5 reasons why mums know best and why every office needs them

After over a decade of motherhood I felt as if my workplace skills had atrophied to the point that I was entirely unemployable. Despite having held senior positions before popping a sprog and having worked in a couple more during brief hiatuses from my full time role as mum, I was sure that I was incapable of offering anything useful in the world of commerce.

I know that I am not alone in this feeling that giving birth and spending far too many hours in front of CBeebies has some kind of physical effect on your brain. Stripping you of your powers of bullshit and bravado that are crucial to survival at work. But I am here to tell all the mums who think they couldn't ever make it behind a desk again how wrong they are.

Mums really do know best for the following five reasons:

Mums are digitally savvy

You think fiddling with your phone, sharing pictures of your kids on Facebook, instagramming the birthday cake you just made, sharing a video of your baby's first steps on YouTube and tweeting a countdown to wine-o-clock are just distraction techniques to get you out of sorting the washing.

WRONG - these make you a digital whiz. You know all about the latest social media platforms, what makes for viral content, what posts have reach and how to communicate in different mediums online. These are skills that employers are crying out for. They are desperate to find that Holy Grail of content that real women are actually interested in and mums can easily locate it for them.

Mums are arch negotiators

Anyone who has ever worked anywhere will know that office politics reign supreme. Getting what you want out of a job is all about scratching the right backs and not treading on the wrong toes. It is a harsh world out there and only the best negotiators will rise to the top.

Luckily all mothers have been trained to haggle with people who drive the hardest bargains on the planet - toddlers. We have all had the fights over nap time, getting into and out of the buggy, over whether or not broccoli should be considered a great source of vitamins or a deadly poison that should not be ingested at any price.

We are used to wheedling, cajoling and occasionally using brute force to get our own way, no matter how unreasonable our opponent. I cannot think of better preparation to navigate the tricky power struggles of office politics.

Mums can multitask

Give a 20-year-old sixteen tasks to do at the same time and it is a recipe to find junior members of staff in tears in the toilets. This generation has just left home, where mum did everything for them (silly mum) and the idea that they should do more than one thing at a time is ludicrous.

Mums on the other hand are more than used to booking a plumber, while stirring the dinner and pacifying a screaming toddler with a biscuit. Or reading a story, while standing in as a makeshift climbing frame to her child. Or leaving the house equipped for any eventuality from snowstorms to sunburn.

Merely having to put together a report, make a phone call, book a taxi and chair a meeting, blissfully free from the usual soundtrack of wailing children, is a walk in a park for a mum.

Mums are nobody's bitch

When I was 25 my job was everything to me. If it went well I was a success, if things went tits up I was a failure. My whole psyche was tied up in the ups and downs of my career. That meant that I was terrified of losing my job and as such prepared to put up with any amount of shit, just so long as I was able to cling on to my rung on the career ladder.

Not any more. I like my job. It is fun, stimulating, gets me out of the house and pays me well. But it is not my life. My life is my family, my job is what I do during the day. This is not to say I don't want to do it well, but I am not going to play the game of who can stay longest or curry the most favour with the boss. If my employers can't see the value in me, I am confident someone else will, and even if they don't I still have my boys and really that is all that matters.

All mums are in the same boat. Not matter what happens at work, as long as your kids are happy and healthy life is good. This makes mums perfect employees. They will work bloody hard, give of their best, but they won't be afraid to stand up and be counted if something needs to be said - and every employer should welcome that, as otherwise how can they improve and do the best job for their clients?

Mums know best

I often sit in meetings where lots of young people try to guess what will motivate a proper grown up to make a purchasing decision. They come up with lots of fatuous ideas based on what we all thought grown ups were like when we were that young. A classic example was when someone said that 40-year-olds were past it and no longer cared what they looked like.

Ahem says I, a 44-year-old decked out in make up, hair dyed to hide the dreaded grey, clothes bought to make the most of a body ravaged by childbirth and my devotion to cake, yes we do.

