Why the summer holiday is the best time to be a working mum

When I was at home minding my brood, the summer holiday was a time that I would both long for and dread in equal measure. Six weeks of not having to get up to do the school run, of not having to track down swimming kit, shoes, and clean jumpers every morning, of no homework and no schedule was pure bliss. Six weeks of children moaning, bickering and endlessly whinging that they were bored if I ever dared to switch off the Xbox, not so blissful.

As the break loomed this year I had equally mixed feelings. It's my first summer as a working mum and, as the school term reached its chaotic end, riddled with concerts, picnics and prize givings, I felt nostalgic for those lazy sunny days spent with my boys. When I missed the mums' end of term get together in the park, I sat glumly at my desk wishing I was sharing prosecco and strawberries with my school gate mates. But when it came to packing for our two weeks in the sunshine, I was more than happy to use going out to work as a great excuse to leave that particular chore to my husband.

Foolishly he showed himself to be eminently capable, doing a far better job than me - remembering both tea and laundry detergent - so I have now designated him chief packer for the household. Lucky man. 

But it was when we returned that I really appreciated the true benefits of being office bound during the long summer holiday. As we unpacked what appeared to be at least six months-worth of dirty laundry, replete with shorts pockets crammed with pebbles from a faraway French beach, T-shirts liberally smeared with exotically-flavoured ice creams, swimming trunks still damp and salty from the seaside, I realised gleefully that for once it wasn't me who had to clean this mass of filthy clothing. 

As I checked that my phone was charged and I had my fob for the office door on my first day back at work,  my husband disconsolately asked me 'What should I do with them all day?' Not my problem I thought smugly as I remembered all the summers when I had to entertain my entourage of toddlers  and small children as he fled to the office. 

The hours I have spent wandering around farms staring at sheep who looked as catatonically bored as I was, or sitting through hours of animated film that left me anything but, or furtively reading thew newspaper on my phone, as I lurked on a park bench pretending that I couldn't hear my children's demands to be pushed on the swings. Or worse, doing battle with wasps and friendly dogs as my children hysterically screamed and flapped their arms as if Godzilla were bearing down on them with murder in his reptilian eyes. 

Of course there were golden days where we chased down dragons in the local woods, played epic Pooh sticks battles in the brook behind our house, munched on sausage rolls and strawberries in the grounds of splendid stately homes and froze fantastic concoctions to make syrupy sweet ice lollies that dribbled all over their tiny faces. But those glittering snapshots of delight were few and far between hours of fighting over toys or staring blankly at the TV. 

On balance I have to shamefacedly admit that I would choose a swift kiss in my way out of the door for those few children who have made it out of bed before I leave for work, followed by a peaceful day at my desk, over spending at least five and half weeks desperately thinking to myself 'When do they go back to school?'

The monotony of a long term cook

Putting the last candy sweet, acid bright lick of icing onto a showstopper challenge cake, lifting a glass cloche to unleash a puff of fragranced steam, watching a swoosh of rich jus being painted, just so, onto the pristine white of a porcelain plate. These are sights that I cannot get enough of on my television screen.

The Great British Bake Off is must-see viewing for all the family, and I can be found, surrounded by a squirming sea of boys, glued to the soggy bottoms whenever the series airs. The orgasmic groans of Gregg Wallace as a particularly delicious pudding melts its way down his throat have me in paroxysms of joy, and don't get me started on Heston's Feast. When he crafts a jelly baby out of ox's blood and angel's breath (or something equally implausible) I can hardly contain myself.

Which is why it surprises me how dull I find cooking nowadays. You would think that someone with shelves bulging with bright ideas from Nigella and Jamie, a monthly subscription to Good Food Magazine and a family-sized belly to prove my enthusiasm for the consumption of food would enjoy the process of the creation of food more than most.

It was not ever thus, once I did relish whipping up a delectable feast for lovers, friends and sometimes, at a push, even family. I remember my first serious relationship, which spanned my late teens and early 20s, was measured in grand meals I would cook for our unappreciative young friends. They would happily live off Pringles, booze and huge chocolate bars, but was determined to be 'grown up' and host sophisticated dinner parties replete with herb-crusted lamb and lavender-infused panacea.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, old before our time, that boyfriend and I reached that stage of boredom with one another that wouldn't usually hit until mid life crisis years and split up when we were just past 25.

