Experiences of paid work and childcare

Yeah, she was working right up until she had him which - she hates it, it was her first job. I told her it's somewhere to start. Yeah, I was at TAFE doing an apprenticeship for carpentry while [son's name] was born. I ended up stopping that and was unable to complete the course. Took me a couple of weeks to realise that that wasn't where my heart is so I stopped working with that.

I was out of a job for about six months and ended up doing, removalist just for some quick cash until I was able to find the actual job that I wanted which was spray painting. I was a spray painter for a couple of weeks, which really annoyed me because I ended up getting sacked for someone else's work and that's what I wanted to do. So, I'm now going back to TAFE to try and get back into that thing and I don't know it really comes down to what you want to do and where you want to end up. And you kinda have to work that out before you start making your moves.

By the time I was, I don't know, 16, I at least want to be into like - the easiest way to put it is a white picket fence sort of lifestyle. White picket fence, nice three/four bedroom house, back yard, front yard, nice neighbourhood, but that's what everyone hopes for and like I want him to go to a private school. And so work's pretty much only option.

But it was three months we were just - it was a revolving door, hospital, home. Hospital home, hospital home, hospital home. And we had, there was a community service CAP, community asthma program, that were put onto us.

And they, I remember them calling me saying you know, "How does asthma affect your life?" I'm saying - I sat there and thought and went 'Bing, a lot'. And they started saying, "Well, does it affect your work?" "Yes, I'm pulling work off every second week. I can't work. This is a huge impact. It's - we don't have a life". I said, "Our life is the hospital or trying to keep her well".

And she was doing a little bit of creche at that time. By the time she hit one year old, or 11 months old, she ended up in ICU. And we said, "We pulled her out of creche - this is just, it's not good". And I remember our family doctor saying, "With her asthma this child probably won't be able to go to creche until she's three years old. Because she, because she's not going to be able to keep getting these sicknesses all the time".

And I thought, 'Oh my God, I can't work for three years. Like what's that, what's that going to do to my career? How are we going to afford it?' Because we can't - I need to work, we just couldn't afford for me not to work. I thought, 'Oh my God, what are we going to do?' And so you know we took her out of creche for a couple of months, and we managed to have people look after her, sort of a bit here. Mainly it was my parents that look after her a couple of days, or would do a bit of a swap around, move round. I'd work later and I'd work a little bit later at nights but look after her.

And so we managed to do that for a couple of months and then we got her into another creche. And then it - because I think the medication kicked in, it wasn't so bad, and we were able to resume some sort of normality to it.

And sure, I understood people's advice that baby needs me more but again, you don't know until you experience it. Now I know for sure how many developmental milestones the first year has and I want to be there for them. And I don't see why I would rush back to the office where, you know, your baby needs you a lot more. And so it probably comes down to being able to understand others only once you experience it for yourself and that sounds, again, like a cliché but it is so true.

I'm prepared to work part time but ultimately I'm not prepared to give up life and become a full-time mother. So having two or more children at the moment is a bit of a Mount Everest for us to consider climbing. And maybe it will come with time. We maybe need couple of years to settle and see how.

Think the concern for me is and I'm pragmatic about it, is if I work an hour drive away from home where will my childcare be? Will it be close to work or will it be close to home because both of them have disadvantages when you are called and you have to pick up your baby.

So if I worked, within a shorter distance and the childcare could be in between maybe I could imagine having two or three children. But just the logistics already put me off. How will I manage with child care that's so far away? But thank goodness that the employer gives us an option to go part-time until children are at school age. Because that is the only way I can imagine that we will cope as a family and keep things in order and manage to cook and manage to do grocery shopping and washing.

We did talk about who would - who would work and everything. Like I'd been actively looking for work continuously through my pregnancy and was successful in finding some contract work the last couple of months. So I worked right up until a few days before I gave birth and I'd indicated to him that like I wanted to continue to work because that's what I'm used to.

And he was busy setting up his own business and so I was keen to assist him in what - however I could with that. So we'd never really said, you know, "I'll stay home and you go to work". It was we were both going to do the best that we could but somehow I did have an expectation that he would provide the bulk of the income. And that's been a - like a cause of great upset [laughs] because he hasn't. So [laughs] yeah.

And I suppose it's - like it's difficult because I had such a horrible experience with work just before having the baby that I really - I don't know what I want to do. So I've been sort of looking in a fairly half-arsed manner and very clear about what I don't want to do, but don't know what I do want to do. So I've continued to work. Like I work for my dad, just a few hours a week that I do from home and have been pursuing employment opportunities, none of which have really worked out.

