Bouncing back from expat-no-return

You might remember that a few months ago, I was attending job interviews. I’d reached a point of expat-no-return, in which, to be brutally honest, playdates were beginning to bore me senseless and the freelance work I’d been doing for a couple of years had hit a dry patch.

Is this it, I thought? Have I really sacrificed my former career in glossy magazines to spend my days wiping bums, noses and tears, making boiled eggs with soldiers and listening to my boys talk about their willies non-stop.

In a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side moment, I decided I needed a full-time job. With colleagues, interesting projects and (remember this) a salary. My next lightbulb moment came during one of my interviews, while sitting in what can only be described as the office’s broom cupboard.

“The hours are 9-6, and we work six days a week. Saturday to Thursday,” the Turkish interviewer with a dark floppy fringe told me, looking at me intently as my eyes darted to the floor in search of a trapdoor.

Kids, shhh! (I need earplugs, don't I?)

Kids, shhh! (I need earplugs, don’t I?)

“And it’s all office based.” Which surprised me somewhat as to get to the broom cupboard, we’d practically had to climb over at least a dozen workers crammed into a space no bigger than my kitchen.

Armed with the knowledge that publishing sweat shops packed to the rafters and operating on a six-day week do exist, I gave up the job search.

And decided to go it alone with my own little venture (big plug here).

It was fairly quiet to begin with, but then, just like buses, three jobs came along at once. And, all of a sudden, my little dipping-of-the-toe in the shallow end of the mumpreneur pool turned into a thrashing, front-crawl Channel swim, against the tide.

But, complaining I’m not. The mix of office work, work from home and playdates is suiting me nicely, despite being totally run off my feet at the moment.

The only thing is, during my days working at home, I’ve noticed that the boys have moved on from talking about their willies. And have, instead, started photographing their bum cheeks and front bits with my iPad.

Lord, help me.

To work or not to work?

I’ve been working a lot recently, in an office, with adults who listen and don’t break everything. They don’t shout, fight, or fall off chairs and injure themselves.

Nor do they need help in the toilet.

At the end of the day, my colleagues are still alive, without any assistance from me whatsoever.

I like it. I really like it.

Except I wish I didn’t enjoy it quite so much, because our lives would be so much easier if I didn’t work. If I hadn’t struggled so much with being a stay-at-home mum whose days felt like one long, open-ended project that I was as likely to finish as I was to climb Everest, backwards.

Perhaps if I’d been able to pat myself on the back occasionally for singing the baby to sleep, or dangling a rattle for him to swat, things would have been different.

But the truth is, whilst I love my children more than I ever thought possible, I found it difficult having them barnacled to my ankle/breast/hip 24/7 – and I really missed work.

Anyway, they started growing up, not needing me quite so much. And since it costs money just to stand still in Dubai, going back to work not only stopped me from going round the bend, it also made sense.

What goes up...must come down

What goes up…must come down

So now we juggle. We make complicated arrangements involving my husband, our nanny, and kind mothers who do me an enormous favour and bring my youngest son home from school if needed.

I bark orders as I grab the keys to leave. “Don’t forget, you need to go to school 15 minutes early as it’s ‘Look at your child’s learning journal’ day. And then drop LB and C [our nanny] at the park for the class playdate. Oh and there’s French homework.

DH looks at me, wanting to throttle me.

(He’s here quite a bit in the day, due to an erratic flying schedule that often sends him away at weekends instead. I know we’re lucky in that respect as one of us is usually around.)

I rush home from work and stuff money into envelopes for school trips/teachers’ gifts. I attempt to come up with the latest demands from school for things I don’t just happen to have lying around (yesterday it was 31 of something…buttons, beans. I sent Lego).

I worry a lot about missing things.

The Festive Sing-a-long. The Winter Festival. “And, oh god, Decoration Day. It’s next week, in the middle of the day [about as convenient as a hole in the head]. I can’t go!” I think to myself.

But it’s the mummy guilt that really gets me.

“Mum, how many days are you working? Why are you working again?” my children ask.

And the line my youngest son came out with this morning: “What takes you so long at work, Mum?”

Those Cosmopolitan magazines that told every female who’d listen in the 70s that it was her right to have it all/have an orgasm/combine motherhood, homemaking and career changed everything, didn’t they?