I’m still recovering from spending all of last week in New Orleans at the 59th annual ATA conference, so here’s a topic for all of you while I catch up on work and sleep:
A colleague is weighing the options for working (or not) with small children, and specifically whether to take a sabbatical (stop working completely) for a couple of years, or to work 10-20 hours a week during the small child years. Obviously there’s not a clear answer here (if only!), so I’m interested in hearing from readers about the pros and cons. Freelancing moms and dads, over to you: what do you think??
I’ll kick things off:
My daughter is 16, and I started freelancing when she was a baby–just a few months old. I worked probably 5-10 hours per week during her first year of life, then 10-20 hours a week until she went to preschool at age 2 1/2, then a little more than that until she was in school for a full day when she was 5. However you slice it, freelancing with small kids involves some tradeoffs, but I feel that this option was probably the best for me. I felt–correctly, I think–that if I didn’t work at all, I would lose my mind from boredom and lack of intellectual stimulation, and that if I worked full-time, I would regret not having spent more time with my daughter during those early years.
However, the situation still had some minuses:
-I continually wished that I could be a full-time translator and a full-time mom. Intellectually, I knew that there would still be tons of exciting work opportunities there for me when my daughter was older and more independent. In retrospect, I feel that I have plenty of time to work as much as I want, now that my daughter is a teenager and will soon be in college. However, time sometimes moves very slowly when you have a small child; they don’t call it “the longest, shortest time” for nothing, and there were moments when I felt a lot of tension between the kind of fulfilling professional life I wanted for myself, and the kind of home life I wanted for my daughter.
-No matter how little you work, working when you have a small child is still stressful (or at least it was for me). Murphy’s Law dictates that even if you hire child care, which seems like the “easy button” solution, the babysitter calls in sick on the day you’re scrambling to meet a big deadline, or the kid wakes up with a fever on the day you have an important client meeting. Even with a supportive husband, I still did a lot of juggling. And for what it’s worth, this Murphy’s Law is still true when the kids are no longer little. My daughter almost never gets sick, but when she does, it is always when I have a big deadline or ATA-related task. Kids seem to have a radar for these things!
-However, I feel that I would not have been happy had I not worked at all. As an illustrative example, a friend of mine took several years off working when her kids were little. Then one day, she went to pick the family’s tax return forms up from their accountant, and in the space where the accountant lists your profession, her accountant had put “Housewife.” You can say that “housewife” is a dated term–and it is. You can say that unpaid labor, mostly performed by women, is a huge and hidden part of the American economy–and it is. You can say that a lack of affordable, high-quality child care is a major barrier to women’s economic activity in the US–and it is. You can say that child care should be seen as a family or household expense, not something that the woman in the household has to fund if she chooses to work–also true. Or you can criticize the accountant, who perhaps should have listed the friend’s previous profession, or asked the friend what she preferred to put. Still, that was part of my fear–getting stuck in the “housewife” category.
-Finally, I’m a maniacal believer in self-sufficiency. I felt that even if I earned only enough money to pay for my daughter’s child care and my own spending money, I still really wanted to work. Other people feel differently, and would rather be home full time than net a few hundred dollars a month by working. During my first year of freelancing I earned $9,000, but in some ways it felt more draining than the work I do now to make six figures…constantly getting up early, working late, arranging babysitters, praying that my daughter would sleep for a full two hours in the afternoon, and on and on.
Readers, over to you: what are your thoughts on this?? I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who took an extended period of time off when their kids were little, and how that worked out.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2018 Corinne McKay
First of all, Corinne, let me say publicly that you must have been an awesome “housewife” anyway, judging by how well Ada is turning out!
More to the point, I come from the “supportive spouse” side. Raising Daniel was a team effort, but there is no doubt that Carol left her full-time career, first to follow me around the world while I was on active duty and later to raise Daniel. She must have known how you feel, because anywhere we settled, she taught music in local public or private schools. She was always “part-time”, meaning she was paid for half the hours she actually worked. But she loved her work — and she passed it on to her son. He is now a skilled music teacher, conductor and performer. FWIW, he also competently speaks twice as many languages as I do.
Thanks, Jonathan! Our lone male perspective 🙂 That’s so true about “part time” work meaning two thirds of the work for half the pay! And that’s great that Carol and Daniel shared that musical bond and that she was able to teach while you hopped around the world with the military! Thanks for your comment!
