Today is the Day!

I wrote this shortly after I left the corporate world. Its taken me a little longer than expected to launch my blog but I really want to share this with you. It was the start of everything...........

June 2016 - Today is the day that I have wished for, today is a day that I hoped for. I wasn’t sure I would ever see today while my children were small and now it’s here…..and I feel a little sad.

Once upon a time I was a career girl. I LOVED my job in financial services. In my young, naïve optimism I thought that there would never come a time when I would want to leave my then employer (I was an eejit basically). Why would I? The money was decent, the benefits were good, the office was nice. It was fairly close to home and I had free parking (there are people who would give their eye teeth for the latter 2 points in Dublin). I really believed in the culture and I was doing well there. Fast forward a handful of years, enter the first child and things begin to shift.

I went on maternity leave truly believing I would gallop back after the 6 months were up. My little girl arrived and as the weeks went by I began to wonder why/how I could leave her and go back to the office. I did, but never felt the same. My baby was in full time crèche, I had changed, financial services had changed, the culture of the organisation was changing and it just didn’t feel like home any more. I will save the how’s, what’s and whys for another day but basically through a combination of planning, sacrifice and luck sprinkled with a good dose of sporadic anxiety ridden moments of panic and near miss mental episodes I left the Bank a month ago and today is the children’s last day at crèche.

I must admit that guilt has become a constant in my life since I went back to work after my first maternity leave (which for the record I dragged out for 11 and half months). I felt guilty for leaving my children in crèche full time (not everybody does or should feel like this). Even though I really believe that environment is good for them and I am very happy with my crèche, we have no support network around us so they are literally there all day 5 days a week. I would have liked just a little less, say 3 days in crèche and others with family members but that wasn’t possible for us. It didn’t help that once my daughter started school she realised that some other children get to home with their Mammies afterwards. She began asking why she couldn’t and would occasionally burst in hysterical tears over the issue and exclaiming that she didn’t like the crèche anymore (little girls are masters at triggering the Mammy guilt switch). My little boy is a little clingier than she was at the age of 2 so every morning was awash with crying, screaming ‘MAAAAAAMMY’ and clinging to me for dear life resulting in me having to physically unpick him finger by finger whilst one of the ladies took him. All very traumatic for everybody involved. None of it was helped by the fact that I was then getting into the car to go to a place that I no longer liked. To be somebody who I no longer wanted to be and conform to a culture that no longer sat with my morals. So I took the decision to leave. I had re-trained and set up a little business a year prior to this and knew that in the long run one would have to go but was never actually sure which one it would be. One offered job security and financial stability and the other did not, but hey, I made the decision to leave the 'sure thing' and try to be happier.

The time between the decision being made and my actual exit was about 6 months. I have to say on the day I left the Bank I was feeling a bit nostalgic but there was very very little sadness. But today, the day my children will actually leave the crèche and we will spend so much more time together I feel sad, and guess why I feel sad……….guess!?! GUILT! Bloody guilt strikes again. You see in the last 6 months they have miraculously decided that they love the bloody crèche! The girl announces about 3 months ago “I never want to leave my crèche” and I’m like “sorry, what now?!?” The boy also decides in the last few months that after 18 months of morning time dramatics he’s actually grand and starts skipping in the door in the morning "Bye bye Mammy” and barely a glance back at me. Where I used to have to practically commando roll past the window on the way back to the car for fear of him spotting me and kicking the hysteria up a notch he’s now sitting with his friends waving. Seriously like WHAT???? So now here I am feeling guilty again because I am uprooting them, dragging them away from their friends and all the fun activities to be at home with me.

Others emotions include, ‘Ah Jaysus am I able’, ‘work was probably easier’ and of course ‘WHAT THE HELL AM I GONNA DO WITH 2 CHILDREN ALL DAY’. Of course there is also a big slice of ‘I am so happy and lucky to get to spend more time with my babies, bring it on!’

Today is the day, the first day of our new life.

I’ll keep you posted on proceedings………wish me luck

The Cheeky Mummy - Cara Carter runs Cheeky Squeaks teaching Pregnancy Yoga, Baby Massage and Baby & Toddler Yoga in Rathfarnham, for more info select the relevant tabs above