Kicking ass and other office survival skills

So it turns out that a few months as vice chair of the PTA is about as adequate preparation for survival in the modern office as playing a few rounds of Angry Birds would be for a career as a rocket scientist. The mild bickering over whether to send another chiding letter to the parents over the paucity of prizes for the tombola is child's play compared to the 'push back' required to protect yourself at work.

Indeed, even the terms used are designed to befuddle the uninitiated, for 'push back' is apparently code for telling someone to bugger off and stop trying to offload their work onto you just because you are new and naive.

Problem is years as a freelance and a mummy has left me with an ingrained fear of saying no. No matter how outlandish, unreasonable or downright insane the demand of a child/editor, woe betide the mother/writer who turned them down. In either case it could only lead to tears, in the case of the children on both sides, with editors it was probably only me.

So it became anathema to me to say no. A stupidly tight deadline? No problem. An impossible to find case study? Let me help you out. It's already 6pm and you need quote from an expert on the other side of the world by tomorrow? Please allow me to stay up until the early hours. Really it's my pleasure. You need a pink straw to go in that milk, not a blue one? Anything for a quiet life. A Tardis must be created from egg boxes and cardboard by tomorrow morning? Pass me the glue. You need the toilet NOW? Let me hold you out behind a tree to relieve yourself.

Work out for yourselves which that last one applies to - editor or child?

The thing is as both a freelance and a mum, saying yes is just so much easier.

With editors it is the only right answer, and there are no second chances if you get it wrong. After all there's always a queue of eager beaver interns who will happily botch up the job for nothing, or even more chilling, do a far better job for nothing.

With children, particularly young ones, you are dealing with power crazed despots. They are quite happy to make your life a living hell should you refuse to turn the car round the moment you reach your destination and drive back home to pick up their favourite sippy cup. Should you serve the wrong food their wrath knows no bounds and if you think you are going to go shopping then you best not deny them unfettered access to snacks or you will pay.

Adding no back into my vocabulary is proving somewhat tricky though, as I still have that reflexive yes on the tip of my tongue. So when someone approaches my desk with that chancer's glint in their eye, with an oh so casual request for me to 'Whip something up', my knee-jerk reaction is to agree instantly, rather than question them closely as to what exactly it is they need whipping up.

In general the answer is some time-consuming task that they could probably complete much more competently that this wet-behind-the-ears newbie, but that they hope I won't identify as such.

After so many years as a yes woman I am just too soft, but no more. Recently a colleague, no doubt sick of my grumbling about my workload, snapped that I needed to grow a pair. Light dawned and I realised she is quite right. It's time for this mother to toughen up and learn to kick ass again.

Maybe I will even learn to say no to the children too.

School's out for summer

It's the end of term and all my sons are in party mood and ready to celebrate six weeks of freedom. No surprise as the last few days at school seem to have involved nothing but watching DVDs and eating cake in the classroom.

Strangely, despite the fact that I will be in sole command of my little troupe of terrors for the next few weeks, I am feeling equally demob happy. While I am sure that I will be a frazzled wreck come the end of summer I am gasping for a few weeks off school.

School can be very wearing, what with the early starts, endless pickups, interminable concerts, picnics, performances, cake sales, fetes and so on that require parental helpers (or at least those mums such as myself who appear to have 'MUG' tattooed on our foreheads). That's not to mention the politics and infighting that is the inevitable result of interacting with other people over something as fraught as the education and welfare of our precious children.

The moaning never ceases and even though I hold my hands up to being one of the worst culprits, I long for a break from it all. I don't want to worry about who will man the popcorn maker, who failed to put the things away properly in the PTA cupboard, who hasn't given their fiver for the teacher's collection, who has resigned from a key position on this or that committee leaving us in our perennial position of 'in the lurch'.

As I walk out of school today I want to shut the door on all of that and have five weeks with my boys. I want them to get up when they like and spend all day playing computer games if that's what they want. I want to explore sunlit fields searching for dragons in the undergrowth, I want to see just how wet and muddy they can get while playing in the local stream. I want them sticky with ice cream and lazy with days spent in the garden in the sunshine. I want to watch movies and not worry if they get to bed too late.

I don't want to nag about homework, or search for PE kits and book bags, I don't want to sign any permissions slips, or remember packed lunches, or make sure music practise is done. I don't want to do load after load of washing to ensure there is clean uniform available every day. I don't want to wake up at 7am to drag myself out of bed to extract my grumpy children from beneath their duvets. I don't want to start the day by screaming at them to remember to brush their teeth and to hurry their way through their breakfast or we will be late.

In short I am sick of the drudgery, the never-ending school runs and the unceasing flow of admin that has to be dealt with to manage the school lives of four children. The forms, the invitations, the applications for clubs, the music lessons, the tutors, the school applications…the list goes on and on.

This is why I think it is so important that we keep our long summer holiday. It's not for the children's sake, it's for all the parents. Of course the children love a break, but it's us mums and dads who need a few weeks away from the school gates. So I say hurrah for the summer holiday (but check back with me in a couple of weeks and see if the boys have managed to dampen my enthusiasm by then).