Trying to Build Something While Raising a Four-Year-Old

 I spent a long time waiting for uninterrupted hours that don't really exist with a four-year-old in the house. Eventually I started wondering whether it was the business that needed to change.

My son has started asking me, “Are you working?” with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for people caught doing something they shouldn't.

The answer is often no.

I might be looking at the grocery list. Checking the weather. Replying to someone about school pickup. Once, memorably, I was trying to find a recipe for chicken thighs.

Still: “Are you working?”

Apparently anything involving a screen is deeply suspicious when you're four.

If I am working, it gets more complicated. Because yes, technically, I'm working. But I'm also sitting in the same room while he builds something elaborate out of blocks, occasionally needing me to inspect a particular piece of machinery. There are excavators involved more often than you'd expect. Someone is usually stuck somewhere. Occasionally the excavator is the problem.

I used to think I needed to find a way around all of this. Now I think the better question is what kind of business can survive it.

The interruption isn't the exception

For a while I kept waiting for uninterrupted time. A quiet Saturday afternoon. A productive evening. A couple of hours where nobody needed a snack, couldn't find a shoe, or wanted me to watch something being jumped over. Those hours do exist occasionally. They're lovely when they arrive. They're just not a reliable business strategy.

A four-year-old doesn't operate on the assumption that Mum has a content calendar. He doesn't care that I'm halfway through a paragraph when he's discovered a beetle near the vegetable patch, which — like most things in that garden — is thriving in ways I never intended and struggling in the ways I actually planned for. He has important information to share. Immediately. And the thing is, he's right. His life is happening now too.

I don't want to build a business that treats him as an inconvenience every time he wanders into the room. But I also don't want to pretend that building something alongside motherhood is all meaningful little interruptions and heartwarming perspective. Sometimes I would quite like to finish one sentence without being asked whether excavators sleep. Both things can be true.

The guilt goes both ways

Nobody really talks about this enough. When I'm working, there's a small voice suggesting I should be more present. When I'm not working, there's another one wondering when exactly I'm supposed to build the thing I'm trying to build. You can lose an entire afternoon negotiating between the two and somehow end up feeling guilty about both. I don't have a clever solution to that.

What has helped is accepting that my son doesn't need every spare minute of me, and my business doesn't need every spare minute either. That sounds obvious written down. It wasn't obvious to me.

Children are surprisingly comfortable with you having a life that isn't entirely about them. Mine seems happy enough when I'm nearby but not actively involved in whatever complex situation is unfolding between his dinosaurs and the lounge room furniture. He wants connection. He also wants to play. Those aren't always the same thing. I've started trusting that distinction more.

Small work for small windows

Not every business task deserves the same kind of attention. Writing something complicated? I need quiet. Making a few Pinterest pins? I can probably manage that while supervising an excavation project on the living room floor. Checking links, updating a product description, answering an email, tidying up the increasingly questionable number of tabs open on my laptop — those things can survive interruption. Some work can't.

The mistake I used to make was forcing the wrong work into whatever time I happened to have. I'd get interrupted, lose my train of thought, become disproportionately annoyed with everyone involved, and decide I was terrible at balancing things. I wasn't terrible at balancing things. I was trying to write a novel in a five-minute window. There's a difference.

Now I keep smaller jobs available for smaller pockets of time. Not in a beautifully colour-coded system, unfortunately — I've tried those, and the system always ends up looking impressive enough that maintaining the system becomes the new hobby. Mostly I just know what's possible in twenty minutes and what needs the house to be genuinely quiet. That alone has made things easier.

I stopped trying to protect every moment

There was a period where I treated any interruption to work as a threat. I'd finally sit down, open the laptop, find my concentration — and then someone would need something. My whole body would react as though the evening had been ruined. That's a miserable way to live when you're raising a young child.

Eventually I had to admit the interruptions weren't a problem I was going to solve. They were simply part of the shape of this particular season. Once I stopped fighting that quite so hard, I got better at choosing when to work. If I've got an hour of proper concentration after bedtime, I don't waste it answering emails. If I've got twenty unpredictable minutes while he plays nearby, I don't start the article that's been sitting in my head all week.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. Most useful things do, once you've finally stopped making them complicated.

What I hope he sees

My son will probably grow up with a fairly strange understanding of what his mother does. He sees me working from home. He sees Teams meetings and headphones and the laptop opened again after dinner. He sees me making things that don't seem to exist physically anywhere in the house, which must be confusing. I don't expect him to understand it. I just like that he sees it.

Not in a “watch Mum build her empire” kind of way. Absolutely not — I can barely type that sentence without needing to lie down. I just like the ordinariness of it. Mum works. Mum makes things. Mum also sits on the floor and gets told off for moving a dinosaur incorrectly. The two parts of my life don't need to be separated as neatly as I once imagined. I'm not building something despite him being here. I'm building it while he's growing up. That's different.

The business will probably look different by the time he's older. More uninterrupted space, hopefully — although I suspect children simply replace one form of interruption with another, and continue asking you questions from different rooms until you're eighty.

But these years are shaping the business now. They're forcing me to build systems instead of relying on endless effort. They're making me choose work that can survive an ordinary Tuesday. They're teaching me that something doesn't have to be done perfectly, or all at once, to eventually become real.

Yesterday I was halfway through working when my son came over and asked me to watch him do something. I can't remember what it was now. Something involving a jump. I closed the laptop and watched. Later, after he'd gone to sleep, I opened it again and finished what I'd been doing.

The work was still there.

So was I.

And, increasingly, that's the kind of business I want to build.