What will You do With Yourself? When your youngest Starts School

When your youngest child starts school, the job of mothering doesn’t end. But suddenly the question of what comes next – returning to work, starting again or simply working out who you are now – becomes much harder to ignore.

My youngest starts school in September. After more than a decade of having at least one small child at home, all four of mine will finally be in school. Recently, my mother-in-law asked me a question that has stayed with me.

“What will you do with yourself?”

She didn’t mean anything by it. But there was something about the phrasing that caught me.

Perhaps because it makes this moment sound so final. As though a job I’ve been doing for more than a decade is coming to an end, and I ought to have another one lined up.

We’re supposed to look forward to this bit. You’ll finally have some time to yourself. You’ll get your life back. But what if you’re not entirely sure which life you’re supposed to be getting back?

Spend long enough raising children and the woman you were before them can start to feel very far away. Not because motherhood has erased her, but because while you’ve been so busy tending to everybody else’s becoming, there hasn’t always been much space to consider your own.

There is something strangely reassuring about being needed that much. However exhausting it is, there is very little ambiguity about your purpose. Someone wakes up and calls for you. Someone falls over and wants you. Someone is hungry, frightened, tired, ill, lost, lonely – and somehow, for a very long time, you are the answer.

Then one September morning, you take the last one to school. You come home. And nobody needs you until three.

Perhaps that’s the part of this milestone we don’t talk about. We talk about the freedom. The hot coffee. The quiet house. The six uninterrupted hours stretching gloriously ahead. We don’t talk so much about what it feels like to have spent years being essential to the rhythm of other people’s days and then, quite suddenly, not to be.

What will you do with yourself?

Maybe that’s why the question lands. Because somewhere inside it is the suggestion that one version of your usefulness has expired – and that you ought to know what you’re going to replace it with.

Except, of course, they haven’t stopped needing you.

My eldest is ten now, and I know that motherhood doesn’t end at the school gates. The work simply changes. There are fewer of the relentless physical demands of small children and more friendships, homework, activities, worries, school admin and, in our house now, the looming business of secondary school. I could fill every school day running our family and still have things left undone.

So the job hasn’t ended. But something has. My children haven’t stopped needing a mother. But the world has started wondering what else I’m going to be.

And perhaps, quietly, so have I.

‘The Job hasn’t ended. But something has.’

The strange apprenticeship of motherhood

Because when you think about it, we ask something quite extraordinary of women during these years.

We step away from careers – sometimes entirely – to become experts at a job designed to make our expertise obsolete. You master babies once you no longer have one. You crack toddlerhood just as they start preschool. By the time you know exactly what you’re doing, the job description has changed again.

And for years, this knowledge is invaluable. You can diagnose a fever with the back of your hand, pre-empt a meltdown and hold the schedules, friendships, appointments, worries and whereabouts of several small people permanently in your head.

Then they grow up.

Imagine the same arrangement in any other workplace: a ten-year fixed-term contract requiring you to work nights, remain permanently on call and continually retrain – while the career you left quietly advances without you.

Because that’s the real paradox. You can spend a decade becoming more capable than you have ever been while becoming less employable on paper.

Your industry moves on. Your confidence may not. The colleagues you left behind become the people doing the hiring. And the expertise that has consumed you doesn’t fit particularly neatly on a CV. Then, just as the role loosens its grip, you’re expected to have the next one ready. No handover. No transition plan. No exit interview.

‘You can spend a decade becoming more capable nthan you ever have been while becoming less employable on paper.’

Just a small person in an oversized school uniform and a cheery question:

What will you do with yourself?

Except the job isn’t finished

Of course, the fixed-term contract isn’t really fixed-term at all.

Motherhood doesn’t expire when the youngest starts Reception. But something shifts: once your children are all in school, there is an assumption that you are now available for paid work.

Except the school day was never designed to resemble a working day. It ends at three-something, disappears altogether for thirteen weeks of the year and is punctuated by inset days, appointments and illness.

So going back to work doesn’t replace the job you’ve been doing. It has to fit alongside it.

‘Motherhood hasn’t been taken off your plate. You’ve simply been handed another plate.’

I made myself something to go back to

I am fortunate, in one sense, to know what I’ll do in September.