My sons are 29 and 26 now, and things have probably changed quite a bit since then, but I certainly don’t regret putting my full-time career on hold when they were small. I was lucky enough to have a husband who earned enough to pay the bills, so any money I earned in the early days was always for extras: nice holidays or house renovation stuff.
I had been an in-house translator with a large company before taking maternity leave with my first-born, which meant that I had a ready-made source of work when I decided I wanted to start dipping a toe in the water again when he was a few months old. Fortunately, my colleagues knew my situation, so tended not to send me urgent translations and I loved keeping my hand in while being a more or less full-time mum. I too would have hated not to have that intellectual stimulus at all, but I was lucky that my first-born was a very good baby. It was an entirely different matter when my second son came along three years later and refused to sleep at all during the day! As a result, I did practically no work at all for his first year, but gradually started to take work on again once he was a year old and started going to toddler group.
Thereafter, I gradually increased my hours as they went to playgroup, and then school, trying not to work when they were around so I could focus on them. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you know you have a limited amount of working time! Even when I got divorced when they were 11 and 14, I still only worked during school hours – probably even more important to maintain that hands-on mum approach when you’re a single parent, and working from home certainly helps.
It may be a cliché to say that their childhood passes so quickly, but it really does – and I don’t regret a minute of the time I spent being at home with my boys and enjoying them grow up. I’m doubtless completely biased, but they’ve turned out very well as a result 🙂
Thanks, Claire! I actually think that the perspective of those of us who have older kids is really helpful for newer freelancing moms, because we have the insights on how everything (the kids, ourselves, the business) turned out. I also agree that even with a teenager, I still really love the ability to work mostly during school hours; especially now that my daughter is more independent, small things like having a snack with her after school, or being able to have an uninterrupted conversation while we drive to her guitar lesson or her bike race, are really precious. Thanks for that perspective!
That driving time is the most important of all – somehow, because you’re not interacting face-to-face, all sorts of things come out that they might not otherwise tell you. My boys were (are!) very sporty, so there was lots of chauffeuring to various sporting fixtures to be done (another reason I wasn’t able to work full-time until they passed their driving tests – how do parents who don’t work from home cope with all the activities?!) and plenty of opportunities for chatting – which I really treasured.
I wrote a blog post about my experiences from a retrospective perspective in more detail a few years ago: https://clairecoxtranslations.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/empty-nest-but-isnt-this-the-best-job-in-the-world/, which others may find useful. It certainly generated quite a bit of interest at the time. I realise that not everyone has the luxury of choice, but if you can juggle both worlds, it is one of the most rewarding things you can do 🙂
I’m not sure how applicable my experience is, but you’ve asked to hear from those who took an extended time out, and that’s certainly what I did.
I didn’t really have a career when I had children – I’d worked in IT for a few years, decided it wasn’t for me, but knew I would be starting a family so just took temporary office admin work for a couple of years until my first was born. At that point, I stopped work completely – we were fortunate that my husband earned enough for us to live on, so didn’t need the extra income. We didn’t live near any family to help with child care, and anyway, I wanted to be at home with the children while they were small. The practicalities of life with young kids – as you point out, what do you do when your child is ill, or has a hospital appointment, if you have work commitments – meant that I didn’t even think about working until my youngest was in secondary school.
Did I go crazy from lack of intellectual stimulation? No. How did that happen? I’m not quite sure, to be honest! When they’re tiny, of course, just getting through the day is enough. As the children got older, I took on all of the work of running the household, organising holidays, getting the new kitchen fitted, and so on. I treated it as my “job”, and took it seriously. My preferred job title, if asked, was “family manager” (not my phrase, I borrowed it from a book I read by Kathy Peel) – it seemed to describe what I did, and didn’t have the connotations of “housewife”.
Eventually, as the children became more independent, I decided that wasn’t enough any more, and started looking for something I could do, preferably working from home and freelance so that I could still do parent taxi service, orthodontist appointments etc. as required. That led me back to my first love, languages, and translating, so one MA and a sixteen-year gap on my CV later, here I am!
Would I do it again? Yes, definitely. I loved being at home with the children, not having to worry about juggling work and childcare. I hadn’t left behind a career that I enjoyed, so didn’t have any regrets from that point of view. It meant we didn’t have fancy holidays, but that was OK. The downside is that I’m now embarking on a new career later in life, so I suspect my income will never reach the heights it could have done, but that’s OK too.