I think my little colleague, who was young enough to be my child, saw anyone over the age of 30 as ready for a blue rinse and a zimmer frame. The problem is that when you are trying to appeal to people who have cash to spend, even 40 is a spring chicken.

While young people are amazing at knowing what the latest way 'millennials' communicate is, or what platform is hot or not, or whether you still meet dates on Tinder, or is that almost as uncool as saying uncool, they know bugger all about life. That said the combination of sparky, bright youth and genuine life experience is and something every office needs. So step up mums as your contributions are golden.

Mums are the CEOs in any family with the skills to reflect that. So if you are thinking of hopping off the school run and onto the career ladder, don't be afraid and make sure to haggle over your salary as hard as your kids bargain for that extra five minutes in front of the telly before bedtime.

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.

That Sunday feeling

The problem with weekends is that they are just too short. Well I say that, when I was a WFH mum weekends really only stood out in so much as I could hand over some of my everyday tasks to Mr FDMTG, which was nice, but it was hardly the break that I had come to understand a weekend to mean.

This is a hangover from my school days, when the weekend was the most exciting time of the week. Saturday night was the night for discos, snogging, bar hopping and generally getting into trouble. Hmm, thinking about this perhaps it is no bad thing that my weekends are a touch more sedate than they were in my teenage years.

One particularly riotous escapade occurred when my friend and I decided to put our somewhat shaky command of maths to work on the finances of our weekend drinking. We came up with the bright idea that rather than cough up a few quid per drink in the local den of vice, we should instead buy direct from the supplier (in this case an off licence of dubious repute) and drink our tipple of choice straight from the bottle.

I remember buying the vodka, the first few slugs and then nothing more until I woke up in a hospital bed the next morning, feeling as if I had been run over by several buses and then come down with the world's most earth shattering case of food poisoning.

To make matters even worse I was meant to be staying at my friend's house, with her delightfully straight-laced parents that weekend. On that bleak Sunday morning I returned to the pastel haven that was their home and was promptly shoved into the guest bedroom to puke my way to repentance, until they could return this 'bad influence' back to her own louche parents, never to be invited to lead their daughter astray again.

Tales like this might make you wonder why I recall my school day weekends with such fondness but, mercifully for my liver, such excesses were not the norm. Instead weekends were a blur of dancing at neon lit clubs to 90s dance music. I can't hear Sash Encore Une Fois without instantly being transported to flinging my hands above my head, on a packed dance floor, fuggy with cigarette smoke as me and my gay best friend did our best to pretend that we really were part of the cool crowd.

There was the painfully pretentious bar where we would sip over priced cocktails - the livid green, banana-flavoured Pisang Orange was a firm favourite - as we bitchily ripped apart the other clientele. The cafe where all the ex-pat brats (I grew up in Brussels) would meet to flirt, kiss, drink and fuel interschool feuds. Then there was the crazy few weeks I dated a seriously cute Columbian bar tender, who turned out to have a sideline in dealing something a whole lot stronger than Stella Artois.

The problem with those Saturday nights was that they were always followed by Sunday afternoons, when you suddenly realised that you hadn't even glanced at your homework and you had to be up inhumanly early the next morning with everything ready to  hand in. It is a lifelong trait of mine to leave everything to the last minute, so Sunday evenings were characterised by frantically cramming some project that should have taken two weeks to compete into a couple of hours.

That sinking feeling of impending doom stayed with me throughout all of my years of education and employment. But as a freelance mummy working from home that Sunday feeling hasn't troubled me for a long while.

That is until now, when going back to work reminded me with a jolt just how short weekends are and how futile it is to spend all day Sunday wishing that it wasn't Monday tomorrow.