It was with a real sense of abandon that I threw out my aprons and matching dinner sets. For a good year I subsisted on Kit Kats, Special K and vats of white wine. While I am sure that I paid the price internally, that divorce diet of hedonsism and self neglect was ideal in terms of slimming me down ready to find my next catch.

Part of the attraction was that my new man helped to restore my deep affection for food and we spent our courtship enjoying romantic meals a deux and lovingly crafting meals for one another.

Then along came children. At first this did little to abate my culinary activities. I remember the night I went into labour I had just put the finishing touches to a chocolate bread and butter pudding ready for a dinner party that weekend. The arrival of a newborn put paid to the party, but we did enjoy the pudding, warmed up from the freezer, some months later.

When it was time for solids the neat, blonde, neon-white smiling Annabel Karmel, nestled herself between the quirky charm of Nigel Slater and the haute cuisine of Gordon Ramsay on my book shelves.

I learned what a mouli was for, and why it should be avoided at all costs, and could find my way to the butternut squash section of the supermarket with my eyes closed. My fridge was soon clogged by icebergs of tiny cubes of frozen mush. Meal times became a fraught battleground as I tried to persuade my son that he would not die if he let a mouthful of courgette pass his lips. I lost, as he is quite right, these are the Devil's vegetables.

This was perhaps the beginning of the end of my love affair with cooking. After spending hours pureeing and mashing all manner of exotic fruits and vegetables, wasting time that could so much more profitably have been spent, slumped, asleep, in front of the TV, seeing it tossed to the floor without even being tasted was soul destroying.

Fast forward through years and years of serving up teas of fish fingers, pizza, pasta and chicken nuggets to an unappreciative audience of children and my romance with cooking has been cremated. Every night I wrack my brains as to what to feed us all that will be nutritious, tasty and easy to make. I fall back on staples that are dull and do little to excite the appetite, but I have neither the will nor the inclination to try harder.

I thought that when my husband took over cooking duties when I went back to work things might improve, but within a month he had that same rabbit caught in headlights look when asked what was for supper.

I used to wonder why my mother said that my grandmother's fondest wish was that they would invent a tablet you could give children that would fill them up and provide them with all the nutrients they needed. Now I know just what she meant and hope that some bright spark will make her wish come true.

Down time? Remind me what that is again...

The sunlight streams through the floor to ceiling sash window. It warms the cat curled up asleep on my feet. Around me lay the disemboweled remains of the Sunday papers, a glossy supplement laying bare the personal life of a famous actor, the business section counting up and down fortunes. My head lies snug on the lap of my beloved, as he is engrossed in the dubious pleasures of a grand prix on the TV. All is well with the world. 

Perhaps later we might get dressed, go for a late lunch, maybe catch a movie or just while away the evening in a wine bar putting the world to rights. The world is our  oyster and we can spend our own sweet time searching for that pearl of entertainment that will divert us until the working week begins again. 

This was how weekends used to look. They were a chance to rest, unwind and forget about the power struggles and pressing deadlines of the office. There were that precious 48 hours of down time that was so essential to making the five days of toil that interspersed them bearable. 

Since those hedonist days of old, the whole concept of downtime has become increasingly alien to me. From the rude disruption of my quiet weekends wreaked by the eccentric routines of a newborn, to the Saturday afternoons spent freezing in a local park, desultorily pushing a complaining toddler on the swings and trying to catch furtive glances at your phone for just a little distraction from the monotony of the playground. 

But in some ways it hardly mattered as back in the days of little children all my days blended into one blurry mush of childcare. There were a few notable highs to keep one sane; the moments when my children were adorable, funny, cuddly or hilariously astute. For example, the day my little son touched me gently on the arm and said 'Mummy, I know I say you are the most beautiful woman in the world, but you know I don't mean that literally? There are prettier girls, I just don't want to upset you.' What a charmer. 

But essentially one day of Play Dough, CBeebies and the park was much the same as another. 

Since the boys have grown up a little there has been more chance to be self indulgent. Now that they can work the TV on their own pre-dawn weekend mornings can be spent in the land of nod once again. But every time you get settled down to being seriously lazy, it seems to be time to feed them again, or you remember that they have no clean school uniform, or that you really should listen to their violin practise, rather than sneaking in a decadent episode of Suits on Netflix. 

