The Mumpreneur Diaries: Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year. Mosey Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ me with nice normal payslips and a vague feeling of security.

      Writing for a living is an obvious one. I’ve been doing that for nearly ever and sometimes people even pay me. But there’s never really been enough in my pool of freelance contacts to constitute a regular salary. Books are nice but, again, hardly a gold mine unless you’re Jordan and your twin marketing assets come in a 32DD. And you only get paid twice a year. I have trouble getting to the end of the month without a cash injection.

      Before journalism, I was a moderately good PR. The definition of ‘moderately’ being getting clients coverage and not annoying the journalists. If I took the time to build up contacts in the regional press I could perhaps get a few local companies to employ my services – ‘Local waste company bins the suit’ sort of thing.

      The problem with PR is that you spend a lot of time working on contacts and networking to begin with, before you see any money. And unless you’ve got a superstar client that every journalist wants a piece of, you spend your days doing little more than begging. And out here in the boondocks, the pool of stellar clients is vanishingly small, although celebrity chef Anthony ‘Wozza’ Worral-Thompson and famous consort The Lovely Debbie McGee™ both live up the road.

      So I do what I always do in times of stress and head over to Other Mother of Boys to whinge. Other Mother’s Boy One is exactly the same age as my own and they’ve grown up together since birth. We met at the local NCT antenatal classes. I thought she was a grumpy northern tomboy and she thought I was, in her words, ‘a gobby media tart’. Naturally, we became fast friends, uniting in our ridicule against the knit-your-own-yoghurt brigade and insisting that champagne in our hospital bags was much more important than lip balm or whale song. Whenever one of us needed to bend the other’s ear, we knew we could relegate the urchins to the back room to murder each other while we chewed the fat in the kitchen.

      I quite envy Other Mother’s approach to life. Of solid northern stock, the idea of a seat-of-your-pants, boho way of life is yet to appear on her radar. Supper is at 6 pm and if it’s Wednesday it must be chicken pie. Sun means hats, rain means macs, and we’re bathed and in bed by 7.30 pm sharp. In our house it’s more like:

      Husband: Have you been to the supermarket?

      Me: Mm-hm.

      Husband: Hooray! At last, there’s food. Tonight, children, we eat!

      Or

      Husband: Do the kids need a bath?

      Me: Sniff ’em and see…

      The same structure applies to Other Mother’s career. Her father insisted, from their early years, that both his daughters train for something that gave them a job for life. Now a chartered engineer with the National Grid, that’s exactly what she’s got. She knows that she will step back in where she left off 12 months ago and that her pay will be commensurate with her skills, or that’s it, the union turns the lights out. Compare that with journalism where the pay seems to be whatever’s left in the petty cash at the end of the month.

      But, equally, the lack of flexibility would drive me mad. She can’t do her job from a laptop in the garden, she can’t do a bit for a while to keep her hand in and she can’t just decide to stay off for longer because she fancies it. Her situation is similar to mine: she has two boys – the elder is five days younger than Boy One, and the younger is nearly four months older than Boy Two. Boy One is currently at nursery and Boy Two will join him in the autumn, making two care bills that she needs to fork out for. It won’t be so bad by the time her Boy One goes to school in 18 months time, by which time the nanny state and its breakfast clubs, after-school meets and holiday camps can fill in the blanks. But for now, she is about to spend the next 18 months’ working to keep her boys in nursery with nothing left over. But once they’re both at school she’ll be back in the land of disposable income, with job security and career consistency behind her.

      ‘I was only planning on doing a bit of writing now and again, now the Husband sounds like he wants me to be back at work already,’ I whinged. ‘I don’t want to go back at all.’

      ‘He will get another grant in the end, though, won’t he?’ Other Mother asked.

      ‘No guarantees, and it sounds like there’s someone doing the same research as him, only better, somewhere else. If they get to the grants first he’s had it. If he doesn’t get anything by May I’ll have to ask for my job back six months early. And that won’t go down well with whoever’s keeping my seat warm,’ I answered.

      ‘What about working from home? You’ve already been writing those parenting things. Heaven knows you’ve interviewed me for them enough times. Any juicy morsels there?’ she asked.

      ‘Not a sausage. The freelancing’s OK but it’s really irregular and it won’t keep Boy One in Noddy pants.’

      Then she suggests that I look into being a doula – a helper for pregnant and new mums. I was quite surprised she’d even heard of one since she’s of the view that it’s the NHS’s job to get the baby out, then yours to get on with raising it. I had actually looked into having one myself for the birth of Boy Two but I’d dismissed the idea as too expensive at the time. Birth doulas can charge up to around £800 for just being with a mum in labour. My labours were both so short it would have worked out at about £200 an hour. Nice work if you can get it.

      Other Mother points out: ‘I saw it in a magazine article a few months back. You were basically doing what doulas do when you helped me out for those ten weeks after my second was born. It’s not all placentas and panting. If you don’t want to do the gory bit then you can always be a postnatal doula – a bit of baby burping and some light cleaning – I know the cleaning part would be a bit of a stretch for you, but you’d have the money as motivation…’

      She’s not wrong.

       Monday 11 February 2008

      Typing ‘doula’ into Google comes up with a whole raft of websites, but there seems to be an association called Doula UK that puts itself forward as the unofficial doula register for Britain. There are hardly any doulas covering my area so that’s the first rule of business covered – make sure you’ve got the competition sussed. The site also lists the courses you can take to become a trained doula, although again there seem to be no officially recognised bodies. I find one that’s halfway between the cheapo £90 version and the super-expensive £1,000. If I’m paying that much I want letters after my name and a mortar board.

      I tell the Husband that I’ve sent off a cheque for nearly £400 for the course and that I figure a spot of doula-ing will be just the ticket for bolstering the family finances. He goes bananas. Well, actually, he goes totally silent, then quite squeaky for five minutes and then silent again, which is his version of bananas. He isn’t impressed that we’re surviving on one salary with an extra mouth to feed and I’ve just splurged that month’s nappy and packed lunch budget on three days of looking at ladies’ fannies and drinking tea.

      I should leave it at that and give him time to marinate in the information; let him gently come around to the idea that you’ve got to speculate to accumulate and that going down the fanny route won’t be a bad idea. But I can’t resist picking at a scab. Once you’ve got that little flap teased up, it’s impossible to stop yourself from going the whole way and ripping it all off, revealing the raw skin beneath that’s going to take a good few days to calm down again.

      In this case, I don’t leave it alone but bang on about how my job is hardly worth going back to, СКАЧАТЬ