Thanks, Laura! That’s exactly the kind of story I was looking for. And that’s a great point about seeing household management as a job if you choose to do it; when my daughter was really little, going to work felt like being on vacation compared to handling house and kid stuff full time 🙂 Thanks a lot for your perspective; very interesting and helpful!
Great subject! And one I’ve thought a lot about, so let me share my experience. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, hold a professional degree in translation and have 17 years of experience in FR-EN translation, mostly in marketing and communications.
When my first daughter was born, 10 years ago, my husband took the full 40-week paid leave (we live in Québec ;)). We were aspiring to equal parenting, and I had the flexibility of going back to work part time, which I did at 16 weeks. And I nearly had a nervous breakdown. Translation is detail-oriented, and the clients paying boutique rates may very well be nice people, they won’t come back after a bad translation, simply on excuses about baby brain, six night wakings and breastfeeding! These were my daily reality though, on top of all the identity chaos of being a new mom, the physical and hormonal changes, the adjustments in our marriage and living far from extended family. Work was way too much! That was when we calculated my earnings from 15-20 hours a week, and realized that the money was simply ratcheting us up a tax bracket!
I stopped work when our daughter was 20 weeks old. Since we weren’t eager to put her in daycare, I stayed on at home when my husband went back to work. (And yes, financially this was possible after the leave because he has a decent salary and we keep our expenses low.) At this point, I got all sorts of reactions about my choice: one colleague told me I was letting down generations of feminists who’d sacrificed for me to be able to work (!!), while another (kinder) colleague told me something I repeat now to all new professional moms: “There will always be work, your baby will only be young once.” Looking back on that first parental leave, I think we could have organized better and I might have put other conditions in place to be happier in a part-time work situation, but it was trial and error.
In any case, when daughter #2 came along, I was very happy as a full-time parent. I was rested, available to my children and not at all stressed, and I had a rich intellectual life through my involvement in our neighborhood and with like-minded friends, in short: I was creating the home environment that we wanted for our kids. What’s more, we were spending far less money (no childcare! no convenience foods! time to comparison shop and catch sales!). This was making up for the little money I might have brought in at that point. Truly, I’d make the same choice again in a flash!
When I did go back to work (when my girls were almost 2.5 and 5), I felt it was a benefit for my family, not an imposition on my children: the older one was in school, the younger one was in a daycare we loved and, interestingly, sharing the money-earning and homemaking roles more equitably did my husband and me a ton of good! (It had been hard on him that I was getting so much kid time, while he was forced into the “Provider” role—a label that wasn’t much better for him than the “housewife” (or the “feminist spoiler”) label is for women!) As I started making money, he took on more home and parenting tasks, to everyone’s benefit. This was key to a smooth transition back to work, as I added deadlines and expectations and the energy needed to produce top-quality work back into the equation.
I was still the parent with the flexible schedule (and the one waking up most nights!), so I sought out subcontracting work, especially from other women translators. I needed flexibility, but felt it wasn’t professional to let direct clients in on my personal life. Saying “sorry, kid’s sick today” to a comm director probably would have jeopardized my professional credibility and therefore future work, but it was 100% okay with other moms! This worked out so well, and I am infinitely grateful to these women! In fact, now that my kids are older (7 and 10) and my business caters to many large direct clients, I make a point of subcontracting to other moms, serving as the buffer that I enjoyed a few years ago.
I also co-founded the Chameleon Collective, a consortium of five Montréal-based FR-EN translators. One of our raisons d’être was to form a professional safety net, and it works! In three years, our members have “been there” professionally and personally through death, miscarriage, illness, birth and everything in between—life events that would have had great financial and professional impact for each individual had the others not jumped in to meet a deadline, covered for email during an emergency or sent meals, flowers and get-well wishes. For me specifically, the Collective has meant that I can continue to be very involved with my kids (e.g. no after-school childcare) while also running a boutique that provides high-level clients with top-quality translations.
In short, the choices of the past decade were great for our family AND for my career. They allowed me to be the mother I want to be and to come back to—and maintain—a good professional reputation. Putting the conditions in place has been key. I am very grateful to have fully experienced my girls’ preschool years and to now to focus more on my business—truly, the best of both worlds!
