15 Sep Work In Progress

Cathy Watson examines her part-time job’s full-time effect on family life.

“Mina is taking you to the park this morning,” I said brightly. “I don’t want to go to the park.” Fierce, small three-year-old face, looking defiant. “But it will be fun at the park! Mina will be there, and Annie and Finlay…” There was a stony silence and a brief pause. “Yes, but you won’t.”

He was right. It was one of my work days. Every week for two days he goes to family day care. Mina has looked after our children for many years now and is part of our family. She has been our mainstay and we couldn’t imagine life without her.

Twice a week I prepare my children’s bags for the following day, knowing that the next morning will be a whirlwind of pre-work mothering. My day will be spent in the other world, where my life isn’t splattered with children’s debris and chatter. I will be responsible and dignified. I will not shout at people or nag them or smother them with kisses, and I will be ignoring the tug of my heart in my children’s direction. And then evening will come and I will pick them up, and for a few hours we will be a family again before bedtime.

I will wonder how the house has become so untidy when it has been empty all day. And the work day will extend into the wee hours as I make vain attempts to sort through the work/school/kindergarten/playgroup maze. Readers; baths; lunchboxes unpacked; washed and repacked; food prepared; relentless dress-up day preparations; shoes emptied of sand and occasionally polished; washing; clothes for the next day – some of the duties of a stay-at-home mother compacted into a few hectic hours.

Working a couple of days I can feel as if I’m adding to the family fortune (or at least more or less justifying my constant drain from it). I have a life outside of the home. And my colleagues try to convince me that working helps me appreciate my children more when I’m with them. I have the benefit of being a part of my children’s lives for a large chunk of the time. I keep my foot in the door of the workplace, having some sort of useful function and identity there, even if it takes a few hours before I realise that some of my children’s breakfast is decorating my sleeve.

But somehow the days I work seem to overshadow the rest of the week. I can’t completely shut them out. Working part-time gives rise to many out-of-hours phone calls, meetings and snatched hours finishing documents. Working, even part-time, predisposes one to being very tired a lot of the time. I sometimes feel that my nicest face is saved for work and that the family suffers with the grumpy one. It’s hard to be calm and personable all the time.

There are some work days when I am forced to miss a school event and the guilt intensifies. Like the Easter Bonnet Parade. The previous two years I’d faithfully made the trip to watch my eldest lanky son march around in his colourful, anachronistic bonnet and reluctantly sing songs about bunnies. He loathed it and complained loudly about it each year.

So when he was in Grade Two and I found that the Easter Bonnet Parade fell on a work day, I wasn’t too concerned. I mentioned to him on the way to school that I wouldn’t be there. He refused to get out of the car. “You have to come,” he told me. “I can’t,” I replied. We were at a stalemate. I tried laughing him out of it. And cajoling him. And threatening him. I told him I was sorry but next year I’d do my very best to be there. “It’s part of your job,” he informed me. Well maybe it was. But I had to get to work that day. Thankfully, my parents did a mercy dash to the school and embarrassed him with their antics far more than I ever would. But I had failed my job. Again.

The balance is tenuous. Some days it feels right. But other times I wonder if I do justice to either part of my life. But we all make a choice and this is mine.
It means that I’m never completely part of either world, and there is always unfinished business in both camps. At different times, each is eclipsed by the other, and neither can be completely distinct.

But there will come a time when I’ll no longer be a paid worker. So maybe I’ll try to invest more of the good bits into my permanent position. And I’m sure my husband will be grateful when all of the other jobs relinquish their hold somewhat so that he can claim back what’s left of the best of me.