When the nanny quit, I thought things couldn’t get any worse. Trying to juggle three children under eight and making sure they were all up, dressed and fed by 7.45am so I could take them to school or to the hastily-arranged child-minder before shooting off to my job in fashion PR was like trying to wrestle an octopus into a wetsuit.
But then of course, just as seven days of tears and tantrums (my own and the kids’) had given way to some semblance of a routine and I was beginning to toy with the idea of scaling back my hours at work, the recession bit.
It had been snapping around my feet for a while, stressing me out a little, but I never thought I would actually lose my job. Having steadily climbed the career ladder since I graduated, I thought unemployment was something that happened to other people. But no, the company I had worked incredibly hard for over the last 16 years was ‘sorry’, but it ‘had to let me go’.
I heard on the office grapevine that my boss thought I had ‘seemed a tad overwhelmed lately’. Well, quite. But wouldn’t you be if you were dealing with incessant questions, hissy fits and point blank refusals to do as you suggested? And that was just my clients. Never mind a clingy toddler, a solemn four-year-old and a seven-year-old clamouring for an iPad.
On the upshot, at least I don’t need to look for a replacement nanny now that I am free all day and we’ve just slipped down a tax bracket. But since everyone knows bad things come in threes, I’m just waiting for my husband to run off with his secretary and then I’d really be up shit creek without a paddle.