Dealing with disappointment.

When it comes to children, working over the holidays and unexpected illness.

I take my three kids away for a week so that my husband can work.

It’s fun; it’s intense. We connect; I long for a sustained period of time alone.

On the train back, my youngest starts to seem ill. He’s getting a temperature. He sleeps on my lap.

That night, back home, I share a bed with him and wake when he wakes; cooling him down, feeding him water, giving him medicine.

In the morning, he seems sprightly, but I have a feeling he’ll soon crash.

I’m right, he does.

The two-night camping trip my husband had planned with the children is postponed.

He takes the older two out and I stay home with the youngest, working on my laptop next to him while he sleeps through the day.

I can work like this. I’m used to it.

But my longing for time alone, at home, with uninterrupted hours stretching out in front of me won’t be answered.

I feel it in my body - a yearning; a hunger; a need that is now suspended.

It doesn’t disappear but my child takes priority.

My husband offers to take them out for the day, or somewhere else for the night.

But I won’t send him away when he’s ill.

I need to be close to him; to look after him.

This is motherhood.

This is being a working mother.

This is the juggle.

This is the strain.

This is when I remember that while I cherish my work, it will never come first.

This is why I always start a project as soon as it’s commissioned, rather than close to the deadline.

I do my work upfront to allow for situations like this to interrupt the workflow.

Maybe tomorrow he will be okay and they will go away for the night.

I would like this.

My husband would like this.

The kids would like this.

Perhaps I could rearrange the dinner I’d planned to host, with five friends, that I cancelled last-minute.

As well as finish off draft two of my non-fiction book proposal, do a final edit on the ghostwriting book and make plans for the coaching course I’m launching in September.

And have time to raise my SQ: breathwork, yoga nidra, shamanic journeying, intention-setting, manifesting, movement.

But I am open to whatever happens, because I have spent nine years working and mothering in this way.

Annie x