MUM ON THE JOB

It’s 3am and Kate’s got one more thing to juggle!

Ithought starting a new job with a new puppy might be a bit of a challenge, but here’s what I didn’t weigh up – all the stuff that goes with the territory of being a mum that you don’t plan for.

Like the night before your first 3am alarm, your daughter can’t sleep because there’s a mozzie in her room, and she needs you to hunt it down and kill it.

Or the teenagers who wind up in some drama that takes hours of chatting to resolve, the stress of running a household, trying to do a job, thinking you have it all planned out ... and then, whammo, all the unplanned stuff creeps in! That’s before we even get to the puppy, who decides to do wees in various spots along the carpet just before bedtime.

So as I stood on towels soaked with water to clean up puppy wee, chased mosquitoes around my daughter’s bedroom and listened ad nauseam to the teenage drama, I felt what many working mums must feel daily – exhausted, stretched, pulled and useless. Yet, at the same time, oddly rewarded. It was like a challenge I had no choice but to rise to. The legacy of working mothers everywhere has already knitted us a pattern we can follow.

“Just do the next best thing you can,” I kept telling myself as I tried not to think about the 3am alarm. In the end, I got to bed at 11pm and managed a whole four hours of sleep before my first new radio show.

“Sometimes the best days are the ones you’re so tired, you can barely function,” my sleep-deprived husband cajoled.

I don’t actually know what I was more proud of in the end – the fact I managed to get up and do a radio show or that I’d been able to do it and still be the mum my kids needed me to be. So hats off to all the working mums trying to do their best at everything.

It doesn’t always work. And if I thought day one was good, I was kidding myself because by day two, I’d dropped every ball. I didn’t do the mum thing well (shouting and losing the plot) and I wasn’t a great worker either (even simple tasks seemed like Everest in their proportions).

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Good days followed by bad ones. The problem with mums is we never stop critiquing ourselves on how we did, what we could have done better, whether our kids are suffering because of our grumpiness or lack of attention and whether we’re making the right choices for our family. I’m not sure what the ratio of worry to stress to love to rewarding is, but it’s elusive.

So it was with enormous relief that by the end of week one, my kids sidled up to me to say they were proud of me and that they thought it was good I was working.

“But what about when I’m grumpy and scratchy and tired and not here?” I asked, aghast.

“That’s just life,” replied my daughter sagely.

Our greatest lessons are often learned from our kids. Mamas, we need to beat ourselves up less.