From mum on the run to mum on the floor

Last week I found myself at an in-person only Working from Home exhibition. I was not in the best shape, having come down with whatever lurgy is circulating round the schools at the moment, but it’s a busy time work wise and I figured that, armed with Soothers and paracetamol, I could make it through the day. I’d arranged to meet up with daughters two and three later in any event and I’d had an earlier meeting in London which I absolutely felt the need to be there for because it related to daughter one.

Everything went okay, bar a bit of coughing, until I hit Excel. It was jam packed and bright, too bright. There was also a vets’ conference going on. I wondered around the working from home event, looking at the stalls and sat in on a session on how to manage remote workers better. I chatted to some people at a magazine stand.  Then things went rapidly downhill. I installed myself at a table outside the exhibition hall with a cold drink and the packet of Soothers. The plug socket was broken so I couldn’t charge my computer, but it had battery. I started to feel very hot, then very cold. I texted my brother ‘orange juice’ – our code for ‘I don’t feel well’. The only trouble is he is in Argentina so not able to actually bring me the orange juice, or at least not fast. He sent sympathetic words. His normal state of being is ‘stressed and tired’ so he is well acquainted with the downside of being a working parent.

I tried to keep working. As time ticked by and the Soother packet depleted, I felt less and less well. I thought I may have to just stay in Excel for ever as I didn’t think I could get out. I considered texting my daughters to come and rescue me, but Excel is so big I wasn’t sure they would find me.

I tried to listen to a zoom call from work, but my earphones don’t work and I was only catching the odd word because hybrid meetings tend to mean that there is a distance between the microphone and the person speaking. Some day they will invent a better system. Maybe they have already. I felt I was hallucinating in any event.

Time passed. I texted daughter two. ‘Save me’. She is doing drama so appreciates a dramatic flourish. ‘Where are you?’ she replied. Daughter two is not renowned for her geographical skills. She asked me where Oxford Circus was not so long ago. I think Excel would really stretch her.

I said I would meet her at Stratford. I hauled myself onto the DLR and, fortunately, I had to change trains midway which cut down the potential for coughing fits triggered by being in enclosed spaces. At Stratford I thought I glimpsed daughter three by Pret a Manger, but then she disappeared. Was she a mirage? It turned out she had gone upstairs to seek daughter two.

Daughter two came into view, smiling at my hopelessness. “Oh mum,” she said and ushered me into Pret to get a hot chocolate, brandishing a packet of paracetamol that she had picked up en route. After that things perked up slightly. Sickness is a problem for working parents. Because you may have to take time off for sick kids, you feel you can’t take it off when you become sick yourself. That tends to deplete your energy supplies.

I feel sometimes that I am too old for this kind of thing and for rushing around all the time. When does mum on the run get a break, I ask myself? When does she become mum on the walk or better still mum on the lying down? Although partly I tend to think that I simply have to keep going because there’s still the school run to do if my partner isn’t around, I think part of the problem is my own masochistic tendencies so I need to do some work on lowering my own expectations of myself. That may take time, though, and time is something that seems to be constantly in very short supply.

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