Hi. I had my first week back at work last week and it's really made me realise I don't want to leave my 13 month old Son on a regular basis. I'm working 3 days a week (relatively short ones of 9am til 4pm) and he's in nursery 2 days a week and with my parents 1 day a week. I'm very lucky to have a flexible working pattern like that and could change the hours a little bit if I wanted to get home sooner. I wanted to just work 2 or 2.5 days but my employer wouldn't allow it, so I'm there more than I really want to be.
I'm working as a manager in the public sector and can take a career break for a year or two to care for children if I want to. After 1 day into the role I was reading the policy on how to take a career break and wondering if I've made a mistake coming back to work, and if I should have extended my Mat Leave into a career break. I seriously feel out of place at work after 1 year off. The team is different and so is the work and I feel like I've moved on emotionally. It seems like a career I had as a childfree woman and now I just want to do something else completely and start again. I can't believe I am being paid to leave my child and sit on my ass when someone else is looking after my boy. It's all wrong and not the reason why I started a family. My husband is supportive and has agreed to help me out if I'm still upset about leaving our little one once I've tried it for a few months.
My rough idea is to apply for a career break, take a year off and in that year do some sort of casual work or evening / weekend work, which I am allowed to do in the terms of the career break. I just can't work 9 til 5 under contract for someone else. I do want to go back to my job in the long term, just not whilst my Son is so young. I feel as if I'm missing out on watching him grow up and he's just started to be so much more interesting and developing faster in the past few months. It seems wrong to leave him even for 3 days a week, and we can just about get by on my husband's wage for 1 year, as long as I did a little part time work to earn about £50 a week or so for my own personal spends.
Does anyone else successfully do a little part time job at evenings or weekends that they enjoy and brings in this kind of cash? I'm thinking freelance something, like writing or reviewing stuff online, or perhaps working from home at something, or market research, rather than working in a shop or bar.
Any tips gratefully received, before I do my research on job boards.
Cheers!