This week, I have been mostly being made redundant.

Don't worry about me; I'm fine! The stock response when someone is made redundant is to say you're sorry, ask if they're ok, etc. The fact is, much as I loved (most of) the people I worked with, the work itself was not very enjoyable and it was increasingly difficult to juggle working in an office with motherhood. When I first returned to work after maternity leave, my daughter caught every bug going and I ended up having to miss a lot of work. I worked in a call centre, which meant that if I wasn't there on a particular day, my team mates had to pick up the slack of my share of the calls.

When you work set hours in an office it's difficult to be a parent, single or otherwise. The nights when my daughter was having a particularly hard time with teething took on a whole new level of stress, as I began to panic about getting up for work in the morning and managing to coherently make my way through the day.

For a while now, I've been thinking I needed to find work I could do from home before my daughter started school and I had the nightmare of finding childcare in school holidays. Whenever we had a bad night's sleep and I then had to drag myself into the office, I found myself thinking life would be a lot easier if I was able to fit my hours around my other daily responsibilities. 

As well as working three days a week, I've been studying for a degree through the Open University (I was struggling with two modules concurrently when I returned to work, fool that I am). I write here as well as on a personal blog, and submit pieces to several parenting sites. Sometimes, I get around to doing some housework or socialising with friends.

Because I don't want studying or housework to overshadow my time with my daughter, it's all crammed into her ever-decreasing nap times, or the short hours between her bed time and mine - the time of day when you are least likely or able to get up and run a vacuum cleaner around the house, or to read and understand a chapter of a book on child development.

I recently had a conversation with another mother who used to commute to a job in the City, but is now self employed here in Salisbury. We agreed that for many mothers, self-employment without set office hours is really the only way to have any sort of satisfaction.

So my plan for redundancy is to become self-employed, working from home. In my head, everything will be a lot easier and more fun, I'll have more energy for puddle-splashing with my daughter, and the housework will definitely no longer be neglected... Watch this space...