Unbalanced

Last Thursday was a day of days!

In fact, the whole of last week was just 'one of those weeks'  with a few challenges on the work front and the juggling of roles.

It really got me thinking about this work - life balance thing.

A bit of a curve ball and all of a sudden it's chaos.

Let me share a little of my day...

Neil and I car shared last Thursday. He was spending most of the day at the Convention Centre near the city and I was back and fore between locations. I was in charge of picking up Sibs from after school care and he planned to get a cab home later on in the evening. We parked up and went our separate ways.

A few hours later I realised that he had the set of keys, or rather I realised that I had forgotten my keys... I tried to contact him and left a message to say I was heading into the city and would try and arrange a meeting point to pick them up.

Work was busy and I sort of forgot about it and set off on the bus to my next appointment.

I was just about to walk into a lecture theatre when my phone buzzed. Not wanting the distraction I decided to ignore it. Off it went again and this time I glanced down to see the words "SCHOOL" flashing back at me.

Cutting a long story short I had the conversation that went along the lines of  'you need to come and pick up your daughter she is injured'.

Oh heck!

I'm in the city....my car is miles away.....(I don't have any keys anyway!!)...I'm now running late for a presentation.....I can't get hold of Neil....I can't get hold of my friend and neighbour....I'm actually walking around in a circle!!

A few minutes later my friend calls me back realising that if I'm ringing in the middle of the day on a work day that something is up. She says all of the right things - reassuring me that she can be at the school in 5 minutes and will call back if she needs to. Sooo grateful.

So off comes the mother hat and back on goes the work hat.

Of course my phone buzzes again about half an hour later!

This time it was Neil responding to my rather curt "answer your phone" text. (There were more words than that in my text, but I won't share them here!)

Once my presentation was over I gathered my things and grabbed a cab to take me to Sibs.

We took a gentle walk around the corner to get home and then of course  I remember that I had no keys to get into the house!

I didn't have to worry as the front door was wide open!

Yes, the perfect ending to a ****** day.

Do I go in or stay outside? Do I call someone? My thoughts were moving at speed and I couldn't really think straight. I ventured in as far as the hallway and had a quick look around - the computer, TV, ipad all seemed to be in place. It would appear that the front door had blown open as the Yale lock hadn't been secured that morning. Phew!

Panic over, I set about making sure that Sibs was OK. Warm bath, drink, hot water bottle, can she have ibuprofen? What's for dinner?

She got to bed and Twmff the cat (bless him) stayed by her side and gave her lots of purring cuddles.

I eventually sat down and that's all I wanted to do was get lost watching something mindless on TV.

No, that wasn't going to happen  - the TV decided that was the day it didn't want to co-operate.
I changed the batteries in the remote control - nothing,
I fiddled about with cables - nothing.
I googled the problem - nothing.

I gave up and went to bed.

A few days later I met up with a couple of mothers from the school who asked me where I was on Thursday night. It was only then that I remembered that I should have been at a meeting that night! One where I had a reasonable input. I didn't send any apologies or report - I just completely, absolutely forgot everything about it!

There were just too many hats to wear that day. Too many balls to juggle.

The tipping point of the scales is so minute when it comes to balancing roles.

 Life is not full of 'perfect moments'. Life is at times challenging and it does go wrong.

I've done the full time worker, I've done the full time mother and I'm currently doing the part time trying to balance everything scenario.

Nothing is perfect. Nothing works all of the time, and everything is temporary.

But I have to remember that one bad day is just that - one.bad.day.

So it's almost Thursday again. Sibs is fine, there are checks in place to ensure that I always have my keys, and planned drop offs and pick ups have been worked out for the week.

Just to keep it real - the TV still isn't working - but that's OK. I can manage that one.