Over the past few years, I’ve built something of my own alongside raising my children. Partly because I wanted to. But, if I’m honest, partly because I was frightened of the alternative.

The idea of returning to the career I left more than a decade ago felt increasingly like returning to somebody else’s life. The industry had moved on. Job descriptions had changed. And so had I. My interests were different; my priorities were different. Even the thought of sitting in an interview and trying to explain the intervening years made me uneasy.

So I began building something that fitted the person I’d become, rather than trying to squeeze her back into the career I’d left behind. This September, for the first time, I’ll be able to give something I’ve been building in the margins the space of an actual working day.

I’m enormously grateful for that. But I don’t want to romanticise how I got here.

We love stories about mothers building businesses during nap times and after bedtime. They’re told as stories of ambition and ingenuity: she made it work. What we talk about less is what making it work takes from somewhere else.

For years, we barely had weekends in our house. If friends or family offered childcare, I didn’t use it for a date night or an afternoon off; I used it to work. Time that might have been spent resting or recovering became another opportunity to get something done.

And it took a toll. There were times when I was overstimulated and overwhelmed, and I know I would have been less so had I allowed mothering to be the only work I was doing.

I loved having something that was mine. I still do. But I wouldn’t tell another woman that the answer to a decade out of the workplace is to spend that decade quietly building another one.

Caring for children was already the work.

But what if I hadn’t?

And that’s the thought I keep coming back to.

What if September had arrived and I hadn’t built something in the margins? What if, at 40 or 45, I was looking back at a career I left a decade ago and forward at one I couldn’t yet imagine?

There must be thousands of women standing at school gates this September feeling exactly that. Perhaps “What will you do with yourself?” feels very different when you genuinely don’t know.

And for many women, there isn’t the luxury of taking very long to find out.

When ‘what next?’ isn’t really a choice

Because, of course, there is a privilege in being able to spend time wondering. For many women, what comes next isn’t really about fulfilment or finding themselves again. It’s much more prosaic.

They need to earn.

In a household already stretched by the cost of living, another income may no longer be optional. And suddenly a woman who has spent years arranging her life around everybody else’s needs is expected not only to work out what she wants to be, but to make herself economically useful again – quickly.

And yet paid work and family life still operate on completely different timetables. The working day doesn’t finish with the school bell. There are thirteen weeks of school holidays to cover, children get ill, appointments happen – and somebody still has to be available.

For years, she has been the solution to all of those inconvenient gaps between family life and working life. Going back to work doesn’t close those gaps. It simply means she can no longer be the person permanently standing in them.

So what do we actually do with ourselves?

Maybe the mistake is thinking there has to be a right answer.

Some women will go back to careers they loved. Some will retrain or start something new. Some will work because they need the money; others because they need the work. And some, if they have the choice, will decide that family life still needs enough of them.

Surely there is room for all of it.

We’ve spent years trying to convince ourselves that raising children is valuable work. It seems strange, then, to decide that the moment the youngest starts Reception, the hours between nine and three must immediately become productive in some other way.

‘Nor should we replace one narrow idea of what a good mother looks like with an equally narrow idea of what an empowered woman looks like.’

What will I do with myself?

In September, I will take my youngest child to school.

For the first time in more than a decade, I will come home without a small child beside me. I know what I’ll do. I’ll sit down at my desk and give the work I’ve been building in the margins the time I’ve wanted to give it for years.

I’m ready for that. But somewhere between the school gates and my desk, I know I will grieve the life I’m leaving behind.

For all the exhaustion, the noise and the years spent wishing for just a few uninterrupted hours, being needed by my children has given shape to more than a decade of my life.

Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to the question.

What will you do with yourself?

Not what will you do? What will you do with yourself? As though the self is something to be put to use.

And perhaps there is something particularly poignant about asking that of a mother. For years, we have given ourselves to other people – our bodies, our time, our attention, our sleep, our ambitions. Not always reluctantly. Often willingly. Sometimes joyfully.

Then, one September morning, some small part of ourselves is handed back. And almost immediately, we’re wondering what we should do with it.

I know what I intend to do with mine.

But perhaps the more interesting question isn’t what a mother does with herself when her children no longer need all of her.

It’s what is left of herself when, finally, some of her belongs to her again.

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