The reality of working mum guilt and how to stay connected to your kids

Radio presenter and children's book author Helen Farmer recommends working parents demystify rather than demonise their job to help children understand what they do and why. Photo: Helen Farmer

“The obligation for working mothers is a very precise one: the feeling that one ought to work as if one did not have children, while raising one's children as if one did not have a job.” So said Australian political journalist Annabel Crabb. I can identify.

After all, I have had a few (OK, fine, many) dilemmas about being a working mother over the past nine years. I can rationalise it, of course. Why I work. From earning money that contributes to their food, education and care, to setting an example as a woman in the workplace, and feeling fulfilled because I love my career.

Despite all of that, I still feel guilty about “being absent”. That I don’t always know when library day is, or that I can’t be at every choir performance, or pick them up from school (which seems to be all they want, not realising that if I did it every day, it wouldn’t be so special).

I wanted to write My Mummy’s Secret Adventures, a children’s book about being a working mother, because I couldn’t find one. It is my way to explain that mums have other lives, away from our children.

Having spoken to many educators over the years, I realised many little ones genuinely believe their mum sits outside school or nursery waiting for them for hours. So, it’s my effort to help parents talk about how they spend their day, where they go. It’s the book I wish I had when my daughters were younger. Because children need to know that it’s all for them.

The 17 years I have lived in Dubai have been a bit of a whirlwind on the work front – with long hours and more dining al-desko than I care to remember. Then within six months I got engaged, married and pregnant in quick succession. My world tilted on its axis; my identity shifted. I was elated, but wondered how all of this would work with a baby in the mix. In short, it couldn’t. I felt I couldn’t deliver at work part-time and I missed my daughter, so I resigned to go freelance.

That was scary. You don’t know where work is coming from – or if it will come at all. But it’s flexible, and that’s what I needed. I was writing, blogging, doing some voice-over work, and asked Dubai Eye 103.8, a radio station I contributed to as a magazine editor, if they had any shifts for hosts. They did, so I got behind the mic on the other side of the desk, and did that too.

Now each morning I drop the girls off at school, have a couple of hours to myself (in theory to exercise, but more often than not to go to the supermarket, do emails or get a quick breakfast with friends) before heading to the studio, where I have a great team, who both make me laugh, and make me sound good. I come home by 5.30pm to the girls, for bath and bedtime, for monkeying around and stories.

A friend once told me that I should make sure I’m the first thing they see in the morning, and the last at night, and I try to keep that promise. It doesn’t always happen.

I don’t know what work-life balance is – and I doubt if it even exists. We’re lucky to have an amazing nanny, Loreta, who gives me the time, head-space and confidence to work, safe in the knowledge that my kids are in the best possible hands when I’m not there.

My husband and I try to have the odd night out (still home by 10pm). I see friends. I do yoga. I read. I look at houses in the South of France that I can’t afford. It’s life.

Is it perfect? Is anything? But when I look back at this crazy time in our lives, I’ll know that I was doing this for me, and I was in it for my family.