The Years I Can’t Get Back, and the Ones I’m Still Getting Right
A couple of years ago, I worked at an IT company based in the Old Mutual building, where my days ran from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. When people talk about working mom guilt South Africa, this is the version I think of, the one I actually lived, not the one that shows up in a search result. We would get the kids up and dressed and out the door for school, sometimes with a car and sometimes without one, catching public transport when we had to. My parents lived in the same building as us back then, and most mornings it was them who did the school run while I made my own way to work. I was rushing, grumpy, small kids who were being a mission to get moving at that hour, and we would all leave the house a little irritated with each other before the day had even properly started.
I liked my job and the people in it; we were all family people in that office, always talking about our own kids over lunch, but none of that changed the fact that I was not there when mine came home from school, and I spent a good part of every afternoon just waiting to get home to them. I think back now, and I genuinely do not know how I managed it. My kids were so small back then, a handful in every sense, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I must have gone on autopilot. They would bring up something from when they were young, and I would sit there with nothing, no memory of it at all. Even now I will scroll through old photos on my phone from that exact time, and it stops me, like how quickly they grew! How the small people in those pictures feel like versions of them I will never know again, not really, not the way they were then. I would take back even one of those days if I could.
Years later I managed to find a role that let me work from home, and for a long time after that, between 2023 and 2025, my kids were at school in Muizenberg, and I had little to no help. I would collect them in the afternoon, driving back through summer traffic that felt like its own kind of torture. Once we were home, I would try to get them settled before pulling myself back to my desk, because unlike working in an office, nobody was standing over me telling me when to stop. The choice to keep going was entirely mine, and I kept making it. I have always been the kind of person who goes fully hyperfocused into whatever I am doing, and that made pulling away difficult in both directions.
When they would need help with homework, or just want to tell me about their day, I would sit there half listening, my mind still on the task at hand, pretending to be present. Some afternoons would be quiet enough that I could start supper early, but other nights it was six or seven before I even thought about the stove. Worst of all, I forgot things constantly during that period, like an email to a teacher, a sports uniform sitting unwashed or laundry left wet in the machine because there was always one more thing I chose to finish first. That is where the real burnout lived, not in one world or the other but in trying to hold both at once.
I know this is more common than I imagined – women working remotely consistently report higher burnout than men, most of it tied to exactly this: carrying home and work at the same time without a clean line between them.
What They’re Actually Watching
This year, something in the pattern finally settled. I started going into the office on the days that made sense and working from home around them the rest of the time, and for once it actually held together. I have written before about what that routine actually looked like day to day, and it mattered, and for as long as it lasted, it worked.
What I keep coming back to is what they have actually taken from all of it, watching me across these different versions of working. They are older now; they can make their own lunch and get themselves through their homework without me standing over them, and there is an ease in that which did not exist a few years ago.
They have also heard me on calls, seen me get up early on a weekend to work on this blog before anyone else in the house was awake, and I think they are starting to understand something most kids their age do not have to think about yet: that in this house, whatever gets built gets built by me. There is no one else whose income this family runs on, no one else quietly covering what I cannot, and I am not saying that to sound brave about it; I am saying it because it is simply what is true, and I think they feel that truth even when I have never explained it to them directly. I am their mother, but I am also someone with a career I am still trying to grow; I have goals I’m trying not to give up on, and I want them to see that both of those things sitting in the same person is possible.
Where I’m Standing Now
That routine I finally got right this year did not last as long as I needed it to. I have written about the abrupt end my last job came to, and what that all looks like now. What I know for certain, even with everything that has changed since, is that you can be proud of what your children are learning from watching you work, and still ache over the years of them you cannot get back, both at once, neither one cancelling the other out.