From work at home mum to office mum

I’m not going to change the blog title, because that would feel a bit weird, and also lots of people never actually recognised that the WAHM stood for Work-At-Home Mum.

But… I no longer work from home and, a couple of months ago, I started working in-house after over 13 years of running my own business. A seemingly big change, but one which has felt remarkably easy and right.

When I first went freelance all those years ago, I wanted to get away from meetings and management and I wanted to ‘just do the work’. And that was right for me then. I was very lucky to be always have enough work (sometimes too much, and sometimes a bit less than would be perfect), to do a wide variety of different tasks and learn a wide variety of different skills. I honed my editing and proofreading skills over the years, but added design, programming, website creation, Flash and PDF creation, typesetting and illustration to my portfolio, as well as managing freelancers, budgets, schedules and bringing in new and maintaining existing client relationships.

It was also really useful when the girls were little, because I could organise my days around toddler groups and baby groups and Chris and I could share childcare, household tasks and work, balancing everything and being there for the girls.

But lately I’d been yearning for more. I started to actually want to go to meetings and write reports and analyse spreadsheets. I found that I wanted to concentrate predominantly on one area, rather than spreading my workload around different areas. And I found that I wanted the interaction of being in an office surrounded by lots of people, rather than just sat in my home office with my (very nice) husband.

Becoming a school governor and getting involved with the playgroup committee filled this gap a bit (and I love both of these roles), but it also cemented in my head that it was time to move back in-house. And, luckily, Chris was very happy to take on the additional responsibilities of being the sole person doing the school runs and playdates and activities and so on. (Before we shared all of these roughly equally.) He’s also doing more of the household tasks (including cooking most nights) than before and doing all of this while taking over the business entirely and working longer hours than he generally used to. And he does it all much, much better than I could (or indeed did, when I was doing half of it).

A little part of me feels a bit jealous of this domestic competence, but the rest of me tells that part to shut up and enjoy the fact that I can leave for work every morning knowing that someone else who cares as much for the girls as I do is in charge of them, that someone I trust implicitly is looking after, and that, even though it’s technically nothing to do with me anymore, someone is running the business I started all those years ago brilliantly.

I am really really loving my new job. I’m using loads of the skills I’ve developed and refined over the years, and learning some new ones. I’m enjoying being somewhere where people respect my experience and qualifications – and understand what I’ve been doing all these years (many people seem to think publishing is all about long lunches and launch parties). I love the 40-minute bus journey (I get to read – though I do also tend to doze off a bit). I love the coffee (though not the tea).

And I love having evenings and weekends entirely free because, when you work for yourself, this is so rarely the case, however organised you are. I am spending most of my evenings doing a good few hours of painting and drawing (do go and see my illustration blog, where I post slightly more frequently than here, or the illustration Facebook page, where I post pretty much daily) and building up those 10,000 hours. I am working (slowly) on a few children’s book ideas, building up my surface pattern design skills and painting pretty (I hope) pictures. My weekends are pure family time – often just with the girls, sadly, because Chris has to work a lot of weekends still. And when I take time off work, it really is taking time off work, rather than setting aside a day off, but still dealing with emails and invoices and the like. I took two days off at half-term and, with the bank holiday, that equalled a whole five days off in a row, and we fitted in lots of fun stuff, including visiting family, going to London and a three-hour stint in the local soft play centre. I have the day off today and am doing both the school runs, going to a PTA meeting and I even slotted in a trip to the hairdressers.

I’ve got a few reviews that have built up and I’ll be publishing them over the next few days. And then I’m hoping to be back in the guilt-free blogging mode, where I can just decide to blog about a fun day out, or a recipe I’ve developed, or a book I’ve read, or a piece of news that’s interested (or enraged) me. Whether or not I do so remains to be seen. If you’re wondering where I am and you’re not a Facebook friend, your best bet is to check out the illustration Facebook page, Google+ or the illustration blog as I am drawing and painting something daily and almost always share it in at least one of those places.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Do share any news you have, that I might have missed (I have been lax with reading blogs as well as writing them, I’m afraid).