An ode to work (and the childcare that allows it to happen)

No, I don't feel bad about going back to work. And yes, I work full time

I got an itchy feeling the day before we were due to fly home from Ibiza. Oh, we were having a great time (I wrote about going “retired” raving with my two-year-old in The Sunday Times), yet there was a sort of low-level hum of irritation I couldn’t shake. I recognised this feeling from Before Children (and absolutely from during my maternity leave): I wanted to go back to work. I was also having a good, if a bit tetchy, time with my family on one of the planet’s most fun holiday islands. What was WRONG with me?

I need to admit two things. One, on a day-to-day basis, I care far more about my job than I do about my family commitments; and two, god, I know how lucky I am to be able to go back to work at all. 

A recent survey from Pregnant Then Screwed and Mumsnet found that 62 per cent of parents said their childcare costs were the same as their rent or mortgage. The most bonkers thing is that this doesn’t even surprise me. Ours isn’t far off: the annual cost of full-time nursery for one kid in a leafy part of London is more than I got paid in my first job in journalism (almost £20,000, since you didn’t ask). No surprise that the UK is the most expensive in the OECD club of rich countries for childcare.

I'm not about to write about how unaffordable childcare is and what the government needs to do to fix it (a lot). Plenty of smarter people than me have done that, and - surprise! - it doesn't include cutting staff-to-children ratios, which was one solution touted this week. If anybody who supports the idea that one adult can look after five children over two at once, get back to me once you've done it, yeah? I can barely handle one.

What I can say is how life-saving childcare (which by extension has allowed me to go back to a job I love) has been to my emotional and mental health. It’s the sheer weight that has been lifted, knowing I'm not solely responsible for my son's wellbeing and development, as I essentially was during the first nine months of his life (yo-yoing in and out of a series of lockdowns, no less). Even at exorbitant cost to my family, it’s worth every penny.

On the subject of family. My husband and I have worked hard to redefine the traditional gender roles within our unit, where the mother is not the default caregiver. He picks up the slack for me regularly, and is the one my son calls for at night/when he’s scraped his knee. (Case in point: last week I was in Italy for five nights for work, and he did nursery pick-up and drop-off all week. Now I have Covid from that week in Italy, and he’s doing the same. This shouldn’t be applauded, I know, but judging by friends’ experience I feel like it’s worth mentioning: he’s never been away for more than a night without our son. I’ve been away for days on end, multiple times.)

Back to work. Eighteen months after my toddler starting as a small baby, I’m still slack-jawed with gratitude to feel like me again the moment he gets dropped at the nursery door and I walk out to drink hot coffee and answer emails in sweet silence. I'm not totally cold: it still flays me when I often - literally - have to wrestle a child off my legs and leave him with his (lovely!) caregivers while he's howling "mummy". Then my phone pings with an email, and I switch back into my work self and, simply put, don't have the brain space to think about him again until it’s time for pick-up.

The benefits of work and childcare to my family are myriad. For me, my job breathes life into my day and gives me a laser focus that keeps my brain ticking over in a way my toddler doesn’t, shouldn't, cannot. Financially, we’re better off (just). I’m not missing out on my employer’s pension contributions. More simply, I feel good at it in a way I never feel good in my role as a mother, and enjoy it in a way I don’t enjoy parts of parenthood.

And for my son? For starters, he will know I enjoy my job and my role as something other than his mother; and the benefits of nursery are manifold. He has learnt nursery rhymes, made friends, done activities we would never manage at home. Once again: how lucky are we?

It all sounds so simple now, but it wasn't when he was nine months. I was hormonal, lonely due to lockdown and guilty about not bonding with my son. I felt roundly criticised from all corners when I spoke about my desire to go back to work and engage full-time childcare. In January 2021, in yet another lockdown, I was also struggling to keep it together: the screaming that is expected when babies are “settling in” is enough to turn my soul to liquid. In the following months, many people (male and female) asked me “when my working days were?” (same as yours?). A health visitor that I met twice during my maternity leave (because Covid) looked at me in surprise when I said I was going back to work “so soon” and told me, sternly, “children need their parents”.

But what about what their parents need? Or what their parents want? What about that? 

The only reason you're reading this, or anything else I write or say on the radio, is because of childcare. It has changed my life when I thought it was over when my son was born in March 2020. It has allowed me to be me again.

Thanks for reading.

A very long time ago for mother’s day I wrote this, about the joy and ambivalence of being a mother for The Sunday Times. I’m still learning what it means to be a mother.