Part-time work and toddler urine infections

I think I'm in the wrong job.

When I was growing up, I arrogantly dismissed some careers because "I wasn't motivated by money". I didn't bother doing the milk round after university, because I grandly proclaimed the City wasn't for me - I wanted to do an interesting job.

(Well, that and the fact that I didn't finish my last year or take my finals because of another bout of depression. I thought for a while that I'd have to spend the rest of my life explaining why I didn't have a degree, then realised quite quickly that nobody asks what you got, just where you went.) 

It's not that I thought I'd never have to worry about money. I wasn't one of those girls who was fishing for a rich husband, or planning to devote her life to partying. No, I was going to do something different, and I was going to be really good at it. The success would equal money.

That's the privilege of private education I suppose. You're taught that if you work hard enough, pursue your interests and make the most of all the opportunities that come your way, the only way is up.

I believed - so far as I ever actually thought about it in depth, or looked ahead ten years - that my cleverness combined with my spoddy diligence would see me through whatever arty or alternative job I deigned to choose.

Now I'm trying to return to the job market, and I wish I'd trained as something useful, like a dentist, or a teacher, or a computer programmer. 

Because there aren't any decent, part-time jobs out there for people who've done various stints of charity work, a bit of journalism, a dabble in television and an early pocket of politics.

What a fool I was! Was I? Should I have seen this coming, or had some more practical career advice knocked into me at some stage? Is it all my own fault I'm in this situation now?

Partly. Because it's only now, that I have two children, and the costs of childcare and groceries are upmost in my mind, that I've properly thought about whether a job should be entirely about what you feel like doing, or whether you just have to get on with something in order to pay the bills. That is my middle-classness showing, and I'm not proud of it.

Even when I had to start my career all over again, having come back from a high-earning job in Africa after a cataclysmic bout of depression, I swallowed my pride and signed up to a temping agency. But I went to one that placed people at the BBC, rather than in banks. I went for subject matter and working hours over money.

Okay, I've had some bad luck, which has caused me to move jobs and industries a bit more often than most people. Depression mostly, and losing a general election. But everyone hits some bumps in the road.

What isn't my fault, I think, is the lack of part-time jobs. You hear this debate on Woman's Hour all the time, politicians occasionally dip into it, and intelligent journalists like Gaby Hinsliff write about it more and more. But it didn't really come home to me until I found myself in the same situation. It's ridiculous that there is an entire class of women - an army - festering at home, using their brilliant brains to do outstanding Ocado shops and performance manage the cleaner.

Because part-time jobs and jobshares don't really exist in most organisations. Now, I've worked in big outfits, I've managed a team of people, I know what a bore it is when someone isn't able to attend the weekly team meeting. How it's just not practical to give someone a task that needs sorting by next week when they've only got two more days in the office this week.

I know that the idea of restructuring jobs and departments in the particular office that you work in, right now, seems as unworkable and pie in the sky as the argument for legalising drugs. But there must be a halfway house. Because think of the most brilliant woman you've ever worked with (I have a few in mind) and think how much she could add to the particular project you're currently working on, certainly compared to that FUCKWIT who's buggering it up right now - wouldn't you rather have her on board? Even if you could only get her for 21 rather than 35 hours a week?

Doesn't it seem crazy that she's at home, pretending to herself that everything's going to be all right because she's going to finally write that novel she's always thought about, and in ten years time it might make, ooh, eight grand?

While the ignoramus doing a studiedly average job at the task you assigned to him yesterday is checking his Facebook, concentrating on his hangover and working out how much of the presentation he can get away with cutting and pasting from the one with all the spelling mistakes from last time.

If you're in your twenties, and you're enjoying your job, have a think about this. I know you work really hard, and it's stressful, but in between spending a couple of hundred quid on clothes every month and having lie-ins at the weekend and going to bars and restaurants without being fined £35 before you walk in the door because of the babysitter, THINK - is this job going anywhere? If I have kids, will they let me come back part-time? If my employer folds, how easy will it be for me to get another job? Do I have transferrable skills?

