Family pressures with three children

When we lived in London, I was working as a Database Administrator near Oxford, which invloved a  daily drive of 56 miles each way along the M4 motorway; it took me on average one hour and ten minutes to get to work. [Eddy's Universal Law of Commuting in London: it takes one hour and fifteeen minutes to commute to work]. Joan on the other hand worked locally at an NHS Hospital as a A&E Staff Nurse. It took her about 20 minutes to get to work (that's not what I call commuting).

Joan would work night shifts, starting at 7 pm until 7.30 am the following day. I would work day shifts, starting at 9.30 am and finishing at 5 pm (flexible working hours).  Joan would return from work and I would leave; when I returned from work, we would eat for an hour and then she would leave. This system worked while we had our first child, Maria, but the system started to strain when we had Isabella two years later.

Maria, who was two years and six months, started sleeping in a separate room while Isabella, who was six months old, would be in a cot in our bedroom. I would look after her while Joan was working her night shifts. Which meant that I wasn't getting much sleep with all the night time feeding, but I would still be driving the 56 miles each way to and from work. Sometimes, on my return journey I would find myself falling asleep at the wheel. Fortunately nothing happened but that was sheer luck.

At about this time, Maria started nursery. So Joan would take her to the nursery (about a mile away) in a double-buggy, with Isabella.

Fast-forward two years when John is born. Joan takes six months maternity leave - breast feeding John for four months (Isabella was two months and Maria was only one month, owing to her poor sucking reflex). Things start to get complicated.

During Joan's maternity leave the hospital changed it's policy for staff: all Staff Nurses now had to work both day and night shifts - in the interest of staff "fairness". Up to now, each nurse negotiated her schedule to suit her personal circumstances. Now the system was not only inflexible but positively hostile to nurses with families. Several nursing staff who had families had little choice but to leave; Joan was one. She was asked to work two day shifts during the week but that would have been impossible in our circumstances.

We considered the logistics of how to mange our three young children: Maria attended a Special school; Isabella attended a nursery (with different opening and closing times) and John was still at home. We were placed in an impossible situation and with an unsolvable problem. Joan and I didn't have any relations who could help us out for free.

I sat down and costed the situation, using child minders to collect the children from school or nursery and keep then until I get home from work (assuming I didn't get stuck in a two hour traffic jam). It worked out at over £1000 in child-minding fees per month during school holidays. We knew we didn't have that kind of spare money each month to spend on these fees, even if we could work out the logistics of how to make it work.

To make matters worse, the hospital showed no sympathy towards Joan's situation (so much for NHS family friendly policies) and gave her six months after returning from maternity leave to conform to the new system of two day shifts per week. If she failed to conform to this policy then they would take disciplinary action, which would go down on her Human Resources record for all future NHS employers to see. We knew we had to act fast but what should we do?

Well, it was obvious that one of us would have to stop working - but that would cause an enormous financial strain. Our (fixed rate) mortgage was relatively cheap at £935 per month, when the going rate to rent a similar house would cost you £1200 per month in that part of London. But with our bills amounting to at least £1300 per month then it would be a real struggle to bring up our family on a single salary. Joan didn't want to stop working (she loves A&E) and I was no longer enjoying my job at STFC; so I had an idea.

I had lived in London from the age of 19 when I came down from Bradford to study at University. During those 37 years I had lived in five properties that I "owned". So I'd accumulated a resonable amount of equity in our Hounslow home. One solution was to sell up and move to a cheaper part of Britain. I could give up work and look after the kids (since I was the only driver in our family and was looking forward to retirement and looking after the kids) and Joan could continue working as an A&E nurse.

Joan said she wanted to be within easy reach of her friends in London, so we got a map and looked at the M4 motorway. It stopped in South Wales, so we looked for houses between Newport and Swansea at the weekends, staying in a Bridgend Travelodge for just £35 a night for a family room. I was looking for a house near a Special School and the local train station - so Joan could get to work.

House prices were extremely cheap by London standards. In the end, we found a five bedroom Victorian house with two large gardens and a beautiful view of the Neath valley for just £184,000; that was the cost of a one-bedroom starter flat in Hounslow.

So we moved to Neath in South Wales on 8th May 2014 and this is where we now live. The plan has worked and we have a much less stressful life. As an added bonus, we discoverd some of the largest sandy beeches we have ever seen just next door to Neath. However, just like in the Lake District, Neath gets a lot of rain because of the hills, but we have some beautiful green valleys!

I am voluntarily retired, looking after the kids and our home. I haven't missed my old job  for one minute and now I use my computing skils to help organisations like Joan's local Catholic Church, my Quaker Meeting and the RTS Support Group in the UK. I also started a local filmmaking club called Neath Filmmakers.

Joan does Agency work for the NHS around the whole of South Wales. Agency work gives her the flexibility she craved for in the NHS. She phones up early on Monday morning and tells the Agencies which days she's available for work; more often than not she gets those days. The pay is better too but some of this extra money must go towards a pension.

Some of her Filipino friends in London were intrigued by what we did and followed us to South Wales. We all have a much better lifestyle as a consequence.

The moral of the story is this: when life gets out of control, be brave and take those big decisions in favour of your family. In our case we are much happier and stress free following our decision to move, but you need to make the decisions that suit your own circumstances; and it pays to think out of the box sometimes.

Wales in not without it's problems. The NHS is very short of money and it takes twice as long to be seen by a consultant than in London. This has an impact of all services, including those for children with special needs. This is the topic of my next post: Maria's Special Educational Needs Statement.