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

‘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.

Thursday 17 April 2008

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?

Monday 21 April 2008

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.

Due to the ongoing failure of the new mortgage company to provide us with the actual mortgage, money is getting a little tight. I got away with insisting to the Husband that we spend a few hundred pounds teaching me how to deal with screaming women but I don’t think he’s going to be happy about funding the next Naomi Campbell (I can’t think of any well-known male ‘Naomis’ – perhaps that should tell me something about Boy One’s potential career trajectory as a model?). I send the agency a polite thanks but no thanks on this occasion, making up a spurious story about getting over a bug and not being in the most cooperative mood. I initially wondered about pretending that he had chicken pox but thought better of it as they’d instantly think ‘spotty, scarred’ and therefore modelling career aborted before it began. Perhaps with a bit more money in the kitty in the next few weeks I’ll call them back to get that portfolio done, but not right now. We need to eat.

And despite the flow of funds dwindling to a trickle, we are eating rather well. I am in love with Ocado. As I’m perpetually tied to the computer anyway, I decide to shop online instead of schlepping to the supermarket every day. I’m going to try to train myself to do the weekly shop, rather than the daily impulse buy. And, apart from the fact that I’m wedded to posh shopping, I love that they’ll deliver for free at 10 pm after the kids are in bed. The Husband is mollified by the fact that they claim to be no more expensive than Tesco and Boy One thinks Santa comes every week now. If he’s refusing to go to bed I say, ‘You have to be asleep when the man with the van comes or he’ll realise you’re awake and won’t leave any treaties for the treaty basket.’ Oh Mr Sandman, bring me some bream, and the sweetest taters, that I’ve ever seen…

Tuesday 22 April 2008

I get my first taste of what it will be like to run the mumcierge service. One of Boy One’s friends came over to be child-minded today. The Very Capable Childminder had to go to an appointment so I took her only other ward. Normally with a house full of three-year-olds, I’d let them tear around the house and garden, refereeing fights from a distance, lazily blowing kisses from the sofa to kiss anything better and surveying the damage long after everyone has gone home. However, because I’m ‘on’ in a professional capacity, I feel I have to loiter no more than 5 feet from their every position. This means marshalling games of ‘bonk each other on the head with a tennis racket’, ‘lob the ball into next door’s garden’ and ‘running in circles really fast until you fall over in the funniest way possible’. For its novelty value it’s amusing but each game rapidly becomes crashingly boring. The Very Capable Childminder earns her money twelvefold. Just don’t tell her that or she’ll put her rates up.

Sunday 27 April 2008

From tomorrow, Boy One will be at pre-school in the afternoons as well as the mornings. It’s going to be bliss. This means I will be able to achieve more than simply the journey to and from the school, one supermarket shop and one nappy change before the three-year-old whirlwind returns. I might even be able to – gulp – get some work done. If only Boy Two would sleep! Goodness knows I can. Aren’t babies supposed to be sleeping for around 16 hours in 24 at this point. Now, I know that I’m not getting that much sleep, so why won’t he stick to what the book says? Honestly, can’t he read!

Monday 28 April 2008

I got back from an interview at 9.45 am and am already so tired I don’t know what to do with the day. BBC Breakfast rather deliciously wanted me on at 7ish to talk about the insanity that is Nannycams – plastic trinkets that ‘hide’ a camera where you can check up on the hired help. I have never seen anything that so obviously screams WE’RE WATCHING YOU! If you’re so scared about leaving your children alone, don’t. And if you have to, do your research, don’t just abandon them with the local psycho and hope for the best, secure in the knowledge that if they’re being slapped six ways from Saturday, you can watch it all happen 40 miles and two hours away.

Despite a background as a cynical hackette, I still get excited about the prospect of being on the goggle box (if TV is a goggle box, does that make a computer the google box?). The first time I was on TV it was about men being useless at home. I suggested on air that they weren’t and that division of labour was key. However, as my maths isn’t up to squat, division of labour at our house comes down to: work divided by 2 = emptying dishwasher by husband + rest of everything by me.

