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I'm Back in The Saddle


It’s late one Monday night in September 2015 and I’m staring at my to-do list:

Fill in forms for ‘meet the teacher’ meetings X3

Find something about ‘people who help us’ for four year old’s show and tell

Sew Cubs badge on jumper, ditto Beaver badge

Make Tudor outfit for 8 year old, scrape mould off pomander we made last week

Write comments in reading records X3

Do spellings. Ditto times tables

Buy food for Harvest Festival. X3

Wrap shoe boxes to put Harvest food in

Go to start of year coffee morning for Yr 4. And Yr 2. And Kindergarten.

Wrap many exercise books in sticky back plastic

Fill in ‘Who am I’ form for 4 year old’s teacher (help no idea must spend more time with him)

FIND JOB.

Oh my God I need a job. But where does a clapped out cart horse who ‘hasn’t worked’… (ha ha biggest joke EVER!!) for 8 years start?

Flashback to September 2004. I’m sitting in my office in Soho. I’m features editor on Good Housekeeping magazine. I’m wearing a pencil skirt and shoes that have never been worn outside. I’ve just interviewed Joanna Lumley and have been inside number 10 Downing St more than once. Liberty is, literally, my corner shop.

Fast forward to September 2015. I’m crawling under the kitchen table, scraping peas off the floor, silently sobbing. I’m mother to an 8 year old, a 6 year old and a 4 year old. I wear ill-fitting M&S black jeans and long tops to hide ‘the roll’. As for shopping, if it doesn’t sell baby wipes, I don’t shop there.

But before the youngest has finished his first full day at big school everyone is asking ‘Are you working now? When will you get a job?’

So I apply for jobs, big jobs, poxy jobs, ones I don’t understand and ones I’m totally unsuited to. Nothing. A lot has changed out there since I was last in a full time journalism job.

I start writing for free. I interview a Cherokee writer for a charity called Border Crossings. I help a fashion designer write a book. I write feel-good blog posts for a lifestyle magazine. My husband points out that most people get paid to work. I agree that this is a nice idea but can’t work out how to get to do this.

Then my sister mentions a course she’s heard of. Digital Mums. They’re all about helping mums upskill and get back to work but in a more flexible, family friendly work space. It feels right. I’m suspicious that anything so logical could be on offer but I look them up. This, as Oprah would say, is my ‘Aha moment’. I call them and after 2 months of research and dithering, I throw my hat in the ring and enrol.

Before I know it, it’s January 2016 and the course is about to start. My nearest and dearest are entertained by the idea of me being a digital mum as I was always the least digital of person ever. I used Facebook once a year, hadn’t managed to use the Kindle I was given 4 years ago and my mobiles were always so basic that a while back a stranger offered to buy mine to add to his retro phone collection (no joke).

The course starts. The Digital Mums website has this picture of this beautiful, calm lady being a Digital Mum in a beautiful home but I realised by midday on day 1 that I was not going to be that woman. Picture a really really tired lady with bad hair, clinging onto a roller coaster for dear life as it spins her out of control. That was me.

In those first few weeks I might as well have been learning Russian. New words flew around. Moodle. Doodle. G+. Google hangout. Pocket. Canva. Sprout social. Pablo. Thunder clap. Hootsuite. Buffer. Evernote. Google alerts. Buzz Sumo. Tweet Deck. Periscope. Vine. And WTF was IFTTT anyway???

But I loved the Dawn Frenches, my peer group. Thank God for them. I’m one of four girls, went to girls’ schools, I worked in women’s mags… I’m big on women supporting each other. And we did in spades.

I got lucky with my client, Anna, who runs a copywriting business. She was patient, had realistic expectations, bags of enthusiasm and wasn’t micromanaging in the least, which was great for my fragile ego. In all truthfulness I probably spent 25 minutes crafting my first tweet for her (so much for spontaneous messaging!). I mastered hashtags. Tagging. Scheduling. Picture sizing. Managed to fumble my way through a spreadsheet. Became fixated on the numbers of Twitter followers growing daily. And before I knew it I was ending my competition, winding up my campaign and scheduling my last bits of content.

Night after night of going to bed at 1am has taken its toll and I’m exhausted, ratty, fall asleep on page 2 of Chip and Biff and have cried in the playground more than once. The house is a pit, the children think it’s normal to have porridge for tea and I don’t know if I still have friends.

But I’m proud. Proud of what I learnt - I have loads of new skills which I’ll be able to use to pick up #workthatworks. And proud that I took this thing on. To push myself out of my comfort zone and get through it has been revitalising. I needed it.

I love the concept of Digital Mums. There are so many talented women who want to work but who want to be able to work in a flexible way that enables them to earn, to use their skills but also to fit it around children. And Digital Mums is a good way to go about it.

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