Emma’s Diary Feature: Re-addressing the parent-life balance

Partnering with Emma’s Diary has helped me reach so many prospective parents, newborn mums and toddler handlers – I love hearing your feedback and support, thank you! Working with this platform is one of my proudest writing achievements and I love having the opportunity to tackle controversial subjects. Something that I’m constantly asked is: how do we possibly juggle it all? I hope today’s post will give you an insight into how I do it (successfully and unsuccessfully)…

Hello, if you don’t know me, I’d like to reintroduce myself:

I’m Rosie, I’m Mum to Jack (almost 2), I am married and I work part-time from home. We do not have any childcare in place – it’s me doing it while juggling projects, deadlines and meetings.

My house either looks pristine, or like a bomb has just gone off. There is no in-between.

While the balance in our house can be chaotic, it works for us.

With the New Year, I wanted to set myself some (small) goals and help myself re-address the balance of work life/mum life/wife life etc.

What’s worked when readdressing the mum-life balance

As I said above, we’ve never had any strict childcare in place and I went back to work on a flexible part-time and work from home basis. Some days I am incredibly busy and others are quieter.

Life with a toddler means that every day is different and my work life mirrors that.

What’s worked for us is having less toys and much less stuff. This allows Jack to play independently while I am busy doing other things. I’ve found that when he has too many things going on, he’s far less focused and erratic.

Realistically, I can play and engage with him for a lot of the time I’m working, but some parts of my job need me to focus for longer than two minutes.

In 2024 I am going to do more to introduce and encourage independent playing. It’s a healthy skill for him to have. I can already see his imagination bursting with ideas with just a few less toys surrounding him, even when I’m not working but doing other jobs like cooking his meals.

Being Mum & Dad

We call ourselves the three musketeers. It’s us three, always.

The day we announced our pregnancy, we also told people that anything we did from then on, it would have to be something our child could come to. We come as a trio these days.

That has meant that date nights haven’t happened or they’ve been date days. And while that is totally fine and we’ve had lovely times, I think it would be nice to hand over bedtime and pop out to the local pub for a drink every so often.

Jack is now older and happy to be put to bed by grandparents. His separation anxiety is still there but he’s a bit more reasonable.

I’d love to plan a monthly date night that our toddler doesn’t have to join us for. Something simple like a cinema night or a nice dinner out of the house.

Work life as a parent

Having Jack made me realise one, sobering thing: you are totally replaceable everywhere except in motherhood.

I LOVE my job; I love working and it’s something I work hard to make work alongside motherhood. I’ve covered before my thoughts on having it all and how my career currently fits in my set up.

But this year, I want to maintain. And I think that’s ok.

READ THE FULL POST ON THE EMMA’S DIARY BLOG

Do you think you’ve got the balance cracked?
What do you think of my methods and working/life balance?

LoveRosiee
xxx

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