile  all this before it’s too late, having failed for the past decade, I just don’t know. But therein lies the problem of being a mum at an age when your body says yes, but a working culture that favours the childfree says, are you having a laugh? It’s no wonder, after ten years’ struggle, I’m having a massive sense of humour failure on a semi-regular basis.