Corporate beast

I’ve been waking up early the past few days, controlling my own dreams inside my head as come to around five, and then, requiring my own headspace, dig myself out of bed about quarter past.

A trip downstairs for a quiet pee, cup of broth, feed the cat, and bliss, half an hour to myself before the madness of the day begins. It’s a familiar routine, although I’m rusty. It’s been nearly nine months since I last put on my office uniform of preppy collar, chinos, loafers and lipstick. When imposter syndrome looms, I can, at the very least, look the part.

The past week was spent in preparations: clean out the cupboards, hoover the car, polish my shoes, tint back the gold in my hair that had turned to oxidised brass. Noone was looking at me, so why should I care about my hair? Now, I have to look professional, and fuck me, I can afford it – the £180 it cost to turn my locks back to flaxen. Added to Tom’s generous pay bump of last year, even my meager 2017 salary and his 60% marginal top rate tax pushes us into the well-off category.

Hell, we’ve only got five years left on the mortgage. We are, then cash rich, time poor. I’ve been having heebeejeebees about dinners since I got my offer. Since carving out a niche for myself in the ‘healthy wholesome family meals’ category online, I’m panicking about how I can feed us and have a job while Tom is travelling and schmoozing half the working week. It will fall on me to bath and bed and story while he swans off to conferences, but it turns out that travel may be required in my new job, and we both have colleagues’ drinks tonight.

We’ve patched it with eldest daughter picking up from night owls, the piano teacher moonlighting as babysitter between 5.30-6 and leftovers for tea. It’s fine for tonight, but on a rolling basis, less so.

Corporate life has never really wanted anyone to have a life outside of work and the juggle has nearly killed me in the past. Suffice it to say I haven’t *really* been looking forward to going back. And yet, there is something in being taken seriously (at least in the grace period before they realise I’m insane), about remembering what I’m capable of, how much I DO know about complex financial infrastructure (for I’m back in the City, despite qualifying as a counsellor in the meantime), and that all those hours spent at the corporate coalface haven’t really been in vain.

It takes me back to a school trip when Lana’s teacher asked me what I did, a question that always fills me with white cold fear. She said it in the patronising way she reserves for all school mums who are available in the daytime, who, no doubt, she deems as workshy louts who should never have been given their breeding license. I told her I didn’t need to work. That I’d invested in bitcoins in 2012 (which is true – I divested during the Trump bump and took a massive chuck off the mortgage last year), and she gave me a look of pure hatred which I’ve come to recognise anytime I divulge this fact, especially to those I’d told at the time, who then, looked contemptuously at me, as if I’d told them I’d invented a flying car. These days I work in Investment comms and most of *that* lot no longer speak to me,

Fact is, as Tom keeps telling me, I don’t need to work if I don’t want to anymore. And that’s a feeling that helps keep that impostor syndrome at bay.

I don’t know how you do it, said my new boss, likely 10 years younger and a mother of one, when I told her I had three, two of whom are more or less aduts. I don’t know how I did it either, but it’s done now, seven-year-old notwithstanding – and she’s doing her utmost to be good, these days.

I can do what I like. And with this knowledge, I can tolerate a half hour window in which to be myself each day (night), and juggle and vejazzle the rest.

Dinner can be broth, like the rest of my meals these days (I’m back on the weight loss jabs having put on half a stone over Christmas) – Lana will be fine with a peanut butter sandwich if necessary. She gets fed at breakfast club and afterschool club. I don’t need to worry anymore.

But I do.