It’s been so long since I wrote anything here!
Lola is driving me mad today. She will not take her nap. She rolled around in her cot for a while, stuffing books down the side, practicing somersaults, singing “Incy Wincy Pider” (We’re not so good at the “sp” sound yet)… And Max is suffering with new teeth on the way.
Whenever one goes down for a nap, the other one pops up – it is like that game, whack-a-mole.
And Rufus is off traveling again for ten days.
I have felt overwhelmed many, many, many times since Lola was born almost two years ago. All those sleepless nights. Fevers. New teeth. Etc.
But work is pushing me over the edge. I keep telling myself how lucky I am that I had seven months with Lola off work, and then seven months again with Max. So many mothers don’t have that – they have to hand over their babies after only two or three months and go back to work fulltime.
Maybe I am just not up to this working-mothering thing. Maybe I am better off just doing one thing at a time.
The problem, of course, is money. And security and the future and all that jazz.
We want to buy an apartment and a car and soon there’ll be school fees, and eventually, thanks to the new Australian government’s disastrous policy changes, we’ll be paying ridiculous sums for university as well. So at some point I have to work.
And then I worry about my whole career tanking and being basically meaningless if I don’t go back to some serious work sooner rather than later.
So I took an interim kind of job recently – it’s ultra flexible and easy and I can work from home (note to mothers of toddlers.. working from home sounds great but it doesn’t work AT ALL.. I have come to the conclusion that being in the house and not playing with her is worse than just being somewhere else altogether, because if I’m not here she doesn’t seem to care much, once the initial goodbye is over and done with; but if I am, she feels abandoned and sad that I am choosing to do something else.
Some of her new sentences are: “No touching the computer” and “Mummy playing here!”.
I don’t want this to come off as a big whinge. It is a big whinge. But my motivation is noble I think – I want to know how other mothers out there are handling these things. What do you think – should I bite the bullet and go back fulltime, and just work on being a better mum in the hours that I have with them each day? Or should I bite the bullet and earn less and just make the most of being a mostly-stay-at-home mum?
Sometimes I just get so confused between the two of them – what should Max be eating now? What stage of play is Lola at? Is she sociable enough for her age? Should she go to kindy just to mix with other kids? The bottom line is I feel like I am doing a lot of things badly at the moment, including mothering.
hubbub 