Our lovely daughter Frances has just landed another job. Now a mother to two beautiful little girls, she was laid off last summer when her previous company was bought out by a bigger American-based company operating in the same field.
Like her previous firm, the new one is involved in servicing and supporting recruitment agencies. I don't fully understand it all but most of the work is computer-based.
She will be working four days a week - mostly from home but one day a week will be spent down in London and perhaps once a month, she will have to travel up to Glasgow where the company's main office is located.
The salary package is generous but in her field she is both capable and knowledgeable and the new company needed someone with her skills. As luck would have it, the new business's London arm currently consists of three people who were all in her previous company.
As women all over the world have discovered, it is not easy to maintain a career when you are also the mother of small children. There's a lot of balancing to be done and of course in the western world at least, childcare costs can be horrendous. If the truth be known, Frances would much prefer to be a stay-at-home mum but the pressures of modern living seem to oblige most women to get back to work as soon as they can.
Besides, Shirley and I are here and most weeks Frances's mother-in-law will be around too. Such back up can provide a vital lifeline, making a return to work more possible.
Phoebe already goes to nursery school three days a week and we look after her every Thursday but soon we will be playing a bigger caring role with Baby Margot before she is ready to attend the same nursery school.
As I said to Frances the other day, we are happy to look after our granddaughters and in fact consider this role to be a privilege. It's a type of team work and we do not resent our future involvement even though it will make us less free to get away from home whenever we want to go. The bottom line is that we love them.
When I was a lad, my mother was mostly at home though she supplemented the family income by teaching adult evening classes - specialising in "mixed crafts" - including leather work, glove making, basketry, embroidery and lampshade making. She was very talented.
My three brothers and I did not attend any kind of nursery school because there wasn't one and there was no extended family support either because my father's parents were both dead and our maternal grandmother lived up in Newcastle.
The world is different now. Probably more than ever before, we have got to pull together.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/DRuhdiN