By Emma Hopkins Jones
If you had asked me a few months ago what the most important day of the working week was then I would probably have said Friday.
Tuesday the most important day of the week?
Often in my line of work we receive and send letters with a deadline for reply “by 4pm on Friday”. Or I might have said Monday being the first day of the working week. But no, it seems the answer is Tuesday. When I was free to attend meetings and seminars on any evening after work I never noticed this but since my return to work in January Tuesday keeps cropping up as the day of the week when stuff happens. That quarterly meeting of Family Courts Parliamentary Group in London – on a Tuesday. That monthly committee meeting – on a Tuesday. That free CPD seminar – on a Tuesday. My working days are currently Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. In May when my daughter goes to nursery I will start working 4 days a week and my day off will be, yep Tuesday. This is determined by the availability of childcare and therefore in the short term at least (whilst I’m on a waiting list at the nursery a long with half the other parents for a Monday or a Friday) there is nothing I can do about it. This wasn’t something I considered when thinking about my return to work. My focus was entirely on keeping my fingers crossed my employer would agree to my flexible working request but there are other elements to my career that it genuinely hadn’t occurred to me would be affected.
Other things I have discovered this month;
It is hard not to apologise for working part time. I really didn’t want to but I am finding myself saying “sorry, I only work 3 days a week”. It is a choice I have made in the best interests of our family so I want to be positive about it. Plus, I work bloody hard on those three days – my days at work are full throttle from the moment I get on the train, back-to-back appointments to squeeze everything into the days that I’m in and working late most nights to make sure I’ve completed as many tasks as possible before my ‘long weekend’ but yet I find that apology slipping in from time to time. If all jobs were required to be advertised on a flexible basis as the Women’s Equality Party propose then working flexibly would be the norm and I suppose there would be no need to justify my decision.
I love my job. I really do. After a lengthy period away from work I guess it could go either way. Once the initial thrill of the new “me time” has ebbed away and you are properly back in it, you might remember that actually you never wanted to do this, or worse still things have changed so that even though you used to love your job you no longer want to do it. With the legal position currently being that if you take more than Ordinary Maternity Leave (i.e. the initial 6 months) your employer doesn’t have to keep your original job open for you to return into if they can show it is not reasonably practicable many mothers returning to work will no doubt find that the job is literally not what they remember it being. However, I feel very fortunate that 9 weeks in I am really enjoying all aspects of my job from getting to know new team members and catching up with professional contacts to swotting up on legal developments, getting my teeth into a new case and going to court. Best of all on International Women’s Day I got to combine work with hanging out with my little lady on a Tuesday as I hosted a mum and baby afternoon tea to raise funds for a fantastic charity Smalls for All that provides underwear to women and children in Africa to help meet their basic hygiene and security needs.
# Apologising for working part time