Perhaps that's why this post from The Daily Mash, which suggests we could all  have a six day weekend if we stopped dicking around at work, made me laugh out loud. After just a few short weeks back in an office I am reminded once again that if we spent less time in meetings talking about work and more time actually,  you know, doing it, the concept of a six-day weekend could easily become a reality. I might just go and set up a Change.org petition to campaign in favour of this, after all Cameron can't ignore the fact that me and all my Facebook pals agree, can  he?

From slummy mummy to career bitch and other wardrobe crises

Going back to work is filled with innumerable terrors for the naturally reclusive home working mummy. After years of only having to make conversation with yourself and day time television (oh the hours I have wasted screaming at Jeremy Kyle and his motley collection of guests), suddenly you have to dust down those long lost social skills. You have to remember that it is not considered polite to start dabbing at a colleague's clothes with a wet wipe and that it really isn't acceptable to spend the entire day with a streak of child snot across the front of your dress (apologies to all in my office who had to witness this faux pas today).

It is very demanding this professionalism.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for me was the complete wardrobe change. When I first got my job a friend who works for the same company said 'Well you will have to get yourself a whole new wardrobe now won't you?'. I looked down at my ensemble by George at Asda twinned with wannabe Uggs and wonder what he could possibly mean.

For the past decade or so, workwear has consisted of leggings and a baggy T-shirt on a good day, pyjamas until school pick up on a bad day. Fashion really didn't come into it. I have been known to do the school pick up run with my nightie hastily tucked into a pair of jeans and hidden under my practical, padded mummy coat.

As for make up, nail polish and blow drys, well those were things of myth and legend, lost in the mists of time. For a girl who had religiously bought every issue of Marie Claire from the day it launched, I really had let myself go. I thought glamming up was changing my top and using a liberal spritz of dry shampoo.

When I went to my interview I wore high heels for the first time since my 40th birthday. I had forgotten what instruments of torture those shoes are. By the time I reached the office I had developed corns.

But a quick recce of the other women in the office confirmed my friend's fears, my mummy wardrobe simply wouldn't cut the mustard.

I preempted my first paycheck with a serious shopping spree. Out with comfort, practicality and machine washable, in with pain, Prada knock offs and dry clean only. My racks of comfy jeans and washed out T-shirts were ruthlessly replaced by chic shirts, little black dresses and the dreaded high heels.

For my first week at work I walked everywhere with a limp until, one desperate lunch hour I dived into Clarks and chose the comfiest pair of shoes I could find. Never mind that they looked like orthopaedic slippers, at least every step was no longer agony.

But it wasn't just my feet that were in for a shock. Having to look presentable every day posed somewhat of a challenge. I am categorically not a morning person, yet a 9am start in central London meant getting out of bed with enough time to spare to transform a rather unkempt 44-year-old into a sleek career woman, and let me assure you that is a time-consuming task.

Shaving my legs became more than just a bi-montly treat, I had to be smooth of limb every day. Imagine that. My middle aged face had to be made palatable by the means of a liberal application of BB cream and my hair could no longer sprout randomly from my head, but had to be tamed into a mirror sleek bob.

In short I had to switch from a woman who firmly believed that a beauty regime consisted of a dab of lip salve and a prayer, and that high fashion was a pair of Ugg boots that didn't smell faintly of the sheep they had been made from, to someone who could wield a mascara wand like a pro and wasn't afraid of a pair heels.

Although I must admit this is still a work in progress as I realised when I got up from a meeting today, only to discover that my skirt was tucked firmly into my knickers and presumably had been since I had gone to the loo about an hour ago. Sadly my fashion report card still reads: 'Could try harder".

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.

My New Year Anti-Resolutions

The back end of 2015 proved to be far more eventful that I might have imagined at the beginning of the year. As we approached the New Year it was all change, some for the better, some for the worse and some for the 'let's just wait and see shall we'. I would love to go into more detail but for various boring personal reasons and much against the spirit of blogging, I don't like to share too much practical detail about what I am up to. Suffice to say that things are in no way the same as they once were.

