Tips for raising a child without a househelp

Hi Hillary,

I hope you and the cub are well. From your posts, I learnt that you don't have a domestic manager. Would you consider doing a post on how to juggle work and parenting for us single parents who cannot afford house girls? I just want to learn a few things on how I can balance parenting and business without neglecting either one of them.

That was an e-mail I received the other day, and since sharing experiences helps each one of us become better parents, I figured that would be an interesting topic to address.

From the framing of the message, I could tell the sender was being eaten up by guilt like most parents feel when leaving their children behind to go to work.

When Brenda relocated to a different country, and I was left with the baby, I only managed to retain the house help for three months before letting her go. That left me with a baby to raise alone and an office to go to every day, a position that is precarious even for a superhuman.

Get rid of the guilt

The first thing I did was to liberate myself from guilt by coming to terms with the fact that our jobs were essential in providing the baby with the food he ate, the roof he slept under, and the little luxuries he enjoyed.

I also had to develop the mindset of having two jobs; a day job at the office and a night shift in the house. The one at the office paid me in money, but the joy from my second job filled my heart in ways no monetary deposits could possibly match. That train-thought kept me energised for both roles.

One thing that made my case a bit manageable was that there was no Covid-19. It was easy to drop him into a daycare centre and pick him after work. This arrangement came in with one basic cardinal rule; I had to develop new principles about my own way of life.

Sticking to a particular schedule every weekday, was one of them. I have been forced to cut short meetings and walk out of filming sets because it was time to go pick my baby.

The problem with parents is, they often express regrets when they have to seek consent to go handle even natural occurrences, like medical emergencies.

That basically renders children the lesser beings in the equation as the parent protects the employer’s interests at all costs. Jobs or businesses are meant to cash in on us so that we can enjoy with family, but not make the same families look like obstacles.

As a matter of fact, whereas every parent owes the world to their children, no workplace owes even one city to its employee.

It also dawned on me that children value quality more than quantity time, and it has nothing to do with money or gifts. It is the little moments we spend with them that define the bond between us. You may have a whole day with them, but that five-minute game of hide and seek is what remains etched in the young one’s mind.

I, therefore, chose to compensate lost time by being creative and coming up with activities that would build our bond. My son and I have competed with toy cars in this house, rode bikes in the estate, cleaned the house and rolled chapati together. Those were moments that did not last for hours, but they filled the gap left during the day.

Juggling parenting and work also meant cutting down on some social activities I had gotten used to. Time with the boys or visits to relatives went down marginally as I channelled that time to take my baby out over the weekends.

To this day, I prefer sitting at home with him singing along to Daddy Shark on YouTube, overstepping out with the boys. 

Hillary has raised his son on his own from the time he was six months. [email protected]