I’ve been putting off writing this as it’s
a bit personal but I can’t justifiably write about anything else this month
(May). Children Unite was founded by
myself and my partner Jonathan so it’s just the two of us really. Jonathan doesn’t get paid for his work with
Children Unite so he takes on other bits of consultancy work in the children’s
rights field. We have two daughters and
cycle from our home in hackney to our office in hackney – it’s quite an insular
existence I suppose except that we travel quite a bit with our work and are in
communication with all sorts of people from all around the world (from street
children I worked with 20 years a go to Jonathan’s sister in Ireland). But Jonathan has been unwell for the past
five months…particularly unwell for the last month and has not been able to
work. And, I’ve not been able to work much
either so have been based at home; and between looking after Jonathan and
running around after our girls it hasn’t left much room for anything but the
priorities of Children Unite. And while
it’s been an exciting journey for us to set up Children Unite together, this
kind of partnership has an obvious downside.
The good thing is that Jonathan’s illness will all be solved with an
operation to remove his kidney (and his other kidney is fabulously strong) so
it’s not a life-threatening or long-term situation we’re having to deal
with. But his operation has been
cancelled three times so far and I’ve found that I’ve had to put all my energy
into being Jonathan’s personal advocate – trying to get information out of the
urology team at our local hospital has unfortunately required an unbelievable
(and exasperating) amount of ingenuity and determination.
As a consequence I’m feeling unmotivated
about Children Unite and can’t think more than a week in advance but I took
this week off (to paint our lounge shocking pink in an effort to cheer us all
up!) and had a meeting in the middle of the week with someone who came to our
launch event who I didn’t previously know – Victor Riega Garcia, who works in
corporate responsibility at Aviva.
Although I turned up a day early for the meeting (oops!), Victor was charming about it all and gave me some very useful advice – and I found
myself becoming re-motivated about the future of our fledgling
organisation.
I’m finding it hard to separate home and
work at the moment but in many ways this is a false dichotomy anyway – as a
woman, and I think I can afford to generalize a bit on this point, home and
work are not so dissimilar. They aren’t ‘different worlds’ as they are for some
people (men generally) in more traditional jobs. Since setting up Children Unite with Jonathan
I’ve become less troubled or embarrassed that we are a ‘couple’ and we’ve met a
number of other couples in the same boat. But this is, perhaps also because I’m
not trying to prove myself to anyone. In
my 20s when I was trying to prove myself to everyone Jonathan and I both worked
in the offices of Anti-Slavery International and we were fiercely independent
of each other, never referred to each other as a couple and, in fact, hardly
spoke to one-another – to the point where a volunteer once asked me if I had a
problem with Jonathan as I was so short and sharp with him!!). But now, although it’s not the first thing I
want people to know when I introduce Children Unite, I’m not embarrassed by our
relationship, it has always been such a strong partnership that it feels quite
natural to work together as professionals.
So, I guess when I write up the annual
report for 2012-13 I could say that these past three months I’ve been focusing
on caring for the key asset that Children Unite possess: (the wonderful!) Jonathan
Blagbrough!
