Guest Post: It's okay to admit that you're finding the juggle hard
Written by Matthew Knight
The Freelance Parent is currently a free service-based newsletter aimed at helping its subscribers thrive professionally and personally. While Cat is taking some time off to have a baby, we have some brilliant guest parents stepping in each fortnight to inspire your Monday mornings. If you find this week’s issue helpful, please consider supporting the newsletter by donating £3 here and sharing with your friends. All Kofi donations will go to the guest writer.
Leapers' founder and single dad, Matthew Knight explains why there’s no shame in admitting that you’re finding the juggle hard.
Hello. I'm Matthew Knight, dad, freelancer, mental health advocate, coffee drinker, but not always in that order.
I'm a strategist, and I help businesses make decisions on what to do next, I also run a project called Leapers - supporting the mental health of the self-employed. Right now, I'm in the school summer holidays, which means I get to take a little break from all of those things and focus on my children for a while.
It's one of the best things about freelancing - being able to take solid time off to be with my children. For example, when my first child was born, I was freelancing and this gave me the opportunity to be with my new-born daughter, support her mom, and be there as a dad. I’m hugely grateful that I could afford it and that I was able.
When my second child was born however, I’d just started a full-time job. The anxiety around freelancing, uncertainty of income, lack of self-motivation and energy levels steadily declining (which in hindsight were the early stages of depression) meant that I wasn’t able to take any parental leave. Shared parental leave also didn’t exist before 2015 and, as I was within the first months of a new role, I wasn’t allowed to take time off as a new parent or new employee.
To this day, I still resent having to prioritise that choice, yet it’s something we as parents, especially as freelancers, have to balance almost daily. "Focus on the most important things in your life!” they say, but the need to generate income, so I can pay the bills, so I can care for the most important things in my life - my children - means that there’s always a tension between prioritising work and family.
Employees have the decision made for them; they only have a finite amount of time off allowed, and the office hours dictate when and (in pre-COVID times) where they worked. Kids often just have to lump it, and go to after school clubs.
As a freelancer, I get to design my own working schedule, but any time my children aren’t at school, the feeling of guilt for not spending time with them when I could be, is overwhelming. Even if I have work with pressing deadlines, putting them in an after school club weighs so heavily on my mind, I’ll be distracted to the point I can’t work anyway, and I’ll almost always pick them up early. I occasionally try and take some solid time off, but I can only do it when the girls are away with their mom, and I don’t have the option to see them, else I feel bad that I could be spending time with them when I’m not.
Summer holidays are an amped up version of this, with long periods of time where I want to focus on the girls, go away, do fun things. I design my time around when I have them, and promise myself I’ll take some time off when they’re with their mom. But then a client will ask if I can just come along to a meeting and, if I have availability, I’ll generally say yes. If I don’t have the girls and I don’t have any projects on, it's time I can work.
There’s no gender angle here. I’m not writing ‘as a dad’. I’m just writing as someone who just finds the juggle hard, and most of the time, I’m not sure how to cope with it. It’s hard. Really hard. I'm exhausted.
I’d love to give you three tips for dealing with parental guilt, three tips for managing your time and energy, three tips for taking time off - but honestly, I don’t have the answer. The reason I’m writing this is not to say “Hey! There’s a solution, and here it is!”. But rather, whilst Cat is away, I offered to step in and write some content for the newsletter, in the hope that it takes one tiny thing off Cat’s mental to-do list whilst she’s focusing on parenting. Because that self-employed business owner to-do list doesn’t magically go away when you’re focused on family.
Perhaps, that’s what we can do for each other. As a community, we understand the experience of freelancing and of parenting. That doesn’t mean we have to have answers - in fact, most of the time, when we’re overwhelmed, I don’t want solutions, I just want to be able to share with someone who gets it, and feel seen. Being honest and open about the hard bits, listening and being supportive of others, as well as celebrating the awesome things, and making small steady improvements day by day. But mostly just being there for each other, with permission to just exhale, and say “yup, it’s hard”. It is. But knowing that you’re not the only one finding it hard, helps.
We might work for ourselves, but we don’t need to work by ourselves, and I’m grateful to Cat for this community, grateful to my own community, and the many communities out there just creating supportive spaces and permission to share.
Right, back to work.
You can follow Matthew on Twitter @thinkplaymake and @LeapersCo