It's 8.15pm on the first day of my blog and a story of a journey home with plenty of material. My wife Charlotte works for a law firm that is family friendly, so she can leave at 5 on the dot. As we both work in Manchester city centre Charlotte walks to my office so I can leave at my finishing time of 5.30. Annabel's nursery shuts at 6pm, with a £10 fine for pickups, and the journey there is around 25 minutes - you may begin to see the problem.
I am a stickler for punctuality. It's not the fine (we have been let off a couple of 5 minuters, they are a great nursery), it's eating into someone's evening that makes me want to get there on time. Charlotte is NOT a stickler for punctuality. She has no conception that 3 minutes late makes ALL the difference - cue a highly stressed drive home, including a Colin Mcrae style charge round Manchester's back street rat runs. I'm in a temper, Charlotte responds to my rage with hysterical laughter, I get madder, drive faster and faster, angrier and angrier... you know what I mean.
As this blog develops I hope to show a theme that life is suddenly on a knife edge. I was so wound up that I went for a run when I got home and knocked 2 minutes off my best time - I used to play sport to get rid of stress but fatherhood has scuppered most of that, so I now have to run to manage my waistline. I hate running, but it's the best thing I know for calming stress.
What is my point here? Probably, if I asked, my work would let me go 5 minutes early every night which would largely solve the problem, but I feel that's unfair on everyone else, I wanted to be a dad, I should take the consequences etc. Why doesn't our nursery, or any nursery for that matter, stay open until 6.30pm? But the nursery nurses have homes to go to, why should their evening be eaten into? So I guess my point here is that there are no easy answers, no-one is being victimised, and that maybe there is no way to bring up a family AND keep working AND live a calm life. Or is there? That's for another day - I've got a bottle to make up.
