Not just a long holiday

Yesterday afternoon I had a stitch-like pain in my right side, which lasted until about 11pm. The books and websites all reassured me that this was normal: caused by the stretching of the uterine muscles. I would have thought this should be a more gradual and less painful process, but in fact it all seemed to happen yesterday, rendering me fairly immobile for most of the evening. I don’t suppose I have felt the last of it.

Meanwhile the biggest concern on my plate is how to earn money and bring up a child, after my 6 months’ barely-paid maternity leave is up. For those who are unfamiliar with the system, the deal in the UK is that for the first four weeks of maternity leave, you get paid 90% of your salary. You then receive just over £100 a week for 22 weeks, which takes you up to six months. During this time, your employment contract remains intact; you have the same entitlement to annual leave, pensions etc, and you are guaranteed to be able to return to your old job.

At the end of the six months, you can opt to take another six months off, but this will be entirely unpaid. Again, your contract of employment remains in place, and you can return to your old job. You just don’t get any money. You can of course go back to work at any time during this year, and then you would be on your previous terms and conditions, provided you did the same work.

At the end of the year, your options are to return to work full time, to negotiate part time hours, or to hand in your notice. As Pete is not a high-flying executive with an enormous salary, but only a simple programmer with a relatively stress-free existence, our only real option is for me to return to work. A few months ago I was confident that I would be able to work from home, which would at least alleviate some of the childcare burden. Burden is obviously the wrong word to use for something I actually want to do; just that we have to find a balance between caring and earning money for food. Unfortunately a recent regime change has made it less likely that working from home will be a real option, which means I will probably have to go to the office on a fairly regular basis. We are currently trying to decide what combination of childcare and working will be best for all concerned. Here are some of the things we have to consider:

• I need to work at least 28 hours a week to make enough money for us to live the lifestyle to which we are not yet accustomed. This could be three full days in the office, or one day in the office plus four 5-hour days at home, or any combination of the above.
• Pete is prepared to work a four day week, so that he gets a full day of childcare while I go into the office.
• If I go to the office, we have to factor in another two hours of childcare, to cover my travel time, or Pete has to do the drop-off and pick-up, although he usually gets home at the same time as me, so that wouldn’t reduce it by much.
• I feel strongly opposed to putting a six-month-old baby into a nursery for 10 hours a day, even if it’s only twice a week. Also nurseries are hideously expensive, so if this was the only option, then there would simply be no point me returning to work at all. So nursery care is not an option.
• Childminders, on the other hand, seem to offer better care at a lower cost. The ratio of adult to children tends to be lower, and the qualifications and experience are better. Using a childminder would cost nearly half what I earn while the baby is in the childminder’s care, so there would still be some income, albeit not the full 28 hours’ worth.
• It will be very hard for me to accept the idea of a stranger having so much input into the raising of our child; but that’s another post

Having a baby is something we are doing voluntarily, in the full understanding that we will not have as much money [or enough sleep - how boring it is when people make that remark] until the child is older. We currently save a lot each month, and the disposable element of our income goes mostly towards books and computery stuff. It won’t be that much of a hardship to cut back, compared with the rewards we are expecting from Project Baby. At this stage, we can only shrug and hope that we find a good solution, or that we can live with the solution we are stuck with.