On motherhood and...Boarding life

One of these days, someone will say to me "Remember that time you decided it was a good idea to take a residential job in a boarding school with a toddler and C working (more than) full time and then you nearly had a nervous breakdown?" and I will be able to smile wryly. At the moment, the ongoing catastrophe that has been my work/life balance since January 2018 is still very much too close for comfort, or any wry smiling.

Flash back to June 2017, and the logic is pretty damn logical. I am about to return to work, with just the school summer holidays between me and a four-day-a-week teaching job, located 40 minutes from Brighton. I am asked whether I would be interested in a promotion - and it's a promotion that comes with accommodation on site. I LEAP at the chance. No mortgage, no commute, the chance to save - and of course the actual desire to learn more, the ambition to be more senior within the school, and the chance to develop my pastoral skill set which I had long had my heart set on doing. So far, so sensible. What I managed to overlook entirely was the fact that, in order to be suited to living and working in a girls' boarding house in the heart of mid-Sussex, I would need to have had a complete freaking character transplant.

To the uninitiated, the Housemistress job in a boarding school is essentially to be a cross between a head of year and a temporary mother - in my case to to 60+ Sixth Form girls. There are HUGE benefits to this. The girls in my care are, almost without exception, magnificent human beings - funny, warm, inspiring and certainly worthy of all the time and energy a job like this demands. Many of them view you as an indispensable part of their school life, and really appreciate the relationship you have with them. You get to take care of girls that really need your help, and in a few cases make a real and long-lasting difference. If that was what this post was about, that would be the end of it. But to focus on the good stuff is to overlook the staggeringly tough.

The flipside looks like this:

1. Working 2 out of every 3 weekends in term time. Being deprived of the chance to see family while you are still technically in the same building as them. Dealing with the guilt of friends and further-afield family saying they never see you. Declining 2 out of every 3 social invitations for the same reason. Watching social life wither away like a sad old prune. Feeling 82 not 32

2. Evening working - a few nights a week I knock off at 6.30, put Maggie to bed, and am back on duty at 9pm - pretty much when I should be snuggling down with C and True Detective

3. International flights - if one of the girls has to get up at 4am to fly to Belarus, I am up too. If one gets back from Munich at 1am, I am also waiting up.

4. Living on a 60-mile-an-hour road with not even a decent cafe or shop within walking distance

5. Having to drive absolutely everywhere. When you have a toddler, getting in the car is a sodding expedition in itself. You don't want to do that nonsense more than once or twice a day.

6. Having no distance between my personal and professional lives. Gone are the days when Friday afternoon meant a cheerful drive home singing along to the radio, followed by pizza and prosecco. Now they mean walking from my classroom, across the school grounds, and back to my office: where I essentially carry on working.

7. Responsibility. This is a double-edged one...I love the responsibility that comes with the job in some ways, but the timing has been abysmal. You have to be there for your students pretty much 24/7 and this involves a degree of selflessness which would be demanding even without a toddler. The combination of actual maternal and professional ‘maternal’ responsibility can be overwhelming - one night recently I was woken twice by Maggie and then once by a student, all between midnight and six. Not a balance that is sustainable for long.

I could go on - but the more I write this the more I realise this post is becoming one long, embittered rant. I have realised I made a bad decision for good reasons, and the past year has certainly taught me a huge amount about patience, self-preservation and my fundamental unsuitability for life in the countryside. And at the end of the day, it is a learning curve which has led to a happy ending (for those of you who waded this far through the whining)...I am pregnant! And so from the summer I will be back in Hove (AKA civilisation), an older, wiser, patienter (?!) person because of the last 12 months, but also desperate for my city-dwelling life to recommence. It can't come soon enough.