From ‘Job centered’ to ‘Job Centre’

Jo Caley - 4 Mar 16

As I write this, I am sitting in a coffee shop on the not quite so glamourous Bromley High Street and feeling very pensive. Almost two months ago I left the safety of a full time job with the main aim of becoming a “better” parent and spending more time with my daughter. A lot of friends and colleagues were worried about me leaving my job without another one to go to, but those closest to me understood my need to leave (well I like to think so anyway!) So here I am, unemployed but with a very happy daughter.

Did I make the right choice? Who knows. When I was juggling full time work with being a single parent, I worried every day about her and whether I was doing the right thing. Don’t even get me started on the guilt. Walking her to school on dark winter mornings to leave her in a cold school hall with all the other sleepy kids, collecting her at 6pm when she was the last one left, standing there at the gates shivering from the cold (looking like something not far off a modern day Oliver Twist). It was horrible. The worst times were when I had to prise her grip from my arm in a barrage of tears and snot when she would be screaming (and I mean screaming) for me not to leave her. Once it took two members of staff to help coax her away, just so I could leave her to go to a job I didn’t even like. It broke my heart into a million little pieces.

Other times she would stand at the window and I would turn around to wave, only to see a sad little face, bottom lip trembling, and a solitary tear rolling down her peachy little cheek. “Why can’t you take me to school with all the other mums?” “Why are we always rushing Mummy?” “Why do I have to get up so early Mummy?” “Why can’t we have breakfast at home Mummy?” The questioning never stopped. Try explaining to a 4 year old why you have to go to work and they just don’t really get it. Well, mine didn’t anyway!

I am going to be completely honest now, with the risk of making myself look like the world’s worst Mum, but I only really bonded with my child when she was able to talk. Before then I spent many hours just staring at her, driving myself round the bend trying to work her out. When she cried as a baby it used to cause me physical pain that I had no idea why and what to do to help her.  I felt lonely, clueless and heartbroken. I felt like a total parenting failure. Everyone else I knew seemed to be sailing through, whilst keeping their partners happy with a perfectly gleaming house and even managing a bit of home baking just for good measure! (Well, according to Facebook they were- oh the crushing power of social media!) But regardless of anyone else, it just wasn’t the start I had envisaged with my child and I hated it.

I hated every day I spent with her in those early days. Yep, I did just say that. I didn’t say I didn’t love her. In fact it was because I had this tremendously deep love for her that I felt so much pain in not being capable of being the Mum I so desperately wanted to be. I remember once someone coming to visit and when my daughter wouldn’t stop crying, she said knowingly, “Oh, she sounds like she’s hungry” and I just glared at her with my best Daria face and wondered how the hell she knew what a “hungry cry” was. I started to resent people like this that were probably just trying to help. I look back now on those days and think what a horrible person I must’ve seemed and why couldn’t I just “take” to motherhood as naturally as everyone else seemed to. I feel guilty for wasting the time I should’ve spent trying harder to bond with my baby. But we shouldn’t look back with regret, so here I am in the present, trying to look forward. I feel like I have learnt a great deal in the last few years and obviously I will never know all the parenting answers but I do now feel happy that I am doing the best I can.

I am now trying to find a job that will fit in around my child, rather than fitting in my child around my job, which was something I did for far too long, with no real gain. There’s something very dangerous about continuing in a job you don’t like, where you simply exist behind a computer screen every day, you forget who you are or what you’re good at.. Slowly your confidence and dreams are crushed into dust and you wonder how you ended up there. I haven’t been working for the last 5 years, I’ve just been existing in a workplace. I’m positive the right thing is out there, and in the meantime, I’ll just keep attending my parenting classes, AKA daily life.

Jo Caley

Mumma to 6 year old TG. Addicted to music and books. Partial to a fat burger and a Mint Aero. I'm THAT person who is at the gig on their own.

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