When I was a SAHM this wasn't such a problem, as I could work pockets of down time into my day. Since I worked a seven-day week, I felt it was acceptable to take the occasional half hour off to watch TV with my lunch, or go for a run with a gripping podcast on my headphones. While weekends were no longer luxuriant breaks from the week, there were the odd windows of indulgence to keep me from feeling too hard done by. 

Now that I am a working mother, I think the most bloody sacrifice to this new way of life has been my personal down time. Now I know some working mums say that the commute is their 'me' time. Well I am sorry, but being squeezed under someone's ripe armpit inside an insanely overheated train for an hour each way every day isn't my idea of a little treat. 

Add to which I am usually exhausted because I have had to get up too early or work too late, so my time on the tube is spent in a haze of stressed resentment at my miserable lot, and you don't have the recipe for chilled out relaxation. 

So that leaves the two scant days of the weekend, during which I feel duty bound to spend time with the children who I have seen for about 20 minutes each week day, most of which was taken up by screaming at them to get ready for school or bed. 

But I have a terrible confession to make. I would much rather laze on the sofa with my Kindle, or indeed those Sunday papers, than spend quality time with my children. I don't want cook tea, or tidy up, or deal with their roster of parties and extra curricular activities. I want to be selfish and slothful. I want to drink wine, go for dinner, spend a bit of time just tuning out the world, go for a run at a time that suits me, not their busy timetable. I want throw a snotty-hot-tears, kicking-my-legs-on-the-ground tantrum to demand some me time. 

Just as well that my wages are paying for the boys to have the latest whiz bang gaming console for their birthday, as that means they won't notice whether I am there, or not, or dancing round the room with in the Christmas Pudding nipple tassels I got from Secret Santa and little else. 

Room the movie and one A-Ma-Zing mother

If I tell you what Room is about you probably won't want to see it. The premise is based on a girl abducted, raped and kept captive in a single room, so far so horrible. But the film picks up the story seven years after her capture and depicts the frankly incredible relationship between the captive mother and her five-year-old child by her captor.

While critics and viewers alike have waxed lyrical about the performances of the lead characters Brie Larson as Ma and Jacob Tremblay as her son Jack, what really made me sit up and take notice were Ma's amazing skills as a mother.

Here is a girl who was snatched off the street in her teens, repeatedly abused by her kidnapper until she becomes a single mum left to bring up a child alone in a tiny room. As a mother who had children in a loving marriage and brought them up with all the mod cons imaginable, I was so moved by what a great job Ma did with nothing at her disposal beyond her imagination and a fierce desire to protect her child from the horror of his surroundings.

As I drive my children around in a car to the cinema or to go bowling, they annoy me to the point of screeching on a regular basis. I very rarely find the time to amuse them with anything other than an iPad or the television and flights of imagination are in very short supply, and this is how good a job I can do while bringing them up in what is comparatively the lap of luxury.

I can't imagine how I would cope should I be stripped of all of this and left to my own devices with my children in a single room. Suffice to say I suspect my captor would soon be begging us to leave.

The concept of creating a limitless world for your child, within four grotty walls left me speechless with admiration. To be cooped up day in, day out with a child, with no park to wear him out, no babysitter to give you respite, not to mention the constant unwanted attentions of your abuser, his father, would be nothing short of a living hell.

Yet Ma really does make the best of it, putting those of us who struggle in much more hospitable circumstances to shame. Room is not only a great film, it is a perfect depiction of the epitome of a good mother and one that left me feeling both awed and hugely inadequate.

Warning! Man Multitasking

Follow my blog and you will know that I was a long term, working from home mum. In my time I have struggled to cleanse and re-nappy the poo-coated bottom of a small baby, whilst discussing a commission with an editor at a national newspaper, tried to negotiate a column at the same newspaper literally as I came out of the operating theatre post C-section.

I have woken up at 5am to try to file a feature before the children got up, I have worked evenings and weekends to make sure I hit deadlines. I have done amends on a feature whilst suffering from particularly explosive 'morning' sickness and I have done a photoshoot in sky high heels, holding newborn twins and hoping to God I didn't leak any unmentionable substances before the deeply fashionable snapper left.

