Three is the Magic Number

My youngest son turns three tomorrow and from within, I finally feel back on track with my work. Why did it take so much longer than I thought it would?

Over lunch last week, a new girlfriend picked up at my local soft play, admitted she was feeling in the doldrums about her work life. ‘It all feels so meh,’ she said, ‘like I’m just hovering above the whole thing.’ Late last year I had a similar conversation with an OG mate who shared her frustrations of work not really coming together even though her little one was coming up to their first birthday. These women had childcare arrangements more or less in place, they aren’t first time parents and are also vibrant, successful and dynamic in character.

I’m sharing what I told them both: I didn’t really recover my work mojo for around two and a half years after I had my kids and it took three years to feel that anything was properly moving again. It is only now six years after my first child that I’m making more money than when I got pregnant. I went back to work four weeks after my first (with hardcore pressure to finish a book and then quickly market it) and two months after my second (much more slowly with no major deadline). But it took more than two years both times to fully wrest the inertia and feel like there was an actual sense of momentum or clarity of focus in my work life.