I watched an excellent film recently called Before Midnight (essential viewing for any couple with small children - the dialogue is exactly as if the scriptwriters have been bugging your car, secretly recording YOUR rows, added a bit of wit and insight, and turned them into a screenplay) and one character said 'Those years, after you leave your parents' house and before you have kids. Those are your own. You never get time like that again'.

Then again, you'll never have a true understanding of the power that one human's bladder can have over another human unless you go through the stage of life that I'm at.

Out of the blue, Logie wee'd his pants a lot last week. On our bed, in his bed, down the back of the sofa, on my friend's kitchen floor. It was so sudden that I thought there might be something wrong. I took him to the doc with a urine sample, because I remembered a friend's toddler who often got urine infections. She said the signs were sudden loss of control and needing to go often.

The urine sample was clear. So I had to face up to the obvious - it was to do with moving up at nursery to the montessori 'big school'. He is pretty furious about it, despite the fact that he's fine when I'm not there. I'd had a feeling he might be wee'ing on purpose, simply because it got a reaction. Sometimes he thinks it's funny, and he often waits til I've just left the room to do it. He shouts at me lot. Thankfully so far they've only been wet protests, not dirty ones.

Maybe I should have trained as a child psychologist. I still mightn't have a job, but I could manage the hell out of my 2-year-old.

Hospitals

Some people that we love are seriously ill at the moment. So I've visited a couple of big hospitals in the last week.

Do you like hospitals?

I am some sort of weirdo, because I do. I find something about them comforting. Which isn't to say I don't worry about the loved ones I am visiting, or have faith that the doctors and nurses are getting everything right.

I've got bad experiences of hospital, like most people. Watching my grandfather suffer traumatic indignities after his stroke, unable to communicate properly, left such an impression on me I'm unable to recall the memory without tears. I've seen a few pretty nasty incidents in psychiatric hospitals, for example one involving a woman and a used sanitary towel.

Is it some blind trustingness I have about greater medical authority, do I associate it with the imminent prospect of a lie-down (my last few trips to hospital on my own behalf have been for back or hip procedures, and quite frankly have been a nice break from childcare, combined with thrilling pain relief) or is it to do with my lifelong obsession with ER?

Whatever it is, I'm lucky that it's not me in there, getting a terminal diagnosis, or watching over my beautiful, ill baby.

They're like different worlds, hospitals. In different time zones, with different rules. Microcosms - well, giant ones - that feel like they even have their own climates. (Although one of them did have a Marks & Spencer in reception, which was a bit like getting to the International Space Station and finding a vacuum-packed branch of John Lewis behind one of the doors.)

But boy, do you see a slice of life in hospitals. Like alcohol, they are the great leveller. Pain, nausea, worry, frustration, sympathy, love, gratitude; all the things that make us human, that make us the same, come to the forefront.

Waiting for a lift in a busy hospital is an interesting experiment in observing all these traits. What is it with big hospitals and those multiple lifts that still take forever? It's like waiting for a tube in rush hour: inching towards where you think the doors are going to open, furiously judging people who don't seem to be obeying the rules.

Except this time you're also assessing them for signs of visible injury, listening to their conversations to see how urgent their visit is, trying to decode whether that angry look on their face is because they're worried about a relative or because they're just an unpleasant person. 

We all get ill, but serious situations are very different. When it's someone that we care about, we try to imagine their world. We do little things to make hospital more homely, and attempt to work out what they want to hear. But how can you really put yourself in their shoes? You're not walking those long corridors in the night.

I wish there was a universal guidebook about how to support people best. How to be there usefully, unobtrusively, whenever they need us. My motto is: be positive, listen rather than talk, and above all, do not complain about your own trivial problems. Because hospitals are a big deal. This is not ER.