Opportunity knocks

In a world that rewards people via the fiscal system, work done by parents can sometimes feel like a burden, when so much is expected of us from competitive capitalism. As I move forward in my career, the need to justify years of striving, exam success and simply turning up can feel at odds with my innate desire to just hang out with my kids, especially now they’re older and spending time with them feels less like hard work. But when they – and I – were younger, I constantly felt as though I’m walking a fine line between my expectations of myself as a mother and the expectations of the workplace. 

This means I have spent a lot of time being angry. I get angry when my time, which is valuable in and out of the office, is wasted – by meetings that run on, presenteeism, even people not getting their shit together and getting their bit of the job done so I can do mine and get home on time to do the night shift of dinners and homework and, if I can manage it, self-care – which as a woman quite often feels more onerous than for a man. I exploded at Tom last night for the burden of having to remove unshiftable mascara from my face when I was tired, the fallout of which, if I failed to remove it, would be an extra load of laundry that would no doubt fall to me to gather. (The solution, I found, was to blow thirty quid on having my eyelashes tinted and permed so as not to have to bother. It amazes me what shortcuts we can find if only we have money to throw at a problem.)

I  also, this week, got right royally pissed off at a school that for this year’s Christmas concert, kindly sent round the times to expect one’s child’s yeargroup on stage to avoid, I believed, last year’s debacle of parents sitting through an hour and a half’s merry mayhem only to have their kid’s class bumped due to overrunning, as happened to me. So, I arrived this year 20 minutes early, having battled my boss to work from home, to be told my daughter had already had her moment on stage. At my level,  which isn’t senior enough to make these moments worth missing, there’s no winning as a working mother.

The temptation to go with my hormones and have another baby, hang it all and give in to the patriarchy, can be strong – at 36, I’m battling my body’s insistent desire to be pregnant, while negotiating a relentless workplace schedule in which very real things, that have an impact on my ability to perform, like periods, and flu and mental health problems caused by stress, are slightly taboo. And when, like me, your skills are undervalued in order to go home on time, it can be tempting to say to hell with it, especially when your other half’s skills are so much more valued than your own, and he works away a lot, meaning much of the childcare grind falls to me – which causes its own additional stresses while making my time at home feel more worthwhile.

So, it’s at this juxtaposition where I find myself in a situation where I’ve finally been offered an opportunity to step up a gear at work – with a salary and all its temptations of problem solving and lifestyle smoothing – to match. A colleague, herself with two small kids, one who I believed had successfully run the gauntlet of negotiating flexible working while in a senior role is leaving, and she is championing me to be her replacement. 

I’d admired her from a quiet distance, thinking she was one of the few working mums who was managing to make it work. But now I can’t help thinking, she might be leaving because she actually finds herself, like many working mums, doing a full-time job in a part time week. She was the one, out of anyone in a meeting, who knew her shit and got stuff done, so the fact she is going suggests she hasn’t been able to make it work long-term. I know her loss is going to be felt more than most but clearly she hasn’t been persuaded to stay. 

So, while I’m grateful to be recognised as a potential successor – I have utmost admiration for the woman, and the paygrade – fully two notches above my own – is, I believe, much more worthy of my experience and qualifications than the shit I’m currently shovelling, I worry I may be jumping out if he frying pan into an unholy fire.

In this role, I would at least be able to play to my strengths- delivering reliably where others look merely flummoxed – although I lack my predecessor’s experience in this field, and I expect the shit shoveling (the elbow grease, the frozen shoulder, the wrist clicking) will be just as intense. And, yet, as I weigh up my options (reader, I applied), I wonder if I may be grasping a poisoned chalice that befalls all mothers – perhaps all women – in a workplace built around men. To do a job like a man, one must dedicate one’s life to it. And for many women, that’s a choice that’s too tough to make.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my work well enough, and crave responsibility in line with my ambition. But I’m not so single-minded I don’t enjoy other things (which even in more junior roles, I’ve had to sacrifice). But I’ve been trying to manoevre into a position to have the time to pursue them. I already feel up against it at the level I am, but partly that’s the financial burden of choosing (being forced to) earn less to be present for my children, when that strain could easily be picked up by extra help around the home.

But taking this job also means I need to learn the first rule of getting responsibility in the workplace. You don’t talk about the workplace. When you reach a certain level in business, you represent the business. You don’t talk about it online. You also don’t talk about periods, or sex, or all of the other things that people do and feel, because it can be damaging, and once you accept the paycheck, you accept the rules, and that means I will need to STFU.

I tried to wave goodbye to this blog a year and a half ago amid a knowledge that my online voice was upsetting people in the real world who had power over me. The difference then, and why I came back to it, albeit in a slightly watered-down form, was that they didn’t have so much power over me that I felt it worth stopping. Yes, I lost that job, but this blog gave me other irons in the fire – a potential book deal, freelancing opportunities, a chance to sound off and be heard. In order to do this new job, I need to stop chasing those dreams. Someone may want to pay me good money for representing their business interests. And I’m afraid that leaves me with little choice but to cut my losses in other areas, and accept.

It also means, knowing what it is to be a mother of small babies and wanting to actually have a hand in their rearing, rather than palming them off, expensively, to others, the brother or sister my kids have finally come round to wanting, and that my 36 year old ovaries are screaming for, for all Tom isn’t quite so keen, is probably never going to happen.

 And so, we carve out our lives according to be our priorities. I guess this means my priority is to be recognised, fiscally, finally, for the work I do. And there’s nothing so terrible about that, except that doing things because I care and because I want to is in my nature, and perhaps in many women’s. Which is why we get exploited and because I know this, and I have now enough power to avoid it (it wasn’t always thus), I’m going to choose (yes choose, a semantic get-out-clause for the forces that make us act) to chase the money – and, if I get it, to also, reluctantly, disappear.