Free Time…What’s That?!

By Nadine On January 14, 2013 · Leave a Comment

My daughter asked me yesterday if I get lonely when I’m at home all day. It made me smile- I think that people who aren’t in the house during daylight hours think that people who are must spend all day sitting down, staring at the walls, maybe watching daytime TV or playing online bingo* while the dishes soak and doing not much of anything until the kids need collecting again.

I’ll always remember my cousin telling me after she had her first child, that a single, career girl friend of hers had remarked in surprise ‘But what do you DO all day’ when she’d told her how busy she was looking after a child once she’d given up her job. This friend is now the mum of three under fives and knows exactly what it is like to never stop working for a moment but have little to physically show for it at the end of the day. I think everyone walks a mile in each others shoes in the end, but a careless comment can be remembered years later, and the person who delivered the comment might not find much sympathy forthcoming when they are struggling themselves.

So my daughter then asked if I missed her and her brother when they are at school. I said “Of course, but I know I’ll be picking you up again very soon and besides, I have plenty to do to distract me until hometime!” So these things that are distracting me… well writing this blog isn’t one of them. I rarely get to my blog writing until the evening. This is what I do in my *ahem* downtime. I don’t watch the telly on a night. I have no clue who is in the Big Brother house or what the latest Bushtucker Trial is (and don’t care much either!) There is a 2 hour window that co-incides with the evening mealtime when I do enjoy a bit of TV in the background whilst I cook a fresh meal and serve up, when I watch my shows including Desperate Housewives (recorded), the news and Emmerdale, but apart from this my box is switched off all day and only jumps into post school CBeebies and Disney Channel when the young ‘uns take over.

Sadly the cleaning isn’t one of my distractions either. I wish it were but other than the usual daily wipe rounds, I don’t get to that until the weekends like other working mums, when the emails, calls and work schedule breaks enough to allow you to climb back on top of things, ready for it all to start again on Monday when the cycle of drop offs and pick ups starts again. I’m working on this though. I have a plan for the next £400 that I earn from my writing to buy myself a robot! Yes I am actually going to buy a robot- you read that right!

John Lewis sell a robot called Roomba that vacuums the floors for you whilst you are out. It can be programmed to start working each day and will cover every inch of floor, even between different surfaces and will also clean under furniture before taking itself back to the base unit to wait for the next day when it will start again! All I need to do is empty it every few days, so I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to buy my robot and have a shiny house all week.

Women who go into an office to work do the same things as me during the day, and no-one questions their schedule or makes assumptions about how their time is spent. So tempted though I am to write an exhaustive list of all the things I accomplish before the office world has taken their coats off, I’m not going to justify my chosen career path. Frankly, it’s no-one’s business.

*If you want to find a fun free bingo game then www.goldenbingo.co.uk is a great place to start for background research.

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