My life, until about 12 years ago, was quite safe. I went through school, went to University, got a job. I think in some ways I was blissfully unaware of what life could offer if I only stepped away from the safe path. It wasn’t until Simon made the monumental decision not to return to employment after he was made redundant that life for us started to shift. He set up the company that is still going strong and a few years later I joined him. Stepping away from the security of employment is something we’ll never regret, even if at times it’s scary as hell.

When it came to our children’s education, we took the safe path and registered our eldest daughter at the local school. Despite being a lovely, community environment, it’s still a school and the fact that we sent her there has never quite sat comfortably with us. A whole year later and we have decided to take the plunge and homeschool. Just today in fact we handed in the letter that de-registers her. My frame of mind while writing this is a mixture of high excitement and mild terror.

Stepping away from something safe and  known can be terrifying. Leaving things in someone else’s hands, someone trained and experienced, someone who does the job of teaching year after year, feels safe, like apron strings. Going against the grain feels risky. Yet, as we learned with our business, it’s also the thing that makes you feel alive, it’s letting go. For us it’s simple, the more you let go, the more you grow and learn. The more you hang on, the more  you stay the same. Are you hanging on or letting go?

I have recently returned from a weekend away with my oldest, closest friends. They are the ones I see less often than I’d like but when we meet it’s like yesterday. Of the 6 of us I am probably the most content and when I look at their lives it seems clear why that is. They all had difficult childhoods and less than rosy relationships with their parents. I am the only one whose parents didn’t separate or divorce. Whether it’s a fact of us all being daughters I don’t know, but they have all had particularly difficult relationships with their fathers. There seem to be so many lessons to learn from the way each of them has experienced life and in particular parenting.

The most obvious lesson is the career one. A parent working hard to earn money to make everyone happy. But as one of my friends herself explained, her family life was sacrificed for her father’s career. Sure he earned big bucks but at the expense of time with his wife and children. At the end of the day that is what they wanted and what ultimately might have kept them together. It’s a cliche, but happiness, he found, couldn’t be bought after all.

Another is where the parent/child relationship has been pretty much turned around. The parent is needy, selfish, demanding and self obsessed. The child is trying hard to please, be loved, fulfil expectations. Shouldn’t that be the other way around? What happens to “I just want you to be happy”? So often it seems to come with a dose of “as long as I approve” or “as long as it’s making me happy too”.

Many of my friends’ experiences of parenting are too personal to share but suffice to say the thing they all missed was time spent surrounded with happiness. Never mind the career, the money, the holidays, the buying stuff. What my friends needed as children were parents who were simply happy. If you are happy, chances are your kids will be too.

I imagine it was a desire for freedom that drove Simon and I to start our own business. We were both employed for a long time both in jobs we loved and jobs we hated. We had both experienced bosses that drove us crazy. We both struggled with the requirement that we arrive at a particular place at a particular time and stay there all day. Employment, essentially, didn’t really suit us. We had lots of ideas that had no home, a frustration borne out of the ability to get things moving quickly but not the backing or support of those around us and a general feeling of opportunities passing us by.

Simon took the first steps in setting up what is now our business. As I saw him begin work on new, exciting, creative projects I knew I needed to do the same and I slowly but surely left my job. Luckily we took the plunge before we had children. I’m not sure we would have the courage to take such a big risk now we have two small people depending on us. At times we’ve wondered where the money will be coming from to pay for life’s essentials and we have been lucky enough to be helped by family during the harder months. Friends and family in employment just haven’t shared this experience. Each month an amount of money is deposited in their bank accounts and they know that the payments they need to make will be met. Of course they have responsibilities but the risk just isn’t there.

The idea of working when you want and where you want has also been hard to turn into reality. Since I have been looking after the girls, Simon has worked longer hours than in any employment. It’s hard to turn work away when you can’t be sure how long the good times will last. The home office is still an office, albeit one you can swap easily for a coffee shop or even the garden on a sunny day. And although there’s strictly no boss, our clients need their calls and emails answered just as urgently.

