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

I tell the Husband that I’ve sent off a cheque for nearly £400 for the course and that I figure a spot of doula-ing will be just the ticket for bolstering the family finances. He goes bananas. Well, actually, he goes totally silent, then quite squeaky for five minutes and then silent again, which is his version of bananas. He isn’t impressed that we’re surviving on one salary with an extra mouth to feed and I’ve just splurged that month’s nappy and packed lunch budget on three days of looking at ladies’ fannies and drinking tea.

I should leave it at that and give him time to marinate in the information; let him gently come around to the idea that you’ve got to speculate to accumulate and that going down the fanny route won’t be a bad idea. But I can’t resist picking at a scab. Once you’ve got that little flap teased up, it’s impossible to stop yourself from going the whole way and ripping it all off, revealing the raw skin beneath that’s going to take a good few days to calm down again.

In this case, I don’t leave it alone but bang on about how my job is hardly worth going back to, and that if he’d only badger his boss about grant applications instead of always saying he’d do it tomorrow, he’d have the job thing licked and we could make plans. From his point of view I’m probably being grossly unfair. Here I am, ensconced at home with the children, one of whom spends most of the week at pre-school or the childminder, and I have the freedom to see who I want, and generally gad about while he frets over providing for his newly expanded family and deals with the very real prospect of being out of work in three months.

And I know it seems mad that I’m spending valuable family cash on sending Boy One to the Very Capable Childminder when he could now be at home with me. I chose a childminder over a nursery in the first place because I wanted him to have that home environment, the sense of extended family, while I wasn’t there. It’s worked a dream and he now has such a sense of belonging that to remove him from her would be like a bereavement. Besides, he’s just had his world blown apart by the introduction of a baby brother, someone who creates an attention vortex around him whenever he’s in the room. He’s had enough upset to his routine. Even though he still goes three days a week I see him much more now than I ever did. I’m not getting home an hour after his bedtime for a start, and instead of spending the days he has with me accomplishing pointless tasks like grocery shopping and cleaning the car, I can do those while he’s not here and focus on what he wants to do when he is. I think the arrangement works well for all concerned, and I tell The Husband that.

We both hold our corners – he is insisting I would be mad to give up a stable job I’ve been doing since before we were married; I am claiming he has no vision and is worrying over nothing. We don’t go to bed on the argument, though. I go to bed, he sleeps on the sofa.

The Husband and I experience a temporary cessation of hostilities. Just as I’m coming to terms with the idea that writing might not be the path to post-baby riches, out of the blue I’m told I’ve got a meeting with a man about a book. The money involved isn’t something we can retire on, but perhaps the advance will be enough to lift the Husband out of the doldrums, at least temporarily.

Now there’s no question of me attending that meeting in my present leaky, wobbly tracksuited state. So, for want of anything better to do while I wait for my career as a doula to begin, and because the Husband can hardly complain about me getting poshed up if it’s for money, I begin phase one of my transformation from posset-plastered, post-partum patsy to the magisterial mumpreneur: exterior renovation.

Disappointingly, I’m still sporting the ‘joey pouch’ of the new mother and I change bra size hourly. Raiding the Boden catalogue isn’t an option until my body ceases to have a mind of its own. However, when a girl has clothing issues she goes to the three things that remain constant:

a handbag will always fit

shoes will – almost – always fit

a haircut will always fit (though perms are often regretted).

I’m trying to curb my burgeoning handbag habit. My last ‘score’ was a baby pink Luella for Mulberry. A snip on eBay at £180, the original cost £800 plus. It was practically free. Shoes almost always do fit but as your feet swell a bit when you’re pregnant I’m not sure I can trust their size yet.

This has left a ruinously expensive haircut at the local ‘designer’ salon. A cut and colour sets me back £150. Not Nicky Clarke, I know, but easily a week’s worth of childcare or a week and a half’s maternity allowance. They say trust and openness are the most important elements in a marriage, so I’ll pay in cash so the Husband won’t spot my extravagance on the bank statement. If he spits feathers at my paying £400 for education, he won’t be impressed with £150 worth of salon time. He insists on spending no more than a tenner on a cut. He’s so proud of his thrift I haven’t the heart to tell him how much it shows. That’s the great thing about hair, it grows back. Most of the time.

In the end I get my money’s worth because while I am in the chair and they’re all cooing over the delectable baby, he is violently and copiously sick all over me, the gown, the chair and the floor. Curdled milk mixed with shorn hair and the scent of caramel highlight number 36. This is a small but instructive insight on what life is going to be like if I try to mix babies with business – messy, but we plough on regardless.

Up to London to see, not the Queen, but our man about the book. He’s keen for me to write a ‘How to’ guide to being a mumpreneur – how you’ll manage your time (badly); how you’ll cope with childcare (expensively); and what the most suitable sectors are for mumpreneurialism (you’re asking me?). Somewhat ironic that I should be putting myself forward as the expert when my own enterprise is still pretty much at the drawing-board stage.

Book Man seems a little shocked when he’s told that I’ve left the Husband in charge of three-week-old Boy Two to come to the meeting, and that he is currently pounding the streets of Fitzrovia with the baby strapped to his front. I tell him that it isn’t going to be any more distracting working and writing a book with a three-week-old than with a three-month-old or three-year-old so, effectively, there’s no time like the present. I don’t mention that there is absolutely no time like the present because, when the maternity pay runs out in September – they tempt you with twelve months off then hit you with the killer that they’re only going to pay you for nine – so a juicy little advance would do very nicely thank you.

I hope that I come across as relatively capable despite the baby brain. I have one eye on the conversation and another on the clock as Boy Two is still doing his one hour on, one hour off trick, and my bosoms are ticking. If I’m not careful, my man with the plan will find his americano turned into a latte.

Duelling with the commuter chaos on my way home only serves to enhance my determination to leave the London limelight for good. Tucked up snugly in his papoose, my erstwhile baby bump now has a baby face, but that doesn’t stop other commuters cannoning off my front with a single-minded determination to get to their destinations in record time, to hell with whoever they flatten on the way. I don’t like playing human pinball any more. I just want to be human.

* Except she has five children and a hedge fund; I have two children and a hedge.