Navigating Summer holidays as a working mother (& How the hell do you do it?)

As the summer holiday looms, I’m starting to panic.

With mothers still taking statistically taking the lion’s share of childcaring responsibilities (The gap between mothers and fathers in the probability of engaging in primary childcare is 70.8% vs 52.4% weekdays) the impending 6 weeks holidays poses yet another obstacle in the path of women progressing within their careers. ?

I love my kids (goes without saying), But I also love my job – surely it shouldn’t be this hard?

Alongside the personal feeling of pressure to cause the least disruption within the workplace during this time, I’m feeling racked with mum guilt for not having more time off with them – or as a family.

As I’m sure is the same across many households, my husband has also drained his annual leave doing to alternate days to myself to cover holidays. I’m seeing social media posts reminding me ‘you only have 18 summers with your babies’, and this is in no way helpful to the feeling of guilt, not being able to take the 6 weeks off and frolic in the sea with them.

This year I was lucky enough to have the option to purchase further holiday, however this still struggles to stretch to cover the influx of sports days/ inset days and unplanned sick days (of which there is many across my two young children). The average job in the UK offers 28 days holiday, meaning maxing out annual leave is not a viable option, as the school calendar consists of roughly 50 days holiday, excluding inset days!

I wonder to myself, am I missing a trick? How have mothers through the years dealt with this without driving themselves to the edge? I was confident Id cracked the code this year, creating a spreadsheet with all school holiday dates and who would be covering – perfect in design, flawed in reality.

How do you survive the summer holidays as a working parent? What tips can you give other parents in the same position as me?