Mum and Working… well we all are, just not always paid in cash!

Anyone who has children knows that they are the hardest, most stressful, most demanding employers you will ever have! They are also the funniest, most loving and most rewarding job you will ever be lucky enough to get.

Many years ago women fought for emancipation, the right to vote and the right to work. We won that right…but somewhere along the way it all got a bit blurred. As 82 year old Dorothy Kane put it – “We wanted the right to work, we got that..but nowerdays women want it all..the right to work and the right to be a devoted mother. That wasn’t what we fought for – it was supposed to be one or the other not both”.

Can we really juggle the pressure of the two things? I know there are millions of Mothers out there doing a fantastic job – or that is how it seems – they cope. I know I couldn’t – I had to go back to work when my son Felix was three months old as my husband, Paul, worked for an online company that began to pay him by selling the office furniture – not the most reliable source of income with a young baby to think of! I was lucky in a way as I worked two days in the office and two half days from home – by juggling things with Paul and a nursery Felix was always taken care of. However I did find it incredibly stressful and after three months my boss refused to extend the part-time hours and I was forced to go back five days a week. It was heart-breaking, I missed Felix incredibly and I don’t think I managed five days in the office as he was always ill with the myriad of infections picked up at nursery. I did eventually get a new four day a week job which was better…but meant Felix going to a childminder who saw him take his first-steps I(it should have been me!!!!). Paul also got a new job and when I found out I was expecting Maddie I could become the full-time Mum I’d always wanted to be.

However I realised very quickly that women of the 30-something generation (like me) are just not programmed naturally to think of themselves as ‘just Mum’…they are used to being ‘valued for themselves’…in the workplace, as a professional, as someone who can talk about more than the latest organic baby snack! Every Mum I met said they would love to do something else…something that would fit around being a full-time Mother, but would give them back that feeling of being valued, being seen as a person in their own right and give them ‘me-time’. But where can you get that sort of job?! Its not easy….and its never going to pay like a full-time job, but it might give some women the chance to juggle both lives and prove Dorothy Kane wrong – you can have it all!

By Joslyn Bellamy, Working Mum and Founder of MumandWorking.co.uk

Email – jos@mumandworking.co.uk

See part-time jobs for full-time mums at www.mumandworking.co.uk (click logo below)