I'm just a mother who can't say no

Liz Daniell

Have you ever noticed how, just as you approach the end of the last stretch of dual carriageway for 20 miles, you come up behind a convoy of caravans towed by elderly Marinas or a lorry with police outriders, flashing lights and warning signs declaring an abnormal load?

It turns out that life as a freelance is like that too. Just as the kids start counting the hours until they break up, the work comes rolling in. I'm not complaining, no, not at all, it's just . . . Well, why does it have to be now?

I knew I was in trouble when the mobile went during Connie's end-of-term Scottish country dancing demonstration. It was the culmination of my mother-from-hell routine. I forgot to send Connie into school with the right shoes, I got the time wrong and I held everything up for 15 minutes. This is exactly the sort of thing I swore would never happen once I'd stopped work and the darlings - instead of bosses, prestige, status and all the paraphernalia of the career ladder - were uppermost in my mind.

Her teacher finally phoned me at home. "Are you coming?" she asked. I dropped everything and ran (A week later, Connie woke me at 2am to tell me about the nightmare she had just had about the episode).

I sat watching the seven-year-olds heel and toe it in approximate formation across the playground from a perch on the fire escape (I had been far too late to get a seat on a bench).

And then my phone goes in the middle of the Dashing White Sergeant. Of course I say yes to the offer of work. Gabble it really, practically before I hear what the job is. So once again I plunge myself into the old merry-go-round of childcare.

First call in any emergency is my very, very old friend Mary whose obliging student son Alex came to the rescue last year - and turned out to be the most exciting childminder the girls have ever had (as well as being very popular with the mothers).

But Alex is already hitchhiking around Thailand or canoeing across Cambodia, or some such activity, and isn't due back for weeks and weeks - after which he'll undoubtedly be desperate for work, but by then it will be too late. Mary (who used her husband's frequent and prolonged absences to study and gained a first-class degree from the OU) is very dry as I wail down the phone at her. "Talk me through this," she says. "Why exactly did you stop work?"

She's right, of course. Why didn't I say no? How is it I find myself behaving exactly like my partner - as if work is more important than the family?

I feel a great reckoning coming on. One year after ditching the respectable job, and with the dust now thickly settled perhaps it is time to take stock. Then I convinced myself that I was doing it for them: that they needed me to be there when they came home from school, to hear which beastly child had poisoned their day and to show them how much better homework looked when written with a sharp pencil. But perhaps I always knew that I was doing it for myself, because I was sad that I was missing being there as they grew up.

It's great being at home. We've really cracked pencil sharpening and we love the group therapy aspect of it. And they are growing up, and I am there to see it. But a year is a long time. Without the rhythms of work, the ticking metronome of a regular routine, sometimes it feels like for ever.

Unlike work - where, over the course of a week, hours pass in gossip and speculation and queuing for cups of coffee and sandwiches - at home there is no downtime, unless you count staring into space and waiting for the kettle to boil.

There is also, potentially, no sense of purpose between escorting the kids to school and returning seven hours later to collect them. After all, there is a limit to the number of times you can vacuum (although I have to say I am light years from discovering what it is). And even supposing there wasn't, most people want something more in their lives than a shiny home and kempt kids.

Which I suppose is the answer to why I didn't say no. When the opportunity comes for work, for cash and intelligent adult company, I (lovingly) ditch the kids into the arms of a passing indebted student for the duration and enthusiastically embrace it. Without a twinge of guilt.