SAHM Archives : Me, Annie Bee.

My little big boy.

Anna — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 06:00:56 +0000

Saturday was a bit of a bittersweet day. It was the open day at Aoife’s old preschool, the preschool we’re hoping to send Seth to in September. On the one hand it was lovely. Aoife saw her old teachers, they remarked how grown up she was now and reminisced about her time at there with fondness, Aoife basked in the limelight. On the other hand Seth, my last baby, is going to be going to preschool. It’s almost the beginning of a new chapter. When Aoife started preschool Seth hadn’t even been born, it seemed barely five minutes ago and then suddenly we were stood there with a little boy who’s almost three, playing in the sand and showing us he is indeed ready to start this new journey. Well not QUITE ready, although he would be eligible to start in April the school like them to be near as damnit toilet trained and he still refuses to entertain the idea. He’s more impressed with the tricks he can do whilst sat on the toilet. You really don’t want to know. I’ve been asked many times why I don’t send Seth to nursery, even if only to get a bit of time to myself. It’s a perfectly legitimate question giving all the moaning I do. The answer is twofold and as we’re all a nice bunch here I know you’ll appreciate that my opinion may differ to yours and that’s OK. Firstly, I don’t like the idea of private nursery. I KNOW some people don’t have the choice and have to use them but, simply put, I DO have the choice and I choose not to use them. I think my disdain comes from the one closest to our house. The one Seth would go to. It costs just under £40 a day to send a child there. They pop the babies into a triple buggy and wheel them down to the cafe where the staff drink lattes and the children….watch. Yes, the children sit in the buggy watching. If the children are older, they’re walked to the shops to buy whatever the nursery needs. We have a big old park round the corner but they go to the shops. If that’s the thrilling activity that goes on in public I can only imagine what goes on inside! As I have the choice, I choose to not spend £40 a day and let Seth watch me drink coffee and walk to the shop with me for free. Secondly, and most importantly, because I am a SAHM, my children going to preschool is the beginning of the end. OK, that sounds a little dramatic but bear with me. From birth until preschool I’ve had my babies with me pretty much constantly. Initially it was me and Aoife, all day every day, then she went to preschool so we weren’t together all day, every day anymore just most of the day every day. And then real school started and she was suddenly spending more of her waking time there than with me. I hated it. It’s OK though, I had back up. Seth was with me all day every day but come September he will spend two and a half days at preschool. Then a year later, he too will spend most of his waking time at school until he is 18. Then both will be adults and won’t want to spend quite so much time with me anyway as they’ll have their own lives and not want to be with their nerdy (cool) mum. THEIR LIVES ARE FLASHING BEFORE MY EYES. So you see, once they enter the school system it’s the path to me seeing less and less of them. It’s a time when they grow faster and I feel like I’m missing it. As parents we’re always talking about how their childhood is fleeting, how it seems to go by so fast and it does. So, that’s why I’m not sending Seth to preschool before I need to and that’s why I don’t need that time to myself just yet, because these are precious moments I’ll never get back and I want to enjoy them for as long as I can. Before he enters the system where he too is spending more of his waking time with people who aren’t me. Yes, I will often complain I need a bit of space, I mean an inch or an hour. Yes, I’ll moan I’m tired, it’s human nature. Yes I feel like I can’t cope sometimes but I do cope. In 18 months time I’ll be complaining my house is too quiet and I’m feeling pretty redundant. I don’t need to rush that. I’m off to drink wine and cry that my children are all grown up and don’t need me any more.

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Is the grass always greener on the other side?