Thanks, Zoe! Wow, thanks for all of those super-helpful details about how you handled the early years with kids. You’re the second translator I’ve heard from whose sanity was saved by a translator collective (the others are called Black Squirrel!). That’s awesome that the collective allowed you to continue working with demanding clients while working mostly while your kids are at school. Keep up the great work and thanks for your comment!
For me, taking off about a year with each child felt right. I’m not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent long-term, but I liked having that first year with the baby. (My family doesn’t do well with being over-scheduled–and both my babies were terrible sleepers–so staying up late to do work wasn’t a good option for me.) When my older daughter was an infant, I worked on my dissertation during her naps–I finished my doctorate when she was nine months old. When my younger daughter was an infant, my older daughter was four, and took the year off of daycare to be home with me and the baby. There was no way I was getting work done (computer-type work) with both kids at home.
Thanks, Ellen! That’s a great perspective on the year off and being self-aware about your own limits. Thanks for your comment!
When I got pregnant with my son, who’s now 3, I already owned a translation business, with one full-time admin employee, and worked full time myself. I’m a single mother by choice – I had my son with help from a donor – so taking extended time off wasn’t really an option, as I’m the only breadwinner. After my son’s birth, my assistant subcontracted work from our direct clients to a few trusted freelancers that I’d lined up; I told the agencies I work for that I wasn’t available, since I wasn’t worried about losing them. All told, I managed to take about 10 weeks off with my new baby. After that, my parents, who fortunately live in the downstairs apartment of our shared duplex, helped me with child care. They would look after him for a few hours in the morning while I worked. I would pop in and out to nurse and cuddle him. When he napped in the afternoon, I would work a little more. I managed to get things done and keep all my clients happy until my son was 10 months old, which is when I put him in a daycare just around the corner from my house. Ever since, I have been able to work productively and uninterrupted from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., 5 days a week, which is plenty for me to earn a very decent living. I don’t really regret not taking more time off, since I was technically at “home” with my son, being in the same building the whole time. Even though I was on a different floor working, I was only ever 30 seconds away from him at all times. I could not have dropped off the scene without losing my company and my clients, so it wasn’t really an option for me 🙂 Plus… I might have died from boredom 😛
Thanks, Ann Marie! Having your parents downstairs sounds awesome! All the same, I really admire you for taking the plunge on your own; I always knew I wanted kids, and made my friends promise me that they would make me have a kid on my own rather than marry the wrong guy just to have kids. No big deal, I thought–I’m self-sufficient and I’ll just do it on my own! I ended up marrying a great guy, BUT after my daughter was born, it gave me renewed admiration for people who are single parents by choice. The exhaustion factor alone, not being able to let the baby/toddler out of your sight for even five minutes to take a shower, was something I really underestimated. So, go girl, and that is great that you and your son are thriving!
Thank you, Corinne, for bringing up this topic – I really enjoyed reading everyone’s experience.
My son is now two and a half years old. When I got pregnant, I was living in the UK, and for various reasons my husband and I decided it would be better for me to return to my home country Germany, which meant the baby and I would be surrounded by family. The tradeoff, of course, was that he wasn’t around much and I was basically a single parent until a few months ago, when he joined us here. I took a total of three months off – one before the baby was born, and two months afterwards. I then gradually started working again. To be honest, I would have preferred not to work at all for at least six months, but financially that wasn’t an option at the time. It was very stressful to juggle deadlines and night feeds, etc., but somehow I managed. I felt I had my sanity back when my son was about six months old. I got up very early in the mornings in order to get some work done before the little one would wake up, and then work again for an hour or two in the afternoon during his nap time. It’s amazing how efficient you become if you know you only have a few hours to get everything done. I also made some changes to my business during that time. I stopped taking on projects with tight deadlines, which meant ending several business relationships, mainly with agency clients. I increased prices and acquired more direct clients – after taking Corinne’s course on the subject, actually. As a result, my business is now less stressful and more profitable 🙂 I feel very fortunate to be able to work flexible hours and be around for my son while he’s little at the same time.
