10 Things Every Part-Time Working Mum Can Relate To

Since having my son, like lots of mums, I’ve gone down to part-time hours. When you have young children* being a part-time working mum is often seen as the best of both worlds, but the reality is a lot more complex than that.

1. It provides a good work-life balance. I think this is the one we all expected to see here and it is true. Well as true as that can be for any life that involves working and toddler in the same day. It means you don’t have to give up a career or your life outside of motherhood, and you do get a break from the constant toddler demands (even if that is instead replaced with your boss’s demands). All this, whilst still getting to spend more time with your little one than if you were working full time. For me, I do genuinely believe that it’s the best work-life balance I could hope for at the moment as a single mum, but that’s not the case for everyone and that certainly doesn’t mean it’s without its challenges.

2. It’s just about financially manageable. (Thanks to Nanny day-care!) Without a salary coming in I’d struggle even more than I do. If I worked full-time I wouldn’t actually take much more home due to childcare costs but I’d certainly feel the extra burden in terms of work/commute and dealing with sick days etc. Part-time work helps me to provide for my son without work stress taking over my life.

3. You realise just how important the older generation are for working mums. See point two. I know I’m super lucky and many parents don’t live anywhere near their own parents or even still have them around. For me, without Nanny daycare (in addition to nursery) I wouldn’t be able to work three days and still take home enough money to make it worth the stress that work brings. One in four families now rely on grandparents to provide childcare (and I suspect it’s a higher figure for single mums and those on low incomes)**. They really are what’s keeping the country going.

4. Half the time you have no idea what’s going on in the office. You miss out on so much. Despite seemingly having to attend just as many team meetings as the full-timers, cue never enough time to actually do the work you have, I still rarely feel on top of what’s going on! It’s a strange conundrum where you simultaneously don’t know developments within the wider department, yet you also feel like a quarter of your time is spent in meetings not directly related to your actual job.

5. It makes it hard to build friendships at work. I’m relatively new at my place of work and being part-time it’s really hard to build friendships. Of course I’m not around as much as the others so I miss out on what’s happening. Even when I am there, I don’t have the money to go for lunches out (not that I’ve been asked yet!), I don’t have time to stop for a cuppa and a chat, I rarely have chance to go for a drink after work and I’m sure the efficient approach I take (due to work pressure demands) can come across as brusque to say the least. I certainly don’t have the time and inclination to deal with internal work politics… let’s just get the job done, right?

6. It makes it hard to build friendships with the mums brigade. There was a post recently about the importance of the ‘mummy pack‘. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems I’m not at enough of the toddler group activities to really build meaningful friendships. On my days off I sometimes make it to some organised mayhem, but I’m equally likely to just congratulate myself if I get us both dressed and put a wash on. Other friends who are part-time work different days to me, so that only leaves the weekends for catching up and for most parents in a couple that is sacred family time. All in all it means finding and joining one of these packs is harder than it might seem.

7. You work your ass off. My current job is in the charity sector, where part-time work rarely means part-time workload, it just means part-time funding. I don’t suppose it’s much better in other sectors either. Part-timers are often seen as a way to squeeze out the same work for half the cost. I know that on nursery days I have to leave on time, come rain or shine, through hell or high water. I have no flexibility, so I must always work to my maximum, plus a little, just to make sure I will meet that deadline. I know that at any point I could get the dreaded call from the nursery so I can never relax and think I have extra time because at the drop of a hat that time could be taken from me.  I work late/start early on days childcare allows, just to help get on top of things and sometimes I take work home for after little one is asleep. Those are loooooooooong days let me tell you.

8. You dare not complain about the workload. I think point seven shows that my workload is pretty pressurised to say the least. It often feels that I’m doing a busy five day job in three days. That doesn’t bode well for a reasonable to do list. Most days once it’s time to go home my to do list is longer than when I started. I feel like I spend most of my time trouble shooting and having to re-prioritise over and over to the most urgent things only. But dare I complain? Hell no. I need this job, I need it to be part-time. I don’t want to show any signs of what could be perceived as weakness or an inability to cope. I want to prove to others at work that I can do it. I want to prove to myself that I can do it. In all honesty I need to prove to myself, colleagues and my superiors that I can do it otherwise it might all come tumbling down around me. I dare not even risk that the powers that be are ‘nice’ to me and offer to increase my hours if they see I am overloaded, as hard work as this is, I don’t want to lost my part-time status so I don’t get that ‘extra’ time with my son.

9. It’s easy to get stressed. When you realise the budgets are all out and you need to get an answer from Tim*** but he’s been ignoring your messages and you have two hours till the nursery shuts and you won’t be in again for four days, its easy to freak out (internally I should add – I’ve managed not to lose my cool at work… Yet). Or when you realise someone has really messed things up and you will need to rectify it all, in the next thirty minutes. You feel like screaming. Its a mixture of knowing you have such little time to finish this before you knock off for the week, paired with the exhaustion of being the (in my case) only carer, or (in most part-time working mums cases) the main carer, of a little one or three. The long days and lack of sleep mean you just don’t have a good buffer zone to absorb other peoples incompetencies work stresses.

10. You know that promotion is almost impossible. I’m new to my current role so I’m not angling for promotion just yet but I know that as a part-timer I’m not seen as one of the core team. I know that opportunities will pass me by because organisations don’t like employing part-timers, especially as you climb up the career ladder (or in my case try to scrabble up it hanging off by my finger nails). Out of the numerous jobs my organisation advertises every week I would estimate less than 1% are part-time. What does that tell you about their attitude towards employing working parents (or others) who want (need) to work part-time? Apparently we aren’t seen as serious, despite much evidence suggesting that part-time working mums are some of the most efficient employees****.

Despite all this. I’m glad that part-time work is there. I’m glad that I managed to secure this post and I hope that one day we will face a bit less discrimination and a bit more support in the work place so not only can we continue to be some of the most efficient workers about, but we are also able to build our own careers within a supportive and friendly environment.

 

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References

*I’m not even going to go in to the issue that it invariably seems to be the mums, not dads, who change their work pattern… that’s best left for another day.

**According to the Guardian.

***I don’t actually work with anyone called Tim.

****According to the Daily Mail (yes I did just quote the Guardian and the Daily Mail in the same post, at least you can’t accuse me of not using diverse sources to back up my argument).