@MrsBumm
I wish the work and school world were better aligned. It makes me furious how much great time and energy, from people at the absolute sweet spot in their careers, is frittered away on the shitty mental load of school holidays. With the tiniest effort could think immediately of about 4 different simple solutions which, implemented nationally, would improve the wellbeing of children and parents and boost the economy as people could be so much more productive. It's all such bollocks the way it's done now.
I agree.
I'm in a job I carefully selected for being the right balance of flexibility, security and earnings I needed (as a single parent) - and I appreciate I'm in a very fortunate minority to have had that much agency in the matter.
And even still - I'm endlessly stung by the fact that my school-aged child has 13 weeks of holiday a year and I have 5.
This year I think has been particularly difficult in terms of wraparound and holiday care (not just my anecdata- research touted around in the press this week) and I think for so many of us for whom things were really delicately balanced, it's all gone over a cliff edge.
Even aside from that - people (parents and otherwise) often talk v glibly about the need to set up your life to provide 8-6 childcare or whatever. But sometimes that's extremely difficult, or the compromises involved are unpalatable. My school-aged child is waiting for assessment by EP. There are a lot of settings which just can't cope with him, and I don't even have a dx to wave at them and say "this is why he's struggling, please can you help him?!" (under no illusion that it's actually this easy with a dx, btw!). Or he just about copes but the emotional mess I have to mop up at the end of a long day for both of us is what pulls the thread out. These are stark and shit choices, and unfortunately when I'm back in the office he probably will have to go to the screamy after-school club and we'll have to make it work, but it is irksome in the extreme when people who don't have children, or who have loving retired grandparents on hand, blatantly don't get what a tightrope this is. Or who only have children for whom life is just easy, like i was and like my DC2 is, who will thrive almost anywhere. Or that mumsnet favourite "your decision to have kids". Yeah, and I'm grateful for them and wouldn't be without them, but my crystal ball didn't tell me the rug would be pulled from under my feet by a global pandemic, and my careful research and planning didn't tell me what a huge % of childcare just wouldn't feel adequate, and how passionately sympathetic I feel for the families who have no choice at all but to use them.
I keep my head above water (just!) and in the main I do all right by my kids and by my job, and it sounds like OP does too tbh. But it's fucking hard and it's made harder by people looking straight at you and not seeing any of it at all, and it's largely stuff we could fix if we put our minds to it. With or without children, working 40+ hours a week 47+ weeks of the year is a stupid way to waste the best years of our lives.