A DAD'S LIFE:Balancing kids and work has made me more creative
HAVING BEEN out of full-time, pensionable employment since the elder was born, getting on for nine years now, I believe I may be unemployable. The idea of a work day beginning at nine and finishing at five is as alien as a pygmy-hunting pig to me. Work, if I’m lucky enough to have it, starts when the kids are out of the way and finishes sometime later.
This lack of structure does not always a happy camper make. Without boundaries to signal when you start and end, your day can be a constant ongoing miasma of never quite feeling anything is done. The kids give out, claiming “you’re always working!” when you know that’s simply not the case. Clients roll their eyes when you offer child-related issues as an excuse for another deadline swooping by.
Nobody’s happy, least of all the sloppy homeworker who chose this life so he could be “available” to his kids. I’m a bundle of bad work habits: I start slow, finish slow, and am not too hot in the middle. Finally an unshiftable deadline looms, everyone in my orbit is warned to back off, the caffeine drip gets switched to espresso and output cranks up. Job gets done, I get paid, kids are released from attic, we all eat.
What employer would welcome that into their organisation? On mature reflection, they all should.
Anyone who’s spent time balancing family demands while “working from home” should, in time, become a master negotiator. Dealing with kids involves ongoing parlays. As soon as they become aware of conscious thought, rather than put their newfound powers to philosophical use, they start to devise ways to amass sugar. Sugar in the system is every child’s goal. Sure, they get distracted by other things, but the desire for sugar never wanes and the scheming to get more of what they need is always close to the surface. You are all that stands between them and a sugar-fuelled existence; keeping them off the gear is a running battle.
Different houses have different thresholds. Some run smoothly like Chinese opium dens, bowls of white powder on every surface, confectionery for breakfast and doughnuts for dinner. Others, usually our organic brethren, run tighter ships, the kids granted a drizzle of honey on porridge in the mornings. Even within households there are divisions; in ours I am a sugary William Burroughs to the missus’s abstemious Mother Teresa.
From the moment you rise you are bombarded with wants. By the time you approach a work desk (in reality, the space where you drop your laptop cleared of laundry and last night’s late snack) you have already dealt with clothes, hair, teeth, breakfast and school lunch negotiations. You have been arbitrator in the court of “she got more than me!” 10 times over, you have proposed backseat treaties on the school run, you have slid them through the school gates with vague promises of later treasures that you can deny when the time comes.
No wonder then that you aren’t immediately mobilised by the wants of colleagues or clients. You know that even if you blatantly ignore them, they will still respond in a rational and polite manner. They won’t throw a plate of linguini on the newly laid carpet or reach into a workmate’s hair and attempt to separate that workmate’s plait from their scalp for a perceived slight. When an e-mail lands inquiring as to why you haven’t done that which you promised to do, you excuse yourself and buy more time without missing a beat. Adults? Easy bloody peasy.
It appears that parenting has led me to a life of blag. I con the kids that yes I will increase their dose later in the day, lie to colleagues about not stealing their ideas or kudos and then when I finally get to the desk, sit there watching YouTube clips instead of doing anything constructive.
If anything, balancing kids and working from home has made me more creative. It may be creative in deceit, and the only person really convinced the wool is being pulled over anyone’s eyes is me, but at least it’s creativity of sorts. I can continue to fob the kids off, break up fights, and provide entertainment while fobbing clients off, breaking up fights and eventually providing what they’re paying me for, in the knowledge that these are skills people on top business courses would kill to have. It may have been a long time, but any employer would be lucky to get me.
abrophy@irishtimes.com