When I was younger and had my 3 children I wanted to work from home to be with them.
Of course the internet hadn’t even been thought of in those days so the opportunities that are available today for young mothers to work from home, simply weren’t available.
I first worked for a company sewing side seams on cotton blankets for the princely sum of .20cents each side. The courier would deliver boxes of blankets and I would sit at the sewing machine for hours and guess what I still didn’t have much time to spend with the kids, it’s just that instead of going out to work, I was stuck in one of the bedrooms.
Then I brought a knitting machine, I have always been a craft orientated person and my kids had beautiful hand knitted and crocheted dresses, ponchos and jumpers. Well once again there is no freedom when you have to sit at a knitting machine all day long filling orders.
The next thing I went into was driving a 5 ton Ford truck with my husband, who is a carpenter and joiner but had decided to try his hand at something else that might have been more profitable. Now what we were doing was picking up glass and broken bottles in 44 gallon drums that were placed strategically around Auckland. Then we would deliver the glass to the Glass factory to be recycled into new bottles.
It was profitable for a time and then the Government began importing bottles from overseas and that was the end of that.
So in the end I went and got a ‘proper’ job working for the Government in a bank. This way I could afford the little extras we wanted as a family. I put the youngest in day care and although it meant I wasn’t there for the kids when they got home from school, and weekends were a round of housework and taking the kids to sport and drama; but even with limited time, as a family we managed to spend some quality time together.