I can confirm my mother's standard question "no news, good news?" It has been a brilliant summer, and a very good past couple of months. I have poured most of my blog output into my project on combining careers and children - hence less ramblings on this site. A quick recap on where I stand:
After quitting my full-time office job at the end of 2013, I won a fellowship for a year to work on a project of my own choice. I had applied with a project proposal on making career and family more compatible. The project kicked off in June, and will run until June 2015. The months before, I continued to work in my own field (health for developing countries, known as global health) on a freelance, part-time basis. I recently picked this up again, and started working on another global health project on a part-time basis, to promote life-saving vaccinations for all children in poor countries.
It has been an incredibly fulfilling few months. I have managed to juggle my projects at a pace that suits my life - at times at a crazy pace, putting in 14-16 hour days. At times at a zero-pace, when I have needed to focus fully on having a day as a breather, spending some vacation quality time offline and off-work with the family, and spending quality time with friends and family who came over to Berlin to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary with us (blessed us!). In other words, I have managed to multi-task and juggle my life in a way that I enjoy it. There has been enough time to do everything that I like - including dance classes and my newest: picking up on piano lessons - WHEN I need it.
Do I regret quitting my office job? Not for one second. The more I think about it, the more this model of freelancing suits my life - and perhaps every working parent's life? It only works on two premises though: 1) either you are a risk-taker, or have a partner who has a stable income - because you never know what will follow the end of a project, and 2) you need to be far enough in your career - or determined enough - to get that next project.
Here are 5 reasons why I think having flexible job is better than having a permanent contract (with long office and presence requirements):
1) 9-5 jobs allow for very little flexibility. And if there's one thing that you need with kids: it's flexibility. For sicknesses, for those horror nights when all are throwing up and you just need to sleep the next day for a couple of hours, for all the errands you need to - or want to - keep running, for all these random vacations they get from daycare and school.
2) With a flexible job, you can schedule "own time" (sports, rest, reading a newspaper, meeting a friend for coffee) during the day - and work from a computer at home in the evening instead when the kids are in bed (reminder: I have a commuting husband with unreliable travel days - difficult to schedule anything properly in the evenings unless I want to bleed babysitting money; and most evening courses etc fall exactly into the time when the kids are still awake…)
3) It doesn't feel like a dead-end. No internal politics!!!! Whoop whoop!
4) It doesn't feel like a dead-end 2. No next promotion, no pay-rises to negotiate. No hierarchy games.
5) In theory, there are breaks between contracts if that's what you want, and are willing to take the risk when saying "no" if e.g. a project high time falls into the months of July/August. There's actual, real vacation….
Happy end of summer - enjoy the last rays of sun and warmth! We'll need it for the upcoming months.