Thanks, Moira! That’s a really interesting story and thanks for that perspective on moving back to Germany to be closer to your family! I like your description of “getting your sanity back.” So true! Thanks for your comment. I also agree that it’s astounding what you can get done when you know you only have 3-4 hours of work time a day. Silvia D’Amico, who has two little kids, did an interview with Tess Whitty on how she cut her work time in half (literally, not as a figure of speech) while maintaining the same level of income: https://www.marketingtipsfortranslators.com/161-2/. Thanks for your comment!
What a great episode, thank you very much for sharing the link, Corinne!
Right??? Silvia is a dynamo, but I thought that was pretty impressive.
Everyone’s situation is different, but based on the basic information you gave, I’d advise your colleague to continue working part-time. There are all kinds of pros and cons for each option, but here’s the thing: You don’t know how you’re going to feel about being a full-time stay-at-home parent unless and until you do it. Yes, you would get more time with your kids, but you’d also spend a heck of a lot of time on mindless drudgery (laundry, diapers, errands, cleaning up potty training accidents, ad infinitum…), which may or may not drive you crazy. And yes, a lot of that mindless drudgery would still need to be done by you if you worked part-time, but at least you’d have some intellectual/professional outlet to balance that out.
Also, if you already have a thriving business, maybe you can afford to pay for part-time childcare while you work. I hate to sound really negative, but if you drop out of the business for a couple of years, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the amount of business back that you let go… or at least not in the time frame you’d like to. If your kids still aren’t in school by the time you decide you’d like to go back to (paid) work, you’ll be trying to rebuild your business from an income level of $0 with small kids at home, which just isn’t easy to do. The amount of juggling necessary—which Corinne described—can be physically and mentally exhausting, and that exhaustion can limit your ability to plow uphill to rebuild your business. So honestly, if you already have a good income stream, I don’t see many downsides to continuing that work on a part-time basis. You could try it for a few months or a year and then change course if you want (ramp up or down). I’m generally in favor of decisions that leave your options open as much as possible!
Thanks, Rachel! That’s actually a great way to look at it: what would be the downside of the option that someone is considering in this situation? Honestly, I agree with you that there are not that many downsides to continuing to work very part-time–let’s say an amount where you could even work at night/weekends or trade child care with friends and not incur any expense. Personally (again…personally) I see various downsides to not working at all, including those you mentioned (“plowing uphill” is a great description!). Thanks for your comment.
Thank you so much for writing about this! I am a working mom of two kids, 6 and almost 2 years old, and I feel that there is not enough discussion about the challenges of being a freelance language professional and a parent at the same time. So thanks for bringing this up!
My husband has a full-time office job, and our family is in Europe, so we have no help with our kids.With our first one, I stayed home during the first year, while taking some online classes. This was my transition from working in-house to freelancing, and I also wanted to build a network locally since we had just moved to the US. I met some amazing friends and got to focus on my first-born, and I don’t regret it at all! When she was 18 months, she started at daycare and I continued studying and started working part-time. I gradually went from 10 to 20, then 30 hours a week by the time she was 4 years old.
With our second baby, I had to take several months off due to unforeseen health issues, which, in hindsight, was a blessing because moving from 1 child to 2 with no family around is hard! When he was a few months old, we hired a nanny, and I went back to work, again gradually going from 10 to 20 hours a week. Now he is almost 2 years old and goes to daycare, and I work about 30 hours a week. There are days when I feel torn between my responsibilities and wish I could do the “full-time mom stuff”, but there are also days where I wish I had an 8-hour workday 🙂 But I love having the flexibility to work and have time for my kids.
I am definitely the kind of person who wants the mental stimulation, the feeling of involvement in the profession, the inspiration, the independence, and the professional accomplishment, so a full-time stay at home mom role is not for me. On my hardest days, I remind myself that I am setting an example for my kids (my daughter most of all).
I believe that for this to work, one needs a very supportive partner who will never judge or push you to be someone you are not. And, of course, it is important to find your “tribe”, because most of the time part-time working parents like us don’t always connect with the crowd you’d meet at a typical mommy-and-me class, and it is very important to have a support system of people who get what you do and why you do it.
Thanks, Veronika! What great insights, thanks a ton! I agree with you about the “fitting in” part; I had the advantage of living in a place where loads of people are freelancers, work part-time, saved up enough money to not work at all for a while, etc. etc. But I do think that if you live in a more go-getter kind of place, freelancers can end up feeling like you don’t fit in with either the parents who work full time and totally outsource the child care, of the parents who are home full time and never have anyone else watch the kid(s) for a minute. Thanks a lot for your story!
