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.”