Despite all this the freedom we imagined does exist. We can make quick decisions, turn company ideas around overnight, change direction, jump at opportunities. We can work like crazy people and then take a month off as we plan to do this summer. The long hours seem worth it when you’re working for yourself and not for somebody else. The harder months forced us to re-evaluate what’s important, gave us our simple approach to living and our reason for writing this blog. Simon has started to experience a little known phenomenon; that of actually looking forward to going to work. Our company has been in existence now for 12 years, not long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough for us to know we simply couldn’t do things any other way.

When I was five I wanted to be a vet. I imagined a life filled with cute, fluffy, baby animals. When I discovered that my hands may have to enter the rear ends of cattle I changed my mind. My next ambition was to be a punk. I had dreams of living with pink hair and safety pins. I didn’t consider how I might make a living from this. Music and art were a big part of my life from quite a young age and for a while my future was mapped out as a musician. Eventually, however, I ended up going to art school and although I never became a sculptor as I had dreamed, the experience certainly shaped my life to a great extent.

Each step along the way something changed. My love for a baby animals was clearly not enough to forge a future in the world of veterinary medicine. It became apparent at school that science was not my forte. My punk dreams were halted too by a change in fashion and a move to a more hippy aesthetic. Art won out over music in the end although I wonder sometimes what I would be doing now if I had gone to music school instead.

So can life ever go to plan? I can’t say I ever really saw myself doing the things I do. I’m not sure Simon and I thought, even ten years ago, that our business would have taken the direction that it has. Things have just evolved. Decisions have been made on the spur of the moment. Opportunities have been grabbed or avoided. Life has swung this way and that. I read so often that to succeed you need to keep your dream at the forefront of your mind, have a plan, stick to it. But what about spontaneity? What about changing your mind? Can’t you succeed if you go with the flow? Isn’t that part of the beauty of working for yourself?

Whatever you think about life and plans, I for one plan to keep shifting the goalposts. For me it’s what keeps life interesting. Have you been asked that awful interview question “where do you see yourself in ten years time?”. My answer would have to be “I have absolutely no idea!”. I certainly didn’t know ten years ago that I’d be here. Oh, and thank you Simon, for a great birthday present.

Nearly all my female friends have changed direction, some quite dramatically, since having children. They have found that their pre-baby life just doesn’t work any more. The very idea of disappearing to an office five days a week is totally un-manageable. Some have developed their own businesses, one became a baby masseur, one is considering starting child-minding, another has just decided not to work at all for now. Others have taken part-time work, anything really, that fits with school and childcare. It doesn’t matter if it’s totally below their skill level. In many cases it’s just something “for now”.

I don’t want something temporary though. For me, this has become an opportunity to get back to basics and think about what I really want from the rest of my life. For the past 15 years I have worked for arts organisations of one kind or another. I have done admin, management, project development, fundraising and recruitment. Since running our own creative consultancy I have worked in lots of other people’s organisations too. And as much as I’ve enjoyed it I’ve realised that I don’t want the same things any more. It isn’t that I just want something that fits around my children. I want something inherently different for me.

It’s taken a long time to come to any conclusion. I have thought about lots of different things I could do. It has taken a lot of searching and many ideas have seemed right for a while until I imagined myself doing that thing every day. Finally, the nagging thing, the thing I have been trying to push aside for lack of practicality or security has finally made it to the number one spot. What I have found I miss is doing my own creative work and the sense of fulfillment it gives me. I did go to art school a very long time ago but over time my own practice has just disappeared. I dug out some old sketchbooks recently and was hit by memories of visits to exhibitions and galleries. Time spent drawing, developing ideas. And I felt such a rush of excitement I just knew I had found my calling again.

A trip to London took me to the V&A, where I spent a whole morning looking and drawing. I came away filled with ideas but I got home and dithered about for a few weeks until Simon said “look, just DO something!”. So I went on ebay and bought myself a table, ordered some printing inks and set myself up a small corner of the office as a studio. And there it waits, until tomorrow, when I start my new life. I have no idea if I’m still any good. I have no idea if anyone will be interested in what I’m making. But I have to give it a try. I hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future someone will ask me what I do and I will confidently be able to reply.

The pros of working from home. Well, there’s no commute! I’m not an early riser but Simon gets up at the crack of dawn and comes downstairs before we’re all awake and gets a good few hours in while the house is quiet. We have breakfast together and are always home in time for family dinner. Lovely. There’s no money wasted on expensive lunches in cafes. Coffee is readily available. The space doesn’t cost us anything (interesting that I wrote about food before cost savings…). In fact we can include some of our household costs in our company accounts. We can work anytime, even into the evening if we want or in the middle of the night if inspiration strikes. And the kids can pop in and say hello! Really lovely.

