Mosey Jones - The Mumpreneur Diaries - Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year

I’m also too embarrassed to do this direct to the editor of the magazine. After all why pay a freelancer to dictate to you something that you may just as well have knocked up yourself? Instead I call Middle Sister who is handily at her desk in a super-cool sports and music marketing agency in London.

I wonder what they make of:

‘“Your toddler will enjoy shouting rude words like POO and WILLY”—got that?’

‘Do you want me to capitalise all of poo and willy?’

‘Yes, please.’

I hope her boss in their nice open plan office is understanding.

The trip to Scotland was nice but it puts us all out of sorts. Perhaps it’s the seven-hour slog up and down the M1 in the middle of the night that does it. You can’t contemplate a journey like that during the day. Bored children with permanently full bladders make for slow progress. And during the brief moments when you are actually making time up the motorway the children are bouncing up and down in the back, hyped on sugar from the endless chocolate bribery. Boy Two is a little young for the sugar rush but Boy One has a surprisingly long reach for someone strapped into a car seat.

So an overnight drive it is, speeding through the wee hours down the coast, listening to mad programmes on Radio 2. The Husband ponders why stations insist on playing bagpipe music or Wagner when you really need a bit of Bon Jovi or The Eagles to keep you going. But the children are both snoring peacefully in the back so we have to be grateful for small mercies.

At one point we both get hit by a dose of the snoozes so we need something more peppy to keep us going. The Husband has stored some comedy on his MP3 player so we plug in a bit of Billy Connolly to blow the cobwebs away. We’re right in the middle of a lovely juicy skit about inventive sex, in which Billy C gets himself in a right old froth and shouts, ‘FUUUUCCK, Fucking FUUUUCK!’ with great gusto, when a little voice from the back pipes up:

‘He said “fucking”, Mummy. Has he got naughty manners?’

I find myself completely incapable of speech. I’m trying so hard to stop myself from laughing that I clamp my mouth shut and my eyes well up. The pressure threatens to blow my ears off. It’s just as well there are few other cars about because I’m finding it hard to see. Eventually the Husband recovers his composure long enough to say:

‘Very naughty manners, darling. Now, how about a bit of “Puff the Magic Dragon”?’

The humorous interlude is unfortunately short-lived. Every time we do this trip the combination of petrol station food, recycled air and sleep deprivation leaves us all twitchy and tetchy. Back home the Husband starts to pick on the state of the house, a niggle that then swiftly descends into the usual argument over money or, more importantly, the lack of it:

‘I just can’t stand all this clutter, it makes me claustrophobic, ’ he complains.

‘It’s only Boy Two’s toys and he’ll grow out of these soon, then we can get rid of them.’

‘But can’t you put them somewhere?’

‘We don’t really have anywhere to put them, but I have ordered some storage boxes to go under Boy One’s bed. When they arrive we could stuff a lot in them.’

‘How much did they cost?’

‘About £80. Why?’

‘You shouldn’t be spending any money. We don’t even know if I’m going to have a job in a month. You don’t seem to have got anywhere with this business thing.’

‘It takes time to get going.’

‘You haven’t even got a name yet.’

‘The name’s the most important thing, I’ve got to get that right. And what about you? We’d have had that cheaper mortgage if you’d got your paperwork to me in time.’

With that I deal the decisive blow. The Husband is on my case in a second if I let a credit card bill go past the payment date. He is an arch-interest avoider. And yet when we had to bail from our mortgage company last month because the monthly payment went stratospheric, he dithered for so long about getting his proof of salary to the new one that we lost the low percentage deal. I managed to secure another one that was only a tiny bit more expensive but not before blubbing down the phone to the operator. She must have thought I was a victim of spousal abuse:

‘It’s just [ sob ] that my husband won’t help me.’

‘I’m sorry, we can’t get that rate back. The system’s automated.’

‘But we had everything, all the papers but his and he wouldn’t pull his finger out [ sob ]. Can’t you do anything?’

‘Sorry.’

The new deal we finally secured wasn’t a great deal more expensive than the first but I now have some great ammunition to shut the Husband up when he starts nagging. I’m not sure how long I can get away with it for, though.

Returning from the shops I find a waif and stray on my doorstep. I often find friends and acquaintances loitering on my doorstep as it’s a conveniently warm place to hide if you miss your train, what with the station being barely a two-minute walk away. Anecdotally, ours seems to be the coldest station in England with an icy wind howling past the platforms as frequently as the trains. Of course, being of good Scots stock and naturally well-insulated, I don’t find this a problem at all. I am, however, surrounded by soft, southern Sassenachs.

Perched on kerb is in fact the Partner in Crime’s husband, the Family Friendly Businessman. Though he’s often away for days at a time on business, when he is home he’s a real hand-son dad and you can tell from his expression that he genuinely loves kids. Mind you, he’s quite slender so he clearly couldn’t eat a whole one.

I invite him in for a coffee and small talk while we wait for the telltale horn sounding at the bottom of the garden that tells him his next train has arrived. He reveals that he and the Partner in Crime have been discussing this mumciergery idea already. As it will affect his family finances as well as mine, and therefore he has a pretty big say in whether or not she goes ahead with it, I tentatively ask him if he thinks it’s a goer, really not wanting to hear the wrong answer.

But Family Friendly Businessman thinks that a mumciergery should fly with no problem. But…

And then he spends the next half-hour coming up with all sorts of questions that I have no idea how to answer. It shows how little I’d thought this through. If I charge a booking fee but I’m not there to enforce it, what’s to stop people bypassing me and going straight to the source? Have I got a criminal record check and do I realise how hard it is to get one? What about insurance – what would happen if a child choked while in my care? Could I cope with offering all these services at once – shouldn’t I think about starting out smaller?

I try to keep smiling in the face of this onslaught but in my head all I can think is ‘What the hell have I let myself in for?’ Finally, the horn sounds and Family Friendly Businessman shoots out through the door to catch his train. I’m left with a head swarming with more questions than answers. To shut them out I self-medicate with a large glass of wine and crappy telly. Am I going to have to rethink the whole thing?

Out of the blue a child modelling agency gets in touch about the email I sent them weeks ago. They’re interested in getting Boy One on their books and would I mind bringing him for an ‘audition’. This sounds like a sensible option while I wait to get everything else off the ground, until I read further.

Would I also mind paying a couple of hundred quid for his portfolio shots, oh, and his insurance premium. Plus, they can’t really guarantee he would be used in the campaign shots that they have in mind for him as the client will ‘order’ a few boys to come along and only use the one that looks best on camera. Apparently you’ll get paid a nominal fee for them to go along, but only the boy who is to be used in the campaign will get his hands on the moolah.