Let me give you the basic details: a friend of mine was covering a maternity leave in a school. She got a better job elsewhere and through her I was asked to cover the last 10 weeks of the maternity leave which would be from the middle of August to October half term. However, come October half term I was asked to stay until Christmas and, somewhat against my better judgement, I accepted. On December 19th I finally finished working 5 days a week, and am now just working 2 days in the same school for a lot of complicated reasons I won't go in to.
What it boiled down to was this - from August 19th to December 19th I worked 5 days a week.
And it was hard. For so many reasons. Firstly, I am a trained Geography teacher and have only ever taught Geography. In my new position, I was teaching 4 new subjects at GCSE and A level. That comes with a lot of pressure, as you can imagine, and a lot of work. If the position had been simply geography I wouldn't have had even half the work I did. And what that meant was I went in to school earlier than I would like, stayed later than I would like, and worked at home more often than I would like. Teaching these new subjects ate away massively at my free time.
And what that meant was that the limited amount of time I then had with Isabelle was even more limited. For 17 months we had every second of every day together, we came and went as we pleased and did whatever we liked in life. Suddenly, we saw one another for an hour each morning, two hours each evening, and two days at the weekend. That is not enough for anyone. I felt like a terrible mother - I was seeing changes in Isabelle and knowing that I wasn't around to watch them progress. Seeing her do and say new things that I hadn't been the one to teach her. As she was looked after by my parents I knew she was in the best possible hands, but it still hurt so much to know that they were getting more time with her each week than I was. She came on in leaps and bounds with them, and it made me feel like I wasn't giving her enough when it had just been us.
Meanwhile, Simon was also working but was often first home. He made dinner, he walked the dogs in the mornings and, despite the initial plan, he walked the dogs most evenings as well. I felt like he was taking on so much more than he should have to. As he was off on Tuesday with Isabelle my working meant we only had Sunday as a family day. More often than not we ended up wasting the day with household bits that needed done and doing nothing interesting or fun. During the 4 months I worked I felt like we were just coasting along in a daily and weekly routine.
That is part of the reason I started up the 50 Active Days challenge with Isabelle - to make myself feel better about the fact that we never seemed to go out and do fun things together any more. I thought it would give us some things to do at home after a day at work and ways to spend time together. It worked to a certain extent, however as I mentioned in many of my posts she was just so tired after a day with my parents that she didn't enjoy the activities like I would have hoped. And then I felt bad for trying to force her to have fun when what she needed was just down time.
We saw so little of our friends, and I felt that I was missing out on watching their kids grow and missing out on giving Isabelle the opportunity to interact with children her age.
But, the absolute worst thing was how exhausted and grumpy I was. Exhausted from full time work and balancing a home life. And grumpy because I hated my job. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, and there are lots of good things about the school I work in now. However, it is very different to the school I worked in before. The behavior is not good, the staff are not overly friendly and that led to me not enjoying it at all. So when they asked me to stay at half term I came home and told Simon and said "But I HATE IT THERE" because I did. I hated it. Yes, some of the other staff were nice enough. Yes some of the kids were OK. But I hated it. I resented that I was away from Isabelle being berated by ungrateful teenagers who pushed their luck all day.
I did agree to stay, with the idea being that I then wouldn't need to work at all in 2015 due to the extra money I would have earned. And I must admit that, much like mould, the school has somewhat grown on me. The kids have either mellowed or I have stopped caring as much (I suspect the latter), I have actually learnt the names of some other members of staff who have chatted to me (and there are a few lovely girls who started at the same time I did) and overall the whole place is not as much hated as it once was, which is why I have agreed to stay on 2 days per week.
But thank God I don't have to work there 5 days a week any more. I couldn't do it. I didn't like what it did to me, my parenting or our family. Missing out on the time with my child is not worth any amount of money or any teaching experience. Nobody else's child is ever going to be more important to me than my own - so why would I leave her all day to go and spend my time with other kids?
Without a doubt, September to December were the hardest months I have yet experienced as a parent. It was my choice to go to work and, actually, I wouldn't change that decision at all because now I know I simply cannot do it! So once again, I am left totally in awe of mothers who work full time ALL the time. You are either totally barking mad, or you are actual superheroes!