Am I a bad mum?

[Aweirdscience]

I wanted to write this down as I just feel like a really shitty mum. It's not really for advice. I just want to see if anyone else has been in a similar situation.

We have an almost 3 year old daughter. Both me and my husband work from home. So I guess you could say there isn't really a separation between home and work at the moment.

We both don't have any family close. I'm estranged from my family who live very far away and his are abroad. So we don't have a support system immediately around us. Our daughter has grown up with just the two of us and the only time we had family look after her so we could have a "date night" was when she just turned 1 and we visited family in America.

Business isn't great at the moment for us and it's down to a few things. Mainly it's obviously covid and lack of time. We send her to a child minder 3 times a week as that's what we can afford at the moment and the rest of the time she's home. But when she's home we ideally need to be working.

So sometimes she can spend the entire day watching TV or using my phone to watch TV (I feel awful already). The rest of the time we are extremely stressed due to the lack of time to work and I'm feeling incredibly guilty that she's not having a fulfilling life so that really effects my ability to do well in my work too. I spend a lot of time feeling sorry for her and having to ignore her to get work done. As mentioned before I've not been very productive due to her being home and I think she's been acting up lately because she's bored so she's very needy...She just wants her mummy and daddy's attention and I get it! We are literally her world.

Because of work stress, lack of time and I guess the lack of family around us really can get to us sometimes we snap a lot at each other and are less tolerable of her and the house can feel so tense!

Anyone else had a similar situation? Am I a bad mum? I feel like one. 😔

Can you and your dh not structure your days so one starts super early and finishes early and one late and finishes late? Then have different down time in the day? Stretch your day right out and then split it? Work after 7pm?

DH and I did something similar when we had our first.

I would start work at around 6-7am (depending on how busy things were) and work until 1pm, at which point I took over the childcare until bedtime at 7. By stopping at 1, I often caught the tail end of DS’s nap so was able to have a relaxing lunch.

DH looked after DS from wake-up until 1pm and then worked through until 8ish.

We found it worked really well for us!

It sounds like a tough balancing act and you sound like you care a lot but I agree with previous posters that you need to find a solution as no it's not really ok (in my view) for a child of any age to be watching tv or on a phone for any length of time. A few suggestions: one of you goes part time to be able to look after your daughter whilst she is not in childcare; you both work flexibly to allow time for you to spend with her during the day (eg go to the park, play with her in the house, attend local toddler groups or soft play); you find different jobs; you find more childcare; move to be closer to family; if you really can't do any of the above then you need to spend some time in the morning or the night before setting up/planning activities for her for whilst you're both working (have a look at five minute mum book/Instagram for inspiration).

It sounds really tough OP. No judgement here. But I echo PP's suggestions about splitting the day so one of you is always with her. During lockdown, DH and I split the day 50:50, one doing childcare and the other working. Not ideal as we had to fit work into evenings too but it meant both DC were being looked after. That said, we are lucky to have salaried positions and understanding bosses. I realise not everyone has this.

Bottom line is, the current situation isn't ideal. Could you do less hours just until January? Obviously without knowing the nature of your business then this might not be possible. But I do agree with others...if you were working out of home you'd have to have childcare so that would need to be covered.

This sounds really really hard, but I'm in a slightly similar situation, not as extreme but I can empathise with your struggles.

My husband and I are both freelancers and the nature of our jobs means there are sometimes extremely quiet times, and sometimes madly busy times. Because of this, we can't really justify more than 2 days a week childcare. The other days we juggle depending on who has to work when. Our daughter takes a decent midday nap, which helps, so we tend to take turns doing mornings/afternoons. One of us always takes her out for a couple of hours in the morning, leaving the other to do work or chores depending on what's going on. The quiet house means that the person left behind to work is a million times more productive, while our daughter gets some quality time with the other parent and gets to go to playgrounds/soft play/swimming/whatever. Is this something you could try? What sort of schedule do you have? When does your daughter wake/sleep?