But when it looked like I was going to get something a few months ago, we were talking fairly actively about how we'd manage that. And he's always said that he'd be happy to stay at home with her and I probably have a higher earning potential than he does, so...

It's one of our issues that I maybe want to go see the psychologist, because we can't seem to agree on like where we're going to go money earning wise. Like he is really encouraging me to go back to work and said that we can move to a capital city again so that I can do that. But I just don't want to do that [laughs]. I just don't want to put on a suit and go work for a corporate again. Just I don't want to do that. But I could earn a lot of money doing that [laughs], so - so we sort of go round and round in circles about what we should be doing versus what we both want to be doing and where we should be living and who should be staying home and who should be earning the money. And I think secretly he thinks staying home with the baby is a piece of cake and he quite likes the idea of doing it [laughs].

Absolutely, and I guess like when I look back I'd always been open to the idea of working while the man stayed at home, just because I'm progressive like that, I suppose. But then when faced with the reality of it, I really - I've noticed how resistant I am to it.

So I went back at about seven months. Purely coincidentally really. The job that I had previously had finished up but I had another job - a previous employer rang me and I started working for them part time and for me that was one of the best things that could have happened. It, it gave me some sense of myself back, something else to do and it actually meant that the days that I was at home with [son's name] I enjoyed much more. The two or three days that we had together were much more fun because I had some time to myself and I was interacting with other people again, and so for me it was a really good balance to go back to work and, yeah the, the anxiety.

So it was all around that time that the anxiety and the sadness, I guess, started to lift. I could - I could begin to move again, walk again and so we could go for walks with the pram and he was a lot older - a lot older, six months but not quite - he wasn't in that really baby stage and starts to interact more so it becomes more natural.

Yeah, so it was - certainly one of the things that helped me enormously was going back to work, if. Yeah and - and I will do the same again. I was one of the first in my mother's group to go back to work and even my mum I think thinks that it was too soon but it was the best thing, it was most definitely the best thing for - for my son and I that I went back to work and he's absolutely fine at daycare. He got sick like all kids get sick when they go to daycare to start with but, you know, it's not - I don't - I don't - I didn't have such an issue with that and it gave me some space.

And going back to work was wonderful in one way but there were so many challenges attached because my first child really didn't want to go to kindergarten, to creche, and cried at - but then he ended up crying every time I left him until he was six and went to school.

So that was, again was his personality but that left me feeling absolutely wretched for the entire day and when I got there I couldn't, I didn't know what they were talking about because it had been a couple of years and I couldn't focus on... I also couldn't see the point in a lot of it.

I send them to school and to creche, they can make mess there. As you can see it's by no means a temple this house but, yeah, I would, that would be my ideal.

But I'm, I also really want to go to work. I couldn't stay home all the time and just be full-time at it. I really admire women who can and who do, but I can't and that means sending the children to creche and they don't always like it and that - I feel wracked with guilt but I also love my work... that's a real juggling act.

I made an effort to go to my mother's group, which was organised by the Council. Sometimes it really was an effort but it was an effort that paid off and making friends in the park, because everyone's actually feeling the same thing.

Although some people look so much more together than you, everyone's really feeling the same thing. It's a bit lonely and it's a bit discombobulating and your body's dreadful compared to what it was and hurts, probably, and you're sleep deprived and you've lost that - you've actually lost - I think work defines a sense of self, well it did for me anyway, I was very much defined by my work and I was very proud of it and now I'm on the other side of, I'm finding that my work really gives me a sense of purpose and of self and of my importance in the world and when you lose that and you go into mothering you actually kind of disappear, you - I did anyway.

You kind of, the work, the, you know the corporation or the university or whatever it was you were working continues without you. It turns out you were replaceable and you quickly lose contact with those people on a daily basis anyway. So this whole network that's just gone, even if it's only for a short period of time, but it's a network that fed into your belief about yourself and your importance and that, in which there are hierarchies and structures that you played a very important role in, and that's all gone when you've got a tiny baby and they don't understand that you're a very important person somewhere else [laughs].

I had told my employer that I would be ready to go back to work and party on at three months, and of course, you know my baby would just stay with my mother. And of course, it wasn't like that at all. She was still feeding every three hours. So that my health nurse was saying, "Well that's ridiculous, you know. She's obviously not hungry; she's just using you as a dummy. Try and stretch her out. If she cries, take her out and show her a tree". [sighs]

So it was very hard for me to do work. My employer - I just type reports. So I could do that from home. But they were very - I had to push them, and I wasn't confident to push them, because we didn't have any other money coming in. I was it, and we'd had to take out a loan or increase our loan for me to have those three months off work, because we'd used our baby bonus to buy a car because my old car wasn't really happy for a baby because it was a vintage car. So I started doing two hours - two days a week from home, and my mum would come one day, and my partner would do the other day.