Anna — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:00:41 +0000

My name is Anna and I have work envy. Recently a friend of mine has returned to work after maternity leave and I am positively jealous. Not only did she get a new hair do and wardrobe but she looked…I don’t know, more vibrant and less ‘mumsy’. When I became pregnant with Aoife I worked in customer services, it was just a job. My wage would have literally just covered the cost of childcare so we made the decision that rather than I work to pay for childcare with nothing left over, I would stay at home with baby and nothing left over. So I became a SAHM (or as I often mistype a SHAM, I’ve been called worse). I loathe the term ‘full time mummy’, it’s patronising to working mums, I would never call Rory a ‘part time daddy’ because he goes out to work. Anyway, I’ve digressed. As much as I love being a SAHM, I do feel like I have to justify my existence to people much more. If someone asks what I do, I mutter something like “Oh nothing, I’m just a mum”. It’s like I won’t offer an opinion as no one will listen because I’m ‘Just a Mum’, I don’t really need to go to the hairdressers because I’m ‘Just a Mum’. I don’t really need new ‘nice’ shoes as I’ll only wear them on the school run because I’m ‘Just a Mum’. Now don’t get me wrong, I love being ‘Just a Mum’ and I know that being ‘Just a Mum’ means being a cook, a cleaner, a nurse, a teacher, a destroyer of nightmares and a nurturer of dreams. It means being a talker, a listener, a hugger, a playmate and at times an assassin of fun. It means being good cop and bad cop. It means having a whole host of jobs, all most of which I love, but sometimes I think it must be lovely to go out to work. I could have an opinion that meant something to someone else. I could have a hot cup of coffee. I could impress someone over the age of 6. I could have a conversation with another adult about something non-poop related. I could have someone to say “What do you think Anna?” and have a response that would change the world (or make sense). I could have a work wardrobe of smart clothes (clothes without snot and food on). I could have a handbag without wet wipes, a spare nappy, snacks, pine cones, stones and a car in it. I could drop the kids off at 7.30, go to work, hope traffic isn’t bad, rush home, pick up the kids, put them to bed before doing some housework and going to bed. I could bring home stuff that I didn’t have time to do at the office and maybe do it at the weekend. I could sit listening to Geoff in accounts yap on instead of listening to Seth acting out Toy Story 2. I could spend the day clock watching, waiting for 5pm. I could write Post it note reminders instead of colouring in Paw Patrol pictures. I could maybe miss the school Nativity because Joan booked that afternoon off before I did… Hmmm with hindsight maybe I don’t have work envy at all. I quite like things as they are. Obviously this is just a speculation of how MY life as a working mum would be for me, Joan ALWAYS gets in her holidays first!?! All the working mums I know are super fantastic at it and I do envy/admire how great they are at leading two lives and making them both work! High Five working mums ^5. This post was originally published over at meetothermums.com

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Lessons I have learned. Well, some of them.

Anna — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Six years ago I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of our first-born (she was late already) and the start of a new and exciting chapter to my life. The chapter where I become a stay at home mummy (or SAHM as we call it in the business). I’ve mentioned before I didn’t have a career and had I gone back to work I would have literally just been paying for childcare so it made sense to stay home. I couldn’t wait, it was going to be a piece of cake after all. Six years down the line I still love that I am home with my babies but I’ll admit being a SAHM is like finally getting invited to that party you really wanted to go to only to discover previous attendees embellished the truth and it wasn’t always as cool as suggested. Here is what I have learned. It’s not all lattes, croissants and lunch dates. All your friends work so you’ve no one to meet up with besides, with not working comes not earning. You accept yourself as a SAHM and deal with it but you consider yourself the exception, other SAHMs are terribly boring and talk about their children and dull stuff like that. People don’t really like to ask too many questions about how you are as you actually are a SAHM and your answers will be about your children and other terribly boring things like that. You feel you have to justify yourself a lot. “I’m lucky enough to be able to stay home with my children” or “I don’t work but I’m not claiming benefits paid for by you”. Firstly It’s not luck that I don’t have to work, Rory has worked bloody hard over the years to be able to make this happen and secondly there’s nothing wrong with claiming benefits anyway, I contributed for years before I stopped working. It’s not all baking cakes. It can be but that just leads to huge weight gain, type 2 diabetes and your taxes covering my healthcare. People forget you have other interests than children and so forget to talk to you like an educated individual with opinions outside of poo and Cbeebies. You forget yourself that your brain once did other stuff and forget that you’re an educated individual with opinions that some might consider valid or at the very least interesting. If someone asks what you’ve done with your day you struggle to come up with important sounding tasks. Somehow watching Masha and the Bear and keeping a small human alive doesn’t seem like a good enough answer. It’s really hard to exercise with a small person around, they hang off your leg and get in the way. It’s pretty lonely, your friends have jobs, their work wardrobe isn’t covered in snot or food and knowing they’re being treated as actual people makes you positively green with envy. People think that because you don’t work you’ve got nothing to do and so can help out at everything. You don’t get a day off, life is like a portable office. ‘Crafting’ is so much messier than you ever imagined it could be. You stop caring that the floor needs hoovering. Your five-year old is probably your best friend and you start to act like them. The idea of going back to work when littlest is at school is both exciting and really bloody scary. You realise you have absolutely no transferable skills, the knowledge you do have is well out of date and you probably SHOULD have got a career rather than a job before children. Even the shittest days are actually pretty fabulous when you have a glass of wine and think about it. You are one of the luckiest people you know because a lot of people would love to be in your position. The Tale of Mummyhood

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