Its not easy being
a fulltime working mother - not only do we have to cope with the pressures of
work, but we also have a house and family to run and we live with the guilt that we're not doing any of it well enough. I'm sorry if you think the
title of this post is a bit sexist - don't fathers need coping strategies too?
Yes I'm sure they do, but I'm not a father, so I can’t comment on that. My
husband works incredibly hard and he has his own coping strategies which are
very different to mine. He works long hours and often 7 days a week in a very
physically demanding job, so the running of the household (cleaning, cooking,
shopping, washing and finances) is down to me as is the day-to-day sorting of
the kids (remembering things for school, lifts to parties, activities, doctors
appointments etc). Being a mother of 5 and running a house the size of a
football pitch (no really, I'm not joking) is a fulltime job in itself - you
have no idea how much washing my family generate for a start, so its a small
miracle I manage to fit in working full time running our garden centre and
landscaping business too. I give a
snapshot of my life in this post A Day in the life of a Mother in France Oh, and then there's the gardening club we
run and the students I find host families for from time to time and then of
course I have our 3 holiday apartments to manage. No wonder I'm finding it difficult to squeeze a bit of blogging
in too, oh and what's happened to my book… it’s a work in progress!
So, what's my
secret? How do I manage to keep going without buckling under the pressure. Well
I'm far from perfect and sometimes I do buckle - there are times when I snap and
scream and very occasionally I get to the point where I think I can't take any
more, but usually I carry on regardless and still manage to enjoy life on the
way.
