How do you balance work and home life?

Middle Child was complaining the other day, because as far as he could tell, there was no food in the house and he was RAVENOUS… I was surprised (not because he was complaining, that’s standard!) but because I knew there was in fact enough food to make at least 2 family dinners. This got me thinking that he must think I’m a sorceress because clearly I can make meals from nothing. This had, in fact, not occurred to him. If anything, he was inclined to believe I’d lost my magic touch, having failed to keep the fridge properly stocked up. I needed to up my magic several notches.

And then I got to thinking how many other maternal super powers I have when it comes to sqeezing in all the domestic chores after work (which, luckily for me, is part time).

For starters, who needs hindsight when you can have clairvoyance? The mystical ability to prevent problems before they happen. This is witchcraft 101 and merely involves learning from others in order to avoid similar mishaps. Also known as listening to your elders/teachers/parents, which is clearly much harder than you’d think. All the young’uns think they know better despite us oldies having at least a generation head start in which to (sometimes painfully) gather a certain amount of unbelievably useful data that we’d love to pass on. Of course, we didn’t listen either when we were young and foolishly sure of ourselves. But the fate of the unfortunate Cassandra awaits us all: we see the future but cannot warn others for they scorn us. So we take charge,  we plan ahead, prepare for all contingencies, quietly ensuring conditions for the best possible outcomes. 

We mostly start motherhood with a basic grasp of time management but we quickly become timelords! We learn to make the baby’s nap a time portal. By the time the baby wakes we have:

Done a load of washing

Paid all outstanding bills

Organised the car’s MOT

Cleaned the kitchen

Replaced the toilet roll, the soap and the hand towel in the bathroom

Decluttered a cupboard

Organised the family holiday

Done some yoga

The daily to-do list never gets shorter though: no amount of magic reduces the number of tasks on The List. There’s light bulbs to change, plumbers to call,  passports to apply for or renew, immunisations/dentist/optician’s/GP appointments to schedule, birthday presents to buy, schools to choose, Christmas cards to write, work-related training days to attend, kids’ parties to plan, after school activities to organise… and each of these seemingly one-off tasks needs to be repeated surprisingly often.

Luckily, time is an illusion and it’s amazing what you can do in an hour when you have to.

Everyone knows that only mothers can see dirt. It’s the magic eye. Like the Cassandra thing, it’s more a curse than a gift. Because you can’t clean dirt that you can’t see, obviously. It’s often easier to tackle the dirt rather than attempting show and tell when dealing with your ungifted kids.

Motherhood alters our brains ability to store information. We can no longer remember lyrics from any new songs, no matter how much we like them, but we seem to develop a magically enhanced memory for birthdays, world book days, bin days, holidays, inset days, bank holidays… we remember to feed the cat, water the plants, we know without looking what we have run out of. We know where the kitchen scissors are, and where that vitally important wallet/ set of keys/pair of football boots/item of homework was last seen.

We can charm seemingly unmendable objects back into life. Admittedly that’s usually just by changing the batteries but hey, the fact that we can conjure up the correct battery at any given time is pretty cool! To be fair, that’s old fashioned magic because who needs batteries nowadays? Our magic has evolved with the times and we can now produce the correct charger for any device at any time. Sometimes a quick tweak with a screw driver will suffice, or a whiff of WD40, a few puffs of air into a neglected tyre; sometimes you need the polyfiller, even the drill; some things can be repurposed, thus a pair of ripped trousers can become shorts, a broken necklace can become a bracelet. Mostly it’s about seeing the broken item/torn clothing/big hole where there shouldn’t be (magic eye) and locating the correct tools (memory magic) and creating time (pure sorcery). It’s quiet, discreet magic because nobody else even noticed there was a problem.

We are mind readers. We can infer what people mean even when neither talking nor writing is an option. This ranges from understanding pre-lingual  baby chatter, all the way  to building flat pack furniture from the most basic pictorial instructions. The former mostly involves keeping an eye on the time and the baby’s estimated blood sugar levels combined with hours of observation; the latter was acquired thanks to hours of childhood Lego. A childhood spent putting CDs and tapes back in their cases has definitely souped up our inexplicable drive to pair socks. Odd socks are our secret nemesis because they defy all our magic all the time.

No sorcery is more impressive than our ability to make a child’s clothes grow at the same rate as the child. Think about it. Think about everything that has to grow; from underpants to socks, from shoes to coats. And everything in between. And think about all the clothes that need to disappear at just the right time so that the wardrobe doesn’t have to expand too. FYI,that kinda magic is not impossible, it merely involves interpreting a longer set of instructions (that look quite a lot like cave art) to create a bigger wardrobe.

We regularly have to make superfluous items disappear. Decluttering, as it’s also known, tests our superpowers because you need to really stretch the time portal to wrest enough hours from an already short school day. Because this isn’t a task you can ever be seen doing. It has to be surreptitious so that the removal of 5 bin bags of rubbish over 3 hours merely looks like a quick tidy. We know better than to expect gratitude, we’ll take it as a win if no questions are asked!

We heal the sick without getting ill. Too much knowledge of herbs and medicines used to get us naughty witches into all sorts of unpleasant trouble so we learned to stop asking for gratitude.

We gently rouse sleepy kids when their alarm has gone unheard. Yet another thankless task which we accomplish thanks to our ability to be both awake first and also able to interpret the absence of noise as a problem that needs to be rectified. Counterintuitive.  Magic.

We work Christmas magic but we attribute it to Santa. We trade cash for teeth but we attribute this to the tooth fairy. Our mundane magic is rarely acknowledged, let alone attributed to us.

Look, I know we’re not really magic.

Magic, as I opined in a previous post (https://midwifemotherme.com/2024/10/05/on-luck-and-magic/) is the combination of luck and practice, but mostly practice. I just feel that mothers are expected to/simply end up practicing more. Is it any wonder we end up accidentally promoting unhelpful  motherhood myths (https://midwifemotherme.com/2024/08/12/accidentally-perpetuating-unhelpful-myths/)? It’s a classic catch 22. We excel because we put in

SO. MUCH. PRACTICE.

We practice because no-one else does, no matter how nice we ask or how much we nag (https://midwifemotherme.com/2024/06/23/never-stop-nagging/). Everyone gets comfortable with our high standards because practice makes perfect and now it actually looks like magic because we appear do it effortlessly.

Thus nobody is incentivised to do better. And nothing changes.