And I suspect the first time I was on I couldn’t have been too coherent, since I was horrifically hungover. When I got the call the night before (being called onto BBC Breakfast is all very urgent, last-minute stuff and is a deeply thrilling ‘I only got the call at 6 pm the night before and simply didn’t have a thing to wear’ affair), I got all overexcited and insisted on bending the Husband’s ear about how great I was going to be over several gins and bottles of white. As I was being conveyed in a luscious Jag – nice to see the wise use of my licence fee, Auntie, by the way – to Broadcasting House at 5 am the following day, or it could have been the same night for that matter, I was clutching my 2-litre bottle of water very tightly and attempting to turn my eyeballs from pink back to white. The make-up ladies were very sympathetic and didn’t mention the fact that I was sweating pure ethanol. And apparently studio lights are so strong they bleach out your eyes anyway, hence the orange pancake make-up.

This time I didn’t make the mistake of staying up all night drinking. Instead I stayed up all night breastfeeding. The pink eyes were still there and instead of ethanol I seemed to be sweating Gold Top. What poor Sian Williams thinks of me I do not know.

But even with an hour’s sleep and leaking boobs, I’m ducking and diving, doing deals. Once I was back in the green room (an affront to trades descriptions since it is the orange broom cupboard), I had a chance to chat with the bloke I was pontificating on screen with. He’s the publisher of a dads’ mag and I’m anxious to get my foot in the door. Much as I’m getting excited by my nascent mumciergery, wonga for words is what’s currently paying the bills and it’s good to have a standby. I loosely pitch a couple of ideas at him and leave it at that.

Tuesday 29 April 2008

Call the editor of the dads’ mag to go over what I’d said to his publisher yesterday morning, but he’s not in so I leave a message. On the school run I bump into the Glamazon. She’s a fellow pre-school mum and I’m always guaranteed to bump into her when I’ve failed to shower for three days and have dragged something to wear out of the washing up box. Never leaving the house without full warpaint, she’s got this old school glamour thing going on. Masses of long, wavy black hair, eyes kohl’d to the max, red lips and HUGE Jackie O sunglasses, she positively sashays. She’s also filled with boundless energy and seems to know everyone in the village as the playground echoes to ‘DARLING!! How ARE you?!’ at 3pm every day. She’s a blast.

We get talking about deadlines as you do and she mentions that she’s running late on one for this men’s magazine she occasionally writes for, one for the dads. I realise that this must be the same magazine I was talking about with BBC Brekkie and get all excited that we have a shared interest.

The second thought I have, following hot on the heels of the first is ‘Oh bugger – I’ve just tried to poach this woman’s column from under her.’ The editor must realise that we’ve got the same dialling code and, as we’re in the sticks, we must live very close to each other. I hope he doesn’t call her to tell her. Hacks can be at each other’s throats for the exclusive on a story, but equally it’s bad form to poach a column from under a fellow hackette’s feet. Particularly when you share the school run. Frantically think of ways to get her onside – perhaps she’d like to be in the mumcierge biz?

Chapter 4 Teething Troubles (#ulink_a0366d9b-fd64-54c3-8776-48d503ee9f18)

Monday 5 May 2008

Realising that the possibility of getting the mumciergery off the ground any time soon is unlikely, and having to wait until next month for the doula training course, I need to get money coming in somehow. My only real recourse is to go back to hawking stories round publishers again.

I may as well write about what I know so I send several beautifully crafted story breakdowns about becoming a doula and trying to set up a business as a Stay At Home Mum. Convinced that these are the topics du jour I can’t help but imagine that the commissions will come rolling in. I email the Husband to warn him that he may be needed for babysitting cover in the next few days as I’ll be busy churning out copy for magazines and newspapers – I’m convinced that the Saturday Times will snap up the doula story, Labour’s failure to provide adequate maternity care being one of their favourite drums to beat.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

Nothing. Not a sausage. The Times replies to say they did a story on doulas two years ago and therefore it was recent history. The parenting magazines don’t bother replying. A follow-up call to one reveals they haven’t even looked at it as their commissioning editor is on maternity leave and they seem less than keen to fill her shoes, claiming: ‘We have enough stories for the time being.’