And the days my partner did, I would just cry in the study, because he would just be out there, and he would be having a ball. But he would do nothing. He'd like cover the kitchen in dishes, and he'd cook me beautiful lunches, but the house was an absolute bombsite. He would bring her in every two hours or something for me to feed, because she just fed so frequently. And I'd be trying to get all my work done, and I wouldn't get it done. And then I'd have to try to do it at nights, and that was really hard.
And my mum would come, and then I'd hear from her, "Oh, he's - what's the story with him? This is just like, the house is..." And she'd tidy up and everything and entertain the baby. Sometimes when my mum was there, nobody could get her to sleep. My partner could get her to sleep because he would just walk around the horse farm and she would sleep on him in the sling. But my mum really didn't want to wear the sling. So I'd have to stop work. And I'd have to get her to sleep, and that often took 40 minutes, and I was getting paid by the hour. So I'd just lost an hour's work.

But I think work being a huge determinant of it. Just that each time - after I had [oldest son's name] I had people wanting stuff from me. With [youngest son's name] I was getting emails demanding me to do work when he was like five or six weeks old. So what would happen next time? No. Technically on leave but still expectations about performance and production and stuff. So I think that decision about when the family is finished is also a tricky one. And the idea of being 'behind' is just stupid. I think it's something that I constantly struggle with. So I got this grant and I had some career coaching as part of it. And one of the really great things from that was about being okay about valuing my values and around family and trying to develop strategies to resist those pressures.

I find the guilt for me is that I'm technically part-time but I get emails all day every day and phone calls and text messages whether it's a work day or not a work day. So I guess that pressure - I'm constantly - I feel like I'm not working enough and then when I get messages when I'm home with my children, I find that colleagues or students don't respect my non-work days. They expect me to respect it for them, especially the male colleagues who I collaborate with and stuff. But they don't respect that for me. And I find that really difficult. You know, if they're not at work, they're not at work. Whereas if I'm not at work it's seen as something that's somehow negotiable.

I think there's an expectation about always of being available. I think smartphones don't help at all. And I think in academia [...] it's all about the career and that it's - and also this idea that it's not actually about the money whereas seriously, part of the reason why you work is for financial security. You might get - it might be personally rewarding but a lot of it's about the money. And if I'm not paid - given the importance of that economic imperative behind work, then I think that that makes them contacting me on those non-working days even more shitty. It still doesn't take away the guilt though. That I'm not doing the job properly even though I am doing my job properly. I was working until three o'clock this morning. And then that I'm not - because I'm answering emails or text messages, I'm not doing my parenting job properly. And it's like it can only be a lose/lose situation. Nobody's going to win except for the organisation that you work for and I think that's shit.

Yeah, I wanted to keep trying to do this course and they were eight months when they when they started back and the place that they're in was the only place I looked at. I looked on the internet at a few places and these guys, (a) they had a good website, so I went down and had a look, and it was a brand new facility and there were windows everywhere, and you could see everything that everybody was doing, and the sleeping area was lovely for the babies and it just, it was so nice my instinct just said, 'This is good enough, I'm not trying anywhere else'.

They're expensive, but they're really good. I found the place, I was happy with it, and we had, we booked months and months out from when they started. The few weeks leading up to when they went there, I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I'm doing this to my children. They're going to be with someone else for the first time. I won't be with them'. And I had a few sleepless nights, and then I thought, 'This is ridiculous, I've just got to get over that. And we've done the best we can do and I've just got to trust my judgment and we'll see how we go'.

And it's always been really good. We put them in care, not just 'cause I wanted to study. It was about socialising them with other children and giving them different experiences, and having them learn things from other people that I didn't know, from people who were professionals, and were doing this all the time. And, from that reason, it's been a really good decision.

When I stopped studying for one semester, we wanted to keep them in there. So they're still in two days now. I mean, they come home and they're singing songs and they're doing things and we think, 'We didn't teach them that. They're learning that there'. They have yoga classes and dance classes and painting and all these group activities that we couldn't give them, that are age-appropriate. You know, it's really good for them. And it's really expensive, but it's really good for them.

