Work/life balance and mental health

Want to know a secret?

I went back to work partly because I didn't want to look after my kids five days a week. Yes, to earn money. Yes, to resume my career. But also because I knew I wasn't cut out to be a full-time mother. I needed to get out of the house - without them.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite solve the problem. Because I've found the part-time job I've been doing for six months quite stressful, and I now have less time to do the same amount of home admin. Because the boys and the house still need maintaining whether I'm physically present or not.

The trick is to get phenomenally organised and never waste any valuable minutes. You do your Ocado (or Morrisons) shop plus plus diary admin on the train to and from work, therefore you need an extra iphone charger at your desk. You lay out everybody's clothes the night before, therefore you become obsessed with the weather forecast a good twenty years before your time. 

This is not uncommon. Parents up and down the land live like this - on the run, militarily precise, totally f*cked when public transport lets them down. Unfortunately, I have a mental health problem, so am not 'robust' enough to keep it up. 

I use the word 'robust' because it's the adjective that telly people use when they come to me (at work), looking for people to film for their documentaries. "We need people with a range of conditions who are at a significant point in their lives, but of course are robust enough to take part in the filming process." This translates as "We need people who are really ill and will do bonkers things onscreen without suing us afterwards".

So I'm having to take some sick leave from work at the moment, to see if I can work on my mental health. The thing is, I can cope with two out of three things going on at the moment (work, home, head) but not all three, and work is the only thing that can give just now. Not that I wouldn't rather lose the depression and anxiety. I've been throwing everything I've got at them recently: ECT, pills, therapy.

But I don't feel much like talking about that side of things at the moment. I'd rather convince myself that I wasn't alone in feeling like that about going back to work. In the last fortnight I've had conversations with two mothers that I don't know terribly well - one through nursery, one through swimming - and they have both broken down in tears on me about how hard they're finding it to cope. Between them they have five children under four. And they have been pushed right to their very limits (and perhaps beyond). One said she was actually counting the days til her maternity leave ended.

So it's hard, okay? It's a hard time in your life. Which isn't to say for a moment that work isn't hard too. It's just a different kind of hard. And if there's an optimal balance between the two I sure as hell don't know anyone who's found it. 

There have been moments when I feel I've nailed it. Like everything's under control, I've done some worthwhile work and I am blessed to have healthy, cheeky children. This is a rare feeling, but I can remember the odd burst of it, eg on the train home on a Monday night, or after my first glass of wine with Jon, kids in bed, on a Friday night.  On one of these smug occasions, I jotted down some notes about the best and worst things about work, compared to being a housewife. They don't seem terribly witty now, but who else am I going to show them to?

5 best things about work

• Pret a Manger for lunch
• Banter (possibly the very point of human existence)
• Somebody making you a cup of tea and bringing it right to you
• You only have to wipe your own bottom (in our office, anyway)
• Being good at something, and somebody (preferably your line manager) noticing

5 worst things about work

• The noise coming from the headphones of whoever sits next to you on the train
• People putting kisses on their out of office replies (is this just a media thing?)
• Being asked to put briefings together on things before they're even finished - either ask me a question and I'll answer it, or keep up
• You don't get bursts of overwhelming love, and chubby cheeks to kiss til they bat you off (in our office, anyway)
• Using nouns like 'action' as verbs - did you know this was called 'verbing'? Oh, the irony...

Right now, I don't feel together enough to even think about these sorts of lists. I certainly don't feel like cracking jokes. I feel empty, and guilty, and sad. Plus my memory is so bad from almost six months of ECT I can barely remember writing this.

But I do know that I will get better - because I always have. Even though ECT, the wondrous treatment that I've raved about and relied upon, doesn't seem to be working for me as well as it used to. (Let's not go there - it's too scary to think that my lifeboat doesn't exist any more.) 

And when I am better, I'm sure I still won't feel like things are perfectly balanced, and I'm getting everything right. But the point is that I won't be so worried about it. That's the nub of it, at least for me: I need to find a way to manage my mental health and worry less, regardless of what's going on at work, or with the boys. So wish me luck with that; I'm trying everything else.