As any mum who works from home, even on an occasional basis, knows juggling children and paid employment is a challenge. Even when you are past the baby stages, you soon learn that fitting anything even vaguely lucrative between the hours of drop off and pick up is nigh on impossible. If you try to do anything silly like the washing or grocery shopping, you can just forget it.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. Thanks to seismic changes on the home front, Mr FDMTG and I have swapped roles. I am off to work every day, suited and booted to hack my way through the corporate jungle, while he is at home, attempting to earn a crust while managing the diaries and vagaries of our four sons.

Guess what? He's finally realised just how tough I have had it for the last 12 years. Finally, he understands why I literally begged him not to take my sons out of after school club despite our declining finances, because it would mean six round trips to school thanks to their packed after school schedule.

He knows now why I would wail like a banshee over the excessive overuse of clothes, leading to near Everest sized piles of 'not really that dirty at all' laundry. Why I would often wonder out loud if we all might be happier if we were to become nudists. While I could never think of what to have for dinner, because after cooking what seems like a million pans of spag bol, you just begin to lose the will to live, let alone think of more creative things to do with mince.

He has discovered just how bloody irritating our children can be, when you have to deal with them on a full time basis and, while he has yet to learn my defensive strategy of ignoring them in favour of fiddling with my phone, he begins to realise its value.

At last light has dawned about how hard it is to manage the cleaner, he quails just as much as I used to at the prospect of either asking her to actually, you know, clean the house properly, or even worse leave so we can find someone else who will.

He knows why, by the time he returned from his office, I was red faced with frustration at being interrupted on a minute-by-minute basis by the boys and their inane and insane demands. He gets why my double G&T habit was purely medicinal, rather than borderline alcoholism (or at least that's what I tell myself).

I know I shouldn't laugh, but I'm sorry my sides they are a-splitting as I watch this rank amateur attempt the fine art of being a parent who works from home. Hopefully he will get the hang of it, or it will be just the incentive he needs to earn enough money to cough up for a nanny once again.

In the meantime read about his exploits at his fab and funny blog Fourboding.

The perils of tearjerking TV

I used to be quite heartless. Before giving birth gave me a core of mush in more ways than one, I would  scoff when my mother burst into tears over some heart rending tale of child abduction or a the grisly murder of a girl around my age. I couldn't understand why tales of some stranger's suffering touched her so deeply.

Well the boot is firmly on the other foot now as I was reminded when I watched the Richard Curtis drama Mary and Martha the other day. This rather heavy handed and implausible tale centred on two mother's who had lost their sons to malaria. One of the dead boys was around the same age as my eldest, cue floods of tears at this unremittingly bleak story.

As the two mothers compared notes on their top life moments, starting with the birth of their boys and ending with all the days their sons' had been alive, I was thundering downstairs to shower my sleeping sons in kisses, dripping those maternal tears onto their cheeks as I went. My husband who had rather grumpily been woken by my nocturnal weeping asked, really rather reasonably: 'Well why on earth did you watch a program about children dying?'

While I take his point, sometimes it does me good to remember just how precious my annoying children really are. Having spent the day refereeing various pointless skirmishes over the ownership of toys and whether or not it was a reasonable request to ask a four-year-old to at least attempt to put on his own shoes, it is sometimes hard to hold onto the concept of childhood as a golden time.

Watching the agony of those onscreen mothers who would never again have to remonstrate with their boys about mess, bargain over the eating of a few more vegetables before pudding is back on the menu or nag endlessly in the vain hope this might mean that homework or music practise actually got done, served as a painful reminder of what a gift the mundane actually is.

Of course it would make you into rather a tedious type of person to be walking round in a perpetual state of recognition of what joys your children are. In fact people would soon start to question or mental capacity if you were to don a beatific smile of gratitude as your little terrors thumped one another and whined at you to buy them sweets in the corner shop.

That said it does no harm to indulge in a little bit of a tearjerker from time to time, even if all it means is that for just one morning you might think twice before starting to scream when your seventh suggestion that shoes and coats were put on as it was time to leave for school about ten minutes ago was ignored. If you can hold on until your requests reach double digits then that sad screenplay has done its job.

Child of our time

Just watched Child of our Time which has always offered me a little glimpse into my future as the children are just three years older than my eldest boy. Tonight's episode was particularly poignant as it captures all the children on the cusp of teenage. Watching them transition from carefree, twirling toddlers to spotty awkward almost adults was almost physically painful.