The cons. Well, some of them are the same as the pros. The kids can pop in and say hello. Lovely, yes, but sometimes a huge distraction, especially when they don’t want to leave (and want Pingu on the computer). They can be noisy around the house and sometimes have their friends to play. Bedlam.  Being able to work anytime can make it hard to switch off – you can’t leave your work at the office when the office is where you live. The project that is nearly finished is just sitting right there in the next room, calling to you “finish me, while I’m still fresh in your mind”. It’s hard for children to understand what work is all about. They see you at home and want you to play.

Working from home can be quite isolating with only Twitter for company. And then there are those practical issues – what if we want to have a meeting? What about using our home address for business? And our daughter loves to answer the phone with a hearty “Ayo”. Cute but not very business-like.

So there’s cost and comfort versus professionalism. But isn’t it more common now for small businesses to run out of a home? Isn’t that what “cloud working” is all about? Meeting at a local hub, using free wireless internet access, online applications and project management systems. Skype gets around the phone issue to some extent. Is the cost of an office worth it? And what about paying for something that we won’t be using for the part of the year we are away.

We’re sticking to the home office for now. We need to fix some of the problems this raises – one phone line, home address, find a good meeting place that isn’t a local cafe. If we are planning to spend a good part of the year away then making this work is key. Being flexible, able to move our work around but give our clients and partners the stability of a fixed address and contact information. But most important we need to be strict about our work/home balance. And that goes both ways, making sure we get the work done when more tempting activities are nearby (painting, cake baking, running around in the garden…!) and making sure those other activities get a look in when work is all-consuming. How do other people make it work?

Anyway, others, for me, have included learning to drive, first trip away without parents, leaving home, first job, new job. Apart from parenting, these all pale into insignificance with the newest and steepest learning curve I’ve had to overcome in a while and that’s technology.

I did try doing a bit of work while the girls were babies, but my attempts to get stuff done while they slept soon failed when it became apparent that they weren’t “sleepers”. The balance was out of whack and both parts of my life were a struggle. It seemed neither children nor work was getting the best of me so I stopped working and became the full time mum I’ve been, until recently, for nearly four years. Just before the summer our eldest started pre-school a few mornings a week, so Simon and I decided it would be a good time for me to ease myself back in. We split the week, three days to him, two to me, and he has the girls when I work.

So Simon excitedly sets me up an account on the computer and off I go! But little did I realise how much things have changed. Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Web 2. What? I know I was never a tech genius but four years ago I was pretty good at using the internet and email. I even knew it was an email address and not a number (sorry, unfair joke at expense of close friend!). I felt I had to “get” these things because we’d already agreed that to pursue our goal of spending some of the year away, we’d need our work to be more portable and technology had a big part to play in that.

Twitter was the most confusing. I just didn’t get it. What the hell was everyone talking about? What did all the symbols mean? Were people actually talking the same language as me? I felt old. Inadequate. Past my sell by date. A computer idiot. Endlessly calling Simon into the room to interpret “tweets”. The more I read the more I hated it. People were just twittering on! It seemed so self obsessed! What was the point? I’m not sure Simon quite understood my frustration. He hadn’t taken four years away from the world. He thought I was just being pig headed. But I was honestly scared. Scared the world had moved on too fast and I had missed the boat. Scared I’d never get it. Scared I’d lost the ability to learn new things. Scared my mummy brain had turned to goo. And scared I’d be the one holding back our plans.

Time passed and I dipped in to Twitter. Slowly it began to make sense. Slowly I found people who spoke to me. Slowly the whole thing came alive. I still don’t claim to be fluent. I can never remember how to DM or RT without a reminder but I can shorten a URL and tweet it and even track how many people have had a look at what I’ve found or said. It turns out it’s pretty exciting!

So steep learning curves can still be climbed, age isn’t an issue, maybe attitude is, maybe willingness to try. My two days a week are great and a welcome break from being mum and my new skills are exciting but actually none of it can compete with time spent in the company of my kids. Three year old’s joke of the day – “What do penguins eat for breakfast? Worms. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.”