City lawyer with toddlers can't cope

[RosieIrene]

I work FT at a city firm and have two dd 1 and 3. Have a full time daily nanny but still can't cope. Work all day, come home and put kids to bed and work all evening to make billable target or have to go to client functions. So stressed out that on weekend just want to sit in garden with kids and do nothing. Can't sleep, can't talk to anyone. How do people manage?

Work does expand to fill the time you allow it. But there can also be a cracking point when there is too much to do.

Well if we are on here we are all neglecting something

I'm booking our summer holidays - far too many weeks to fill...

I'm neglecting cleaning 3 bathrooms and hoovering 4 floors, dusting, ironing, changing the beds, tidying the playroom, and some gardening. Will try and fit it all in between picking dd up from school and when dh gets home from work. Do you think I can do all that (plus cook dinner) in 3.5 hourss? Does that make me a superwoman?

COV - yes you can definitely do that in 3.5 hours unless you are already exhausted .

I still have 4 sets of plane tickets and 3 of train tickets to buy... And a hotel to pay for, once it sends me an email quote... A slow business (but very compatible with MN)

Of course that will mean I'm not stimulating the children

NKF, that's the issue. WHen it gets too much for one person. And "it" can just as much be 24/7 with a baby with colic as working in the city.

There is a defined "extreme job" which I think is a good word. They are great jobs if you love them and the people who carry on in them get huge pleasure for the adrenalin of them. I've sometimes worked through the night but not resented it and some of these jobs you are paid £1m a year or more and you choose to do them. You accept you are available to those who want you to be whenever they say just about. They aren't normal 9- 5 jobs but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them and huge numbers of women love to do them and have families too (and men) but it's definitely a different kind of life and work and I suspect you only continue with them if you intrinsically love the work.

I think it's adjusting to parenthood which is hard for men and women rather than long hours at work and work stress. Suddenly instead of your time and life being your own you're sharing with another little person and until that happens to you you don't really understand it. I sometimes compare myself at 22 - I worked full time and my daughter who is 22 now. I had a child and she doesn't. That's a massive difference in terms of life and work. It takes quite a bit of adjusting to.

Oh really? My daughter loves joining in with household tasks and tidying - she's brilliant at hanging things up out of the washing machine, sorting laundry, emptying the dishwasher etc and we chat all along about what we are doing... I think that all those sorting skills are fantastically stimulating, far better than giving her some yucky and deadly boring plastic toy to learn from

Xenia - I've done an "extreme job". And I have a small child. And both those things are part of me and contribute to who I am and didn't require adjustment. But they are not compatible. Too much for anyone to do well. And I would much rather do one thing at a time properly and enjoy it than run about like a mad woman doing everything simultaneously and not well enough to feel content.

You can have it all just not all at once

Hideehi - that's what I tend to think is the choice that keeps me and my family sane and on an even keel... I'd be miserable and a useless partner/mother if I hadn't had so much time in education and the working world, and I'd be miserable and a useless partner/mother if I was in it right now.

You can have more than either/or though. I'm convinced of that.

Isn't childcare a job you do when you are not very academic, sometimes even a bit thick? Do people who use such early years care really try to convince themselves that its otherwise?

NKF - well, surely, if you work and then you stop working to be with your children in the early years and then you go back to work part-time to begin with... that's more than either/or? Or what are you thinking of?

so you have to be academic to raise nice children , blimely I'm far more academic than my CM but I think she makes a much better job of child rearing than I do.

bugger bugger bugger - wasn't going to point on this - so bloody pointless to rehash it all again.

Caroline - here in Paris that is definitely the case, there was even a very public debate about childcare and domestic service becoming tax-deductible expenses because it would enable unqualified people to find work . People who work in nurseries have qualifications, but I am afraid that those I have seen have not impressed me one little bit. Nannies here are not qualified, in fact many cannot read or write.

But my understanding is that in the UK there are quite well-trained nannies, with A-levels and NNEB and suchlike. So the standards of childcare ought to be higher - and certainly people here on MN claim that it is good, better, even than they as mothers would be.

Calm down, Kew. It's okay. Think about lovely cheesy garlic bread.

But I agree that nannies, childminders and nurseries are a useful stand in when the more intelligent and necessarily higher (than the nanny/CM/nursery) earning mother or father (though they seldom seem to be in the running for the childcare job) decide to put their own sanity and dislke of domesticity above the needs of their child. The child will doubtless be safe and may even feel loved by their mindees, however dim they are.

You could do that Anna. Or you could find another way to have a working life and a home life. One thing that does strike me though is that if a woman has one child, the choices look different than if she has a larger familiy.

The period of being full time at home with one child isn't very long. Really, it's just a blip in a long life. I wouldn't even call it being a stay at home mother. I'd call it a career break. If a woman has three children and stops work until all of them start school, that could be as much as 10 years at home. It's harder to reignite a career after 10 years that after three or four.

Just depends on how you want to play things. There was inevitable compromise in my husband and I trying to get home by bed time at 6 when the children were very little but we wanted to do that and usually one of us managed it. In my 22nd or is it 23rd year of child rearing may be I'm not quite as excited about reading bed time stories every night as a new mother with her first toddler might be so perhaps these things change over the course of your life. My enthusiasm for things like school concerts and sports days is not quite as it was either although I do tend to go.

Plenty of women and men combine work and home. Perhaps some of us are just hugely talented and competent and can do both and some aren't. I just don't believe it is a stark choice but for some stay at home mothers for them that is how it is so there we are. People just differ. Having 3 under 3 or even my baby twins is always always really hard. I don't think it matters if you work or don't work but I do know that for some of us being at home is just intolerable and not good for anyone.

so should dim sahm's have their their children taken away and given to more intelligent people? On teh basis they'd do a better job of raising them?

Cheesy garlic gread, cheesy garlic bread.

I am adomately opposed to concept of "qualified nanny" (at least mandatory government defined qualifications) however I would never never never hire someone who couldn't read and write.

For young children, I can't say I find a higher education (University and beyond) to be a requirement. Common sense is far more important than academic achievement.

"What I am absolutely sure of is that the quality and quantity of conversation (in English and French) is far superior to anything she would get from any kind of childcare available to me. I'm there to answer all her questions, discuss the world around us in detail, and she gets out and about an awful lot, far more than I would be prepared to pay a nanny to do. So yes, I am totally confident that she has more fun and is more developed than if she had been with someone else."

I wish I had your confidence Anna. I'm pretty sure that the quality and quantity of conversation DD2 has with her nanny is far superior to anything that I could offer. DD2 is nearly 5, her nanny is a KS1 teacher with 8 years experience, the attention span of a Buddha and (for children) the patience of the apocryphal saint. I'm well aware that in the thoughtful, consistent, appropriate and affectionate stimulation and care of a pre-schooler she has me beaten to flinders. That's why I've been happy to pay her a heap of money and will continue to do so until DD2 goes to school in September.

Fortunately parenting is not all about stimulating conversations.

Xenia - sure, everyone's circumstances are different. And we can't all do everything we might wish to do all the time. Don't you think it is wiser to recognise the choices/sacrifices/compromises we make and admit them, to ourselves and others, than to pretend we are being perfect at everything?