I have long been one to agonise over the loss that is intrinsic to childhood, weeping over last trips to baby music groups, playgroups or classrooms. I still recall walking home after my oldest boy's last day in his reception class as tears poured down both our cheeks at the realisation that he would no longer pass his days in that colourful room, with that delightfully welcoming teacher. That he would finally become a big boy.

I am not good at letting go and appear to have developed an allergy to change. I watch as my children grow up and ram my finger down on the pause button. While everyday frustrations mean that often their demands on my time drive me demented, I continually scold myself that one day I will long for the time when they would badger me to play with them, talk to them or simply provide them with a fresh piece of paper to scribble on.

I felt my heart preparing to be crushed into a million scared and bewildered pieces as I watched the onscreen parents attempt to navigate their new relationships with their growing up children. Flailing to cope with the fact that the daughters who had loved nothing more than pink and fairy tales, now scorn them as childish preferring to discuss potential boyfriends and mull over future career choices in which the option of astronaut has been firmly rejected in favour of pop star or actress.

The sons who were only recently the same unformed mess of energy that is so typical of my own young boys, who are now sullen, wrapped up in fashionably flicked hair dos and unfeasibly baggy trousers, who listen to music their parents can't pronounce and have ditched childhood sporting dreams in favour of hanging out aimlessly with their friends.

The grandparents who played such a critical role in the years when the height of excitement was pushing the swing a little faster in the playground or being spun on the roundabout are now superfluous to a teenager's needs. The are too old and too slow to hold the attention of someone whose life is moving forwards at such high speed.

It is the heartbreaking human condition that time marches inexorably on leaving each of us behind eventually, even those all powerful teenagers whose hormones tell them they are immortal and invincible. Who amongst us doesn't blush at our callous treatment of our parents when we look back on our teens with the benefit of hindsight?

It is a strange thing though that for us as parents we are savouring each moment, holding onto them for dear life as our children just as eagerly seek to discard them. Perhaps it will serve as a warning to occasionally stop work or to miss out on that run or that episode of my favourite TV programme in order to just be with them. To drink in their childhood before it runs out.

Do you ever wish

that you could just pack your children away for a day or two? Not because you don't adore them, but because you could just do with a real rest? I am having one of those days when I long to be without children. They don't happen often, but lately I have just been feeling so tired that I just want to go to bed without the fear that at some point in the night/early morning a small boy will worm his way under the duvet and snuffle and cough into my ear until I awaken, groggy and disoriented.

I was talking to another mum with three small children today, and bemoaning the loss of down time that is the lot of the parent with many children. There is never a time when you shouldn't be doing something other than curling up on the sofa with a good book. This is not to say that I don't regularly skive off and do just that, but there is always a nagging sensation at the back of my mind that really I should be ferreting through the dirty laundry to put on yet another wash, or that I should have made that urgent phone call for work, or that I should sew the elastic onto the eldest's new ballet shoes or that there are a full week's worth of school shirts that need ironing.

It is exhausting just thinking about all the work that goes into keeping the family ticking over, let alone actually doing it. My to do list is a Sisyphean task that will, as you might expect, never been completed. There are always birthday presents to be bought, name labels to be stuck in, odd socks to be paired up again, food to be bought, cooked and managed. Mostly I just get on with it, but sometimes I just want to book the next ticket out to Rio de Janeiro and forget that I am a working mum of four.

I want to toss away my responsibilites like so many Dickensian chains around my neck, and lie, guilt free on a sandy beach, with nothing to worry about beyond where my next cocktail is coming from. It's bizarre really as when I was footloose and fancy free, I always felt there was more to life and that all the hedonistic pleasures of life were somewhat superficial. To a point I was right as my children bring meaning to my life, and I wouldn't really be without them, it's just that on occassion I want to skip off to that parallel universe where there isn't always something else I should be doing.

Perhaps I am just a bit tired and run down, but to have a few days when exhaustion wasn't my constant companion would be such a delight. To stay up late and sleep in in the morning until I wanted to wake up, and to spend my day doing exactly what I wanted to do, not what I ought to do, to have a weekend dominated by adult pursuits rather than driving to a myriad of classes and hanging around in crowded playgrounds, that would be very heaven in this time of parenthood.