Anyways, enough of being cryptic. I am beginning to remind myself of those needy souls on Facebook who post mysterious status updates about how dreadful things are, without having the decency to clarify what exactly has gone wrong in their lives to satisfy my nosiness.

The real point of this post is that, what with all this upheaval, this new year, more than ever, I have been thinking about change, which led inevitably to New Year's Resolutions and what a bloody terrible idea they are.

The wonderful Marianne Power from the Help Me Blog also inspired me with a fabulous post about this earlier in the week so this is my homage to her and all the other sensible souls who say Bah Humbug to NYRs.

MY ANTI-RESOLUTIONS FOR 2016

I WILL NOT ATTEMPT TO LOSE WEIGHT. If it should leave my body of its own accord, I will not complain, but I am not going to pretend I like salad, do more exercise that I consider strictly necessary or fret over all the size 10 clothes that lie mouldering in my loft while I hold onto a tiny shred of hope that one day my body might once again miraculously fit into them. I shall eat puddings, chocolate and chip and I will rely on the healing power of Lycra and banish my scales to the dusty hell they deserve.

I WILL NOT GIVE UP BOOZE. Dry January has to be the worst invention since....., um, nope can't think of anything bad enough to compare it to. Of all the months in the year to deny yourself the solace of fuzzy drunkeness this has to be the absolute worst. Personally I think the only medicine to cure the January blues is a socking great G&T.

I WILL STOP FEELING ASHAMED OF BEING OLDER. This one is the biggie for me. Once upon a time people who I worked with considered me formidable, scary was how more than one minion described me. Trouble is that the years have taken their toll on that tough cookie, leaving in her wake a rather more soggy biscuit of a middle-aged woman.

This is not helped by the fact that I work with terrifying young people with beards, more confidence than should be legal and an unnerving tendency to bandy around names like Mashable, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat and VICE in a distressingly successful attempt to bamboozle us oldies into thinking they know far more than I suspect they actually do.

If I were to confess that I actually quite like to sit down with a real newspaper on a Sunday and get my fingers all mucky with ink, pages rustling comfortingly as I turned them, they would look at me as if I had admitted that I loved to crank up my Gramophone and dance around the parlour in a crinoline. Turn, pages? What you can't just swipe your way through a colour supplement and why can't I just skip to the next section by jabbing my finger at the text?

The thing is, while there is plenty I don't know, there is also a lot that I do. After living for over four decades, half spent working in the media, I have learned that when it comes to what I would call words and images and they would call content, what counts is delivering something real.

To create something that touches people and makes them feel as if they are not alone in this world, that there is someone out there who 'gets' them, who can articulate their fears or share their passions, is just as weird and dysfunctional as they are.

To craft words on a page or footage into a film that will move someone to tears by transporting them into a moment of sadness or pure joy.

It is our job to wield the power of content to inspire, to educate, to amuse, to console, to comfort, to teach and to create something precious that will stay with whoever consumes it, however they consume it. You never know it might even change their lives in some tiny or huge way.

I am proud to say that I know some of the things I have written have done just that.

Whether you do it in 140 characters (how behind the times am I? #Twitter10k) or with quill on parchment, it's not where you say something, but what you say it that counts.

So rather than quailing in the face of the novelties that amuse my younger colleagues, I shall adopt a serene air of superiority, that might even, with a following wind, be mistaken for scariness once again. I shall not go quietly into the dying of the light, or the perimenopause which is much the same thing. Maybe I will even insist on using a quill pen and parchment to make my pronouncements. The bearded men might even copy me and I could start my very own hipster craze. Quill bars could pop up amongst the cereal cafes, sarsaparilla bars and chimney sweep-inspired boutiques of Hoxton.

So forget Dryathlons, diets and denial, make some anti-resolutions of your own that might really make you happier this year. Cheers and here's to a 2016 where I am no better than I was in 2015, but hey, I am fine with that.