A great post, and I’ve been reading the comments with a lot of interest. I’m currently in the thick of this, having left my corporate job when my daughter was born two years ago to slowly set up as freelance translator and copywriter. I recognise those feelings of wanting to be 100% a translator and 100% a mother, and it’s a real juggle.
I’m in the very privileged position that my husband is the breadwinner and we can manage on his salary, however not contributing significantly to the family finances has been a real emotional struggle. Intellectually I know that’s silly, but I think there is such a strong societal pressure to equate earning with value (similar to what you say about housewives not being valued). So this may be partly behind my decision to start freelancing. Looking at some of the other comments I wonder if I jumped the gun a bit. If you’re financially secure then
However, I generally do feel that slowly building up a freelance career when your children are small is a good time. At the beginning, work comes in dribs and drabs, and I imagine it’s very difficult if you are trying to earn a full-time salary right from the beginning. Going slowly means you have time to network, make connections, work out your specialisations and branding, get your website together, all of which could fall by the wayside if you try to go full-time straight away. This way, I hope that it will be easier to slowly increase the amount of work I take, while waiting until my daughter (and potential siblings) are in school and then starting from scratch would mean there is so much to build up.
I have met some translators who have really had to build everything up again after having children. I did read an interesting article by a freelance copywriter who said she managed maternity leave by outsourcing to a trusted colleague, a bit like the collective Zoe mentioned, which is a great idea. I also occasionally do childcare swaps with friends if I need to have a client call, or just need to get my head down.
Thanks, Fuschia! Great insights, thank you so much! I agree with you that starting a freelance business at a time when you were not planning on earning a full-time income is advantageous; that was my situation too. And I also agree about the “starting from scratch” phenomenon; unless you have significant savings, it can be tough to justify the expense of child care when you are earning little to no money. It sounds like you’re doing great so far; keep it up!
Joining in this discussion a bit late but would still like to contribute. Of course every family has to work out what is best for it at the time but I actually took about seven years off in total after my children were born and I don’t regret it for a minute. There were lots of reasons why this happened and much of it had to do with our circumstances at the time. I had been working as an in-house translator in Germany when I met my (English) husband and eventually followed him back to London and got married. Initially I kept working for my previous employer in Germany (thanks to good old dial-up modem in those days!) but never on a full-time basis, and when the company merged with the larger parent group which had its own in-house translation team the work dried up anyway. With two children born within three years, I never really tried to establish much of a freelance business and was happy to be a full-time mum. This may also have been because I was older (38 and 40 years old when I had my kids) and had already worked for many years as a translator, so was happy to have a break. Fortunately we were able to afford it, and not having any family nearby childcare would have been an issue. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed being able to be at home with the children and not having the stress of trying to juggle work as well. We were also renovating a 100-year old house at the time so I think there would have been too many distractions anyway for me to focus on work. Many people have commented that they would miss the intellectual stimulation, but I find that there is something very intellectually stimulating and satisfying about helping and watching a child grow and develop. And even stay-at-home parents can still have a rich intellectual life through the people they interact with and the interests they pursue outside of child-rearing. I think a lot of this has to do with society’s attitude. We are made to feel like we are not contributing if we choose to stay at home with our children rather than go out to work as well. We moved to Australia when the children were 5 and 2 and for the first couple of years I was too busy trying to get used to our new home and get settled to worry about working. I started to build up my freelance business once both children were at school, gradually building up the amount of work I would take on. I never worked in school holidays and always made sure that I was able to do all the after-school activities with them and attend important events. For many years now I have been in the fortunate position of having plenty of work from a small group of regular clients and plan to go on working well past retirement age (I am 61 already!) because I absolutely love what I do. The decision to take those seven years off certainly worked for me and my family and did not affect my ability to build up a thriving business afterwards.
Thanks, Patricia! That is a great perspective and something I was hoping to hear (from someone who stayed home full-time for an extended period of time and then got back into freelancing). I definitely agree that being “just one thing” (home full time or working full time) minimizes the tension you feel when you’re always dashing from one role to another. It sounds like you still found ways to keep busy and stay fulfilled; thanks a lot for your insights!!
