Mummascribbles – Working mums – Better Together Home – Mummascribbles

I have been a working mum for more than three years now and am currently three quarters of the way through my second maternity leave. Some days being at full time work for those three years was extremely difficult while on others it was nice to be able to sit and have a hot cup of tea without having to wipe a nose or change a bum! I know there are a heck of a lot of working mums out there, some who love it, some who hate it and others who are somewhere in the middle. I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how others feel about being a working mum and maybe we can all learn a little something about dealing with that dreaded mummy guilt!

Today we meet the lovely Alex from Better Together Home talking everything working mummy!

Tell me a little bit about who is in your family
Hiya! I’m Alex and I am a mum to seven-going-on-seventeen Lily-Rose and my super patient husband Scott. We live in a teeny flat in Central South East London, in the same area my husband and I both grew up.

What age were your children when you returned to work?
I returned to work when Lily was just 6 months old, something I’ve always regretted!

Did you return to a job away from the home or within the home?
I worked away from the home – I had a job in retail at the Tower of London.

Did you choose to return or did your circumstances force you back?
A bit of both to be honest – we were struggling to get by on one wage, my post-natal depression and anxiety combined with living with my mother in law meant I was really struggling to be at home all the time and I felt very isolated. It was a combination of so many things.

Did you return to work full or part time?
Part-time to begin with but I moved up to full time hours quite quickly.

What childcare do you have in place and how did you go about choosing it?
My husband worked shifts so we would be like ships passing in the night – me getting back from work and him handing over the baby on his way out of the door. When our shifts clashed my mother in law would look after Lily.

What do you find the most difficult about being a working mum?
The guilt. Missing out on time with her. Nowadays I have an incredible stressful deadline-orientated career and that means I work long hours – it’s hard to get a balance between work and home life. I feel like I miss out because of her school too – they tend to have things like parent-teacher meetings in the middle of the day, or class assemblies at 10:30am – I can’t take the time off for those things a lot of the time and it’s incredibly frustrating.

How do you deal with the working mummy guilt?
Badly! To be honest I struggle with it constantly – I’m always being pulled in so many directions it can be really tough.

How did you feel when it was time to go back to work?
When I returned to work when Lily was a baby my brain wasn’t in the right space – I was depressed, lonely, emotional – I don’t really remember feeling much except for a relief that I was able to be alone for part of the day, which strangely enough was also combined with guilt at leaving her.

Is your work/life balance what you want it to be or would you rather work less or more? 
I would rather work less but obviously that’s not practical! I now work from home which is helping with the balance a bit more but it’s still not really there to be honest!

What advice would you give to a mummy heading back to work?
Talk to people – it’s unlikely you are the only one feeling the way you do about going back to work; be that upset about it or with relief like I was. Take each day as it comes. Remember that you can always make more money but not more time – I look back now and can’t understand why I was so eager to get back to work (aside from the money) – I wish I could have made the most of being there when Lily was small.

Alex, thank you so much for taking part. It sounds like you’ve had a really emotionally hard time adjusting to life as a working mother and even though you feel bad for it, it sounds like it was probably the right thing for both you and Lily. I think it’s impossible to get the balance right no matter whether we work from home or away but I hope that somehow something clicks into place and you can find a way to be at those assemblies. 

Along with her blog www.bettertogetherhome.com, you can also find Alex over on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube