Commuting and parenting - Can the train take the strain?

Last week I went back to being a daily commuter for work - an hour on train & tube in the morning and again in the evening.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect to be honest. I’d been lucky enough for the last nine years to have lived within a 10 minute walk (at one point 30 seconds walk) of my place of employment.

The only commuting I had to do was to the firm’s London office once a week, and usually out of the peak hours.

Living the dream.

Except you don’t really appreciate that at the time though, do you? Everything’s relative, you see, so getting grumpy about having to get out of bed at 6am to catch a train just turns into getting grumpy about having to get up at 8am to walk down the road. Sometimes 8.30am.

So it was with some trepidation that, at the age of 37, I willingly returned to the daily grind.

Firstly, and let’s be clear, it was for a fantastic opportunity, so ‘doing it’ was never in question. And I know that commuting is a daily necessity for a great many people from all walks of life.

But I think what I was most concerned about was how the commute would impact family life. We have a 10 month-old son and my wife and I had established a most excellent work/life balance based around our work hours, work locations (she commutes into London) and childcare.

I wasn’t concerned at all about having to get up early. Really, I wasn’t. Much.

The reality has been something of a mixed bag. The commute itself is not nearly as taxing as I expected (though in the two weeks I’ve been doing it train & tube has been working ok - I’m waiting for the day it all grinds to a halt because of the leaves/snow/monkeys on the line).

Even the early rise isn’t problem as, well, junior has kind of meant early rises for the last 10 months anyway.

The logistics of childcare have had to change a little, but the biggest impact has been the time we get to spend to ether as ‘a family’ in the evening. I particularly miss the time I had with The Boy on my own in the early evening before Mrs East Herts Parent got home from work.

I’ve tried to get round this by putting the commute to good use - carrying a laptop to and from work means I can get stuff done on the way home (I’m on the 6.11pm from Finsbury Park as a write), which means I spend less time of an evening firing off emails and more time with junior.

It also means I’ve been able to get re-acquainted with some box set action on the train that had fallen by the wayside for a year or so.

All of which means commuting as a parent is kind of OK. I mean, we’d all rather not be doing it, but it pays the milk, right?

And you know what? For those mornings/evening after a night when baby doesn’t sleep through, it provides a nice little window (quite literally) to catch some Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.