Thank you! I’ve really enjoyed reading about all these different perspectives on freelancing with (small or not so small) children. My daughter is 10 years old now and I’d like to add my perspective as a single parent. When my daughter was born I’d already been freelancing for several years as a copywriter. Getting work wasn’t a problem as I had worked in-house at an advertising agency before and so I had many contacts in that field.
I’d already taken my exam in translation, but I hadn’t built up any translating business, yet. When my daughter was born, I took off one year from work. This was made possible by the German Elterngeld, i. e. “parent money” which was paid by the state for one year, the amount being based on the sum of money you had made in the 12 months before. For me, it was great to be able to spend this time with my family without having to worry about deadlines. I did take on a couple of small jobs in that year as a way to stay in touch with the business side of life (and because I really like my job), but I also turned down several jobs as I didn’t feel ready for them.
After that first year my daughter started kindergarten. I went back to working, but some of my contacts had moved on, as was probably to be expected. On the plus side, some of my existing contacts hadn’t “forgotten” me. Going back to work felt great, but it was also stressful because, as others have already pointed out, children tend to get sick just in time for important deadlines or meetings. Also, in this phase kindergarten sometimes would be cancelled because of a strike. What really took some effort was for me to adjust to this new style of working where it’s suddenly not in your own hands anymore how long you’ll be able to work without “family interruption” and I’ve heard the same from friends who are freelancing as well. From my perspective today I’ say: Treat yourself kindly. Be aware that you’re achieving a lot, combining the demands of a successful business and parenting, even if you manage to translate/write fewer words per day than before because of your new time restrictions.
Shortly before my daughter turned two, we lost her dad. And in the years following that low point I’ve been extremely thankful for being able to work freelance. In a bad situation, this was the best possible job scenario for me. When I saw how other single parents had to rush from kindergarten to workplace (and back in the afternoon) every day I realized that working freelance took a lot of strain out of the situation for me. It’s true, if there aren’t enough jobs coming in, you tend to start worrying. But then again, in my experience sometimes there will be (too) busy times and sometimes there will be (too) slow times, so overall that’s fine. And the slow times give you a chance to take that necessary breather (and to do some marketing, of course ;-). All in all I think working freelance kind of saves my sanity, as to me it really complements (single) parenthood/family life. So I would like to encourage everyone in a similar situation to try it out.
Thanks, Kerstin! Wow, you really combined a lot of experiences and advice into that one comment, thank you so much! I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your daughter’s dad, and I also agree that in stressful situations, the flexibility of freelancing is really tough to beat. My husband went through some significant health problems a couple of years ago and I missed more than 20 days of work (so more than a full month) to either go with him to Dr. appointments or do stuff with my daughter when he could not. As you said, at the very least it takes a lot of the strain out of a bad situation. Thanks a ton for your insights and for taking the time to comment!
Hello Kerstin, Corinne, and everyone around here! I just would like to add a little more on the single parenting and freelancing joggling. I am a widow myself with two toddlers, ages 4 and 5 (I’m only 32). I lost my husband under really traumatic circumstances last year. It was sudden, and there were no good byes. Words are not enough to describe what I am going through. Since then, I have been joggling between my new life and family situation as well as freelancing. Before tragedy struck my life, I had never worked as a translator. I have a degree in Modern Languages, which in a way opened my way into the translation industry. Three months after my husband passed away, a friend of mine subcontracted me for a project, and ever since… here am I. Freelancing is hard, really hard and challenging, especially under my circumstances. However, translating has literally saved my life, financially and emotionally speaking. As Kerstin says, it does “save your sanity”. It has brought me joy, peace, and tranquility. Syntax, words, endless hours of research, clients, etc. have kept me safe and sound. Sometimes (mostly) I wish I were more productive, but then I remember all the roles I have to play in my life: mom/dad, translator, household manager, etc. and I just take a breath and give myself a break. I even enrolled in the Professional Translation Certificate of UC San Diego Extension. As Kerstin says (which in my view, it’s a very honest piece of advice), for some freelancing in translation or, as Judy Jenner wisely calls it, “being an entrepreneurial linguist” is just the right move. At first it might seem that you are adding more to your burden, but if you are passionate about your career, you’ll find peace in it!
Thanks, Isabella! I’m so sorry for your loss and that is wonderful to hear that your translation business has gotten you through this! thanks for taking the time to comment and keep up the great work.
Thank you… ! All the best for you in 2019. Your blog is inspirational!