The bonus on top of that, is I get a break from them and I'm not quite as loopy as I would otherwise be. I tend to I think, 'Right, on the two days they're not here, I'm going to run around and I'm going to do all these amazing jobs and accomplished so much 'cause I can'. I usually spend most of the day, just not moving 'cause I'm so physically tired and just shell shocked and just staring at the walls, just resting. Some, for a very long time, when I should have been studying, on those days, I actually wouldn't study, I'd come home and go back to bed, 'cause I had not had any sleep so it was one of the few chances, few times I can actually get a decent block of sleep, do a full sleep cycle, without being woken up.

So for the first several months, I would just come home and sleep. I don't tend to need to do that very often anymore. I just - occasionally I still do. But it's just nice to have some downtime and just sit on the computer and just play, just read things. I don't often actually accomplish a great deal, it's just - I was used to for so many years having time that was just peace and quiet and being able to have a two-hour bath with a glass of wine. And you know, I'm lucky if I get a shower... ever!

Well, when the twins - after the twins, my wife had maternity leave for a year from work. And she's a management position, and she was on a better wage than myself. And I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad after, certainly after missing out on my eldest son from my first marriage, his growing up.

That was something that I wanted to do, and I've always been good with children. Even when I was younger, I was the babysitter for friends and family and stuff. So yeah, it was certainly something that I wanted to do. So after the first year of my wife looking after the kids, I was supposed to have a year off to look after the kids, and that was nearly four years ago now. So that's gone; it's gone well.

It's also trying at times. It certainly is easier to go to work than raise children.

And one of the fundamental things that I don't like about raising children is putting them in childcare. And I think that's where my first wife and I sort of separated over, because she was interested in putting him into childcare. And I'm more of a believer, you know, if you have children, you have them to raise them and look after them, not to just billet them out to childcare so you can go back to work. But that, that's just my philosophy.

So he was - when we separated, obviously she had to go to work. And he was brought up in childcare predominantly. I didn't enjoy my job either. I had - well, it was probably the nature working for an employer, you know, tight deadlines and unrealistic expectations that me as the technician had to make sure that everything was on time, you know. Even the, they mightn't have ordered parts until the 11th hour, sort of thing, and that was up to me to do it all. So I, yeah, I used to fantasise about how easy it would be to look after the children at home, and now I'm on the other shoe, and fantasise about going back to work [laughs] and how that would be easy.

Yeah and, even my wife, having the same, the same experience of being a stay-at-home mother, and then going back to work. She certainly agrees that, the non-parenting role's a lot easier. So yeah, it's certainly brought a lot more understanding to us.

Her mum stayed in India and we came back with my mum and dad and - because we need someone here because we are working on Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, otherwise we need to put the kid in the childcare and, in our culture it's really hard for us to put the kid in childcare, and she was a bit upset. She don't want to put the child in childcare rather than me, so they're still here after nearly one year and they're going back and once they've gone back we have a bit stressful things like my parents were really looking after three of us actually and we never had a parental responsibilities like where - because where - just after finish the work, we go back to the home and we found that my mum and dad are giving a bath to child and they feed the child and all the jobs have been finished, and we just play with the kid.

But once they're gone back and all the responsibilities comes to us, but we were happy to do the responsibilities, we didn't find any problem with that, but the issue was that we can't put her in a childcare.

And we tried to put her in childcare but the - right, it was a shocking experience for my child, I believe, because we don't use English as a spoken language in - at home, we always speak our Indian language because I started speaking English once I came here only, from 2010 onwards I started to speak English. I never used English as a spoken language before coming here. So still I'm not comfortable, 100 per cent comfortable in English, so we just speak Indian at home.

And that's why my daughter also didn't learn English and once I put her in childcare from 9:00 to 5:00 and from Monday to Friday, she can't cope with that and when I go to the childcare at the evening to get her and she was crying, crying, crying, crying and she didn't eat anything. And even the workers told me that she, she's lying down after crying, crying, getting tired and that's too hard. And my wife get upset and then we got her mum to come again and then she came and she stayed with us for the six months. She was here up to last month and when she went I asked my parents to come, then they are here at the moment and they can stay here.

Oh, she don't want to miss the baby actually, like, my parents and her parents offered that they can take baby back to India, so you don't worry about your job or anything and we know that they will look after the baby more than what we are doing here, more better. But we don't want - we can't miss her even one day. Yeah, we got very much our affection for the baby. But we got used to it because - anyway, we know that the reality we have to anticipate the - because we had to work, we have got a mortgage and so. So we are coping with that and we are not - at evening we can see the baby, so it's - yeah, coping with that.