Lifestyle Choices

Should you work part-time or full- time? It depends on your needs. When I had my first baby I did part- time design work at home. Then I worked full-time from an office with resident home help. Then I worked full-time at home with no home help. Now I work at home, full-time during the term and theoretically not at all during school holidays. I have found it easiest (but not always possible) to go out to work full-time, and pay for adequate home help. For me working part-time seemed to involve twice the work for half the money with none of the office perks and protection.

I am not the only woman to have found that part-time work from home is ten times more difficult than it sounds. It is because you are trying to do at least two jobs at once. Of course the children interrupt you, and so does the milkman, whether you’re trying to start a business or write a short story in your own kitchen. Of course you answer the telephone, the door, take in your neighbour’s laundry and stave off a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s certainly easier to work part-time if you leave home to do it.

I know a Cambridge professor’s wife who writes detective stories : she leaves her house every day at I I a.m., catches a bus to a room she has hired, and works until 2 p.m. If you can’t afford to rent a room for your work try swapping homes with a friend who also wants to work. You’ll have less difficulty in not dealing with her home life. Or advertise locally.

After my business got groggily on its feet, I could afford a secretary, who comes in one day a week to help me. I now feel I’m not struggling along entirely on my own, and knowing that I am going to have Nicola’s help on Monday acts as a good discipline to get all my office work ready in time for that day — no matter how early I have to get up — when it gets polished off in one go.

THE HIGH COST OF WORK

There’s nothing more satisfying than doing the work you love. Work is a wonderful antidote to misery and grief and it can be a constant stretching of your mind and capabilities. Was it not Freud who said: ‘ Love and work bind people to sanity’? Are you sure, however, that you can afford to work? In terms of money that is? Working can be expensive. Add up the weekly costs of doing your job then multiply it by fifty-two to get the rough, real annual cost. Include tax, fares, lunches, union dues and contributions, hairdresser, make-up and clothes (although you wear something wherever you are, you undoubtedly spend more on clothes, etc., if you work), extra laundry, and food costs. This last is also a difficult figure to calculate, but convenience foods, weekend shopping or late night supermarkets can certainly add 15 per cent to food bills and you have to accept the fact that some food is bound to be wasted.

Then there is the cost of home help and/or child care, especially if you have living-in help. Home help is very expensive when you do a proper accountant’s costing on it and include wages, insurance, room, light and heat, food and general extravagance, such as not switching off the electricity because she isn’t paying the bills. And you have to deal with her neuroses when you’ve just got back from the office and want to nurse your own.

Add to your total a third of gross income for tax. Although you may not be working primarily for money, how much of the year do you have to work before you start to show a profit? When you’ve actually made some money, do you have time to spend it carefully?

Working wives who don’t bear the financial responsibility of being the breadwinner often feel exhilaration. Mothers who have no option, who are bound to work because their husbands are ill, or just not there, or whose husband’s earnings don’t cover the family needs, are more likely to feel tired and anxious all the time. In order to avoid anxiety I took out a crippledorn policy when I became the family breadwinner. It is not tax deductible and costs £125 per annum. If I lose my legs under a bus or am incapacitated in any more interesting manner, I shall be paid £3,500 p.a. When I was ill for a longish period they paid up £5oo immediately, which was a pleasant surprise.

Accountants don’t consider it wise for a mother with an earning husband to depend on her earnings, in case she has to stop work; she is best regarded as a supplement to the wage earner’s contribution. Generally husbands pay rent and running expenses of the home. The wife pays anything she incurs, and extras and luxuries. A fun-funding cornucopia — in theory.

Sometimes the wife works for a specific purpose, say the down payment on a house. If so, it’s best to thrust it fast into a separate deposit account. If it goes into a joint bank account, there’s the risk that the family will quickly get used to a higher standard of living and nothing much will be saved. On the other hand, I know a famous writer whose family live entirely on her income, while her husband is working all the hours God gave him to set up his own publishing business.

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