THE WORKPLACE-PLEASER
Angela Mollard took the long, hard road to get some work-life balance
It’s a great irony that the book I wrote on how to have a happy family is now my kids’ worst childhood memory. Back in 2012 I thought it was a great idea to write a memoir, and when the publisher gave me a tight deadline, I didn’t consider that working 15 hours a day telling others how to have happy children might turn out to be misery for my own. I’d rise at 5am to smash out my daily target of 2000 words before moving on to my day job as a journalist. On weekends I’d forfeit trips to the beach for editing, and as the delivery date for the manuscript drew closer I instructed my husband to take the kids, then aged 12 and nine, away for a campervan holiday without me.
My book, The Smallest Things: Thoughts on Making a Happy, chronicled how to give your child a rough-and-tumble, love-filled childhood where time to build cubby houses and make homemade lemonade was all that mattered. As my kids would later recount, being shoved in front of the telly to watch for the 300th time while I tapped away at my computer made them feel like the smallest things.
