Music to Make You Better

12th February 2025

I would like to thank Self Esteem for getting me started with putting words on the page. For weeks, months I have been relying on the “Morning After Mix” sessions on BBC Sounds to provide the soundtrack to my working days. I assume the programme of chilled, often instrumental tracks was given that title as the intention is to be listened to the morning after something that involved a late night, and perhaps some alcohol. But, despite the distinct lack of those two things in my life they have been perfect for me, and indeed the description I just checked on BBC Sounds summarises them as “music to make you better”. This immediately makes me think about why I need to be made better every day – but there is something about my days, and the juggle of small children, a clinical academic career I care about so much, and trying to do anything else for myself that does mean every day feels like an achievement and I could do with some looking after at pretty much any moment.

Anyway, today is “Daddy Day” for us, my husband, who works a rota of shifts as a hospital doctor is always with the twins all day on a Wednesday. I went to running club last night, a new babysitter gave us a chance and said she will come back (despite my accidental sabotage of her attempts to get R into his pyjamas by turning off the Yoto without warning and the subsequent 30min meltdown – thumbs up for her, thumbs down for me), I got a solid 7hours sleep, and my work to do list is looking manageable. So, for these reasons I switched off Morning After Mix (to return to be made better again soon I’m sure) and switched on Self Esteem, who I associate with pure, powerful feminism and here we are – I am writing something about my life.

It is perhaps also a reflection of the ups and downs of being a working Mum that I intended to write a blog 6 months into my fellowship, then 12 months and have come to it at 15 months. The not-really-a-proper-timepoint-to-write-a-blog nature of 15 months would have bothered me before (and you can tell maybe it still does slightly) but I’m going for it, because WHO KNOWS when I will have this headspace, motivation and whatever else the magic ingredients are to write again. I also took this attitude to running an extra 2km at the end of a long run on Sunday, similar combo of new babysitter smashing it, a good night’s sleep and feeling powerful because I ran far. One interpretation of all these reflections is a classic; kids put limits on your life (both direct – childcare, and indirect – sleep deprivation) and it is hard to do what you want to do.  But that doesn’t sit right with my experience, I think I take more opportunities now than ever before – because WHO KNOWS when I will be able to do it again, and there is something freeing about that.

This is both a brilliant attitude for an early career clinical academic to have, and one that is problematic. Many opportunities that come my way are perfect to take a running jump at if the moment suits, and yet those very real limits that childcare puts on my time mean that response in the moment might have long-term commitments that are more difficult for me to do – I have had to accept that my time is not my own. All previous standards around what it meant to be reliable, including but not limited to; always being there when you said you would be, always replying to emails quickly, always drafting something when you said you would have been torn up. My new approach is to communicate transparently about changes to my availability and timelines, which happen a lot and often entirely out of my control (there will be a whole blog post on Winter Viruses in a Childcare Setting at some point – or not, because maybe that phrase says all you need to know). My husband and I lived very independent lives for the years we were together before we had twins, after some early experiments it became clear I will never be joining him on 100km+ bike rides, and we live in hope of him finishing a novel… It is a constant adaptation to have to check with each other before agreeing to things we want/need to do and one I did not anticipate as part of family life. The statement of putting an event in a shared calendar without discussion, how to ask someone to take sole responsibility for their children in a way that doesn’t convey they are doing you a favour (they are 50% theirs) but also, they are doing you a favour (because they are 50% yours too - I am yet to master this, tips welcome). All this means that each time I say yes to something I am taking a leap into a big unknown: will this be something I can really get stuck into, or will it be another project and, the thing I find harder, person/people I am constantly rearranging, messing around and apologising to. I guess one antidote to this I have noticed is that everything in the world of children is temporary, the good times as well as the bad times. So, when I say yes to something, particularly in a good bit (see starting a blog right now….) I am committing to going through some times with that project where I am not able to do the work on it that I would like. But that period will end, and I will do the work in the end – just on the timeline of the viruses/hospital rota/totally mysterious sleep issues/babysitter availability and so on, and not my timeline. I like working with people who understand this, and there are many of them.

I longed for stories and examples of early career Mums in the clinical academic world when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do, and even more so what was possible. Then I found out I was having twins, and I became very focused on stories of people surviving the first 6 months of that experience with all family members intact. This is nearly as difficult to find as the former, it turns out, and resulted in the Instagram algorithm sending me endless ‘picture-perfect’ 5yr old (usually identical female) twins with no instructions on how to achieve this scenario. I deleted Instagram in my third trimester. I am now nearly 3 years into parenthood (4yrs if you count the pregnancy, which I most certainly do), and I have an early career Wellcome fellowship. I have felt for a while that I want to share these two facts beyond what is written in my email signature, not because I have tons of wisdom or solutions to all the problems, of which there are many (fixed-term contracts, promotion criteria that exclude parenthood circumstances, publication pressure – to be discussed), but because I am someone who is a Mum, and an early career clinical academic, and this feels worth talking about.