My poor blog has been more neglected than a bikini line in winter.
I’ve been working full-time you see, and I’ve also been letting things fall through the cracks.
Like many working women, I am still holding the domestic space together while trying to cope with the demands of full-time work. (This survey found that working women generally still do + 17 hours of housework per week compared to men’s – 6 hours . Hang on, what?)
I’ve managed to forget music lessons and food shops, I’m haphazardly organising birthday parties, homework and play dates. I’m burning pizzas and missing school plays, concerts, and parent’s evenings.
I’m out of the playground and into the commute; away from the frying pan into the mire.
I’m trying to rally the troops, the children and my partner, with lists and memos; I have employed help – a cleaner and a child minder, and I know what a luxury that is.
And yet, and yet…
The jumble and scatter of life squeezes out my writing, these words that are my yoga and my Prozac.
Working life smooths out my edges as I polish myself down and re-imagine a woman I had forgotten; Our Lady of the Meeting, Doyenne of the Filofax, Director of Deadlines. Employee.
No more coffee mornings. No more spending hours honing a blog piece about pants or being a wanker mum.
I’ve been away from office life for so long, I fear that my brain is no longer malleable enough to accommodate the new connections I need to make. All my neurological pathways lead to my kids; they are my entrenched pattern, my learned behavior.
While my part-time existence as a writer was isolating and badly paid, there was space. Time to reflect and get some perspective… too much fucking perspective to quote what’s-his-face from Spinal Tap.
It is a special kind of asthmatic wheeze, this squeezing out of the days, this stringing out of the hours to the last mote of air. Where are the morsels of time, those spaces in which we breathe?
Tell me how you do this thing you fellow working mums…
