Last week, I had my first child-free (well, if you ignore the little womb-raider) day in a long, long time. I can’t even remember the last time I was child-free for more than a couple of hours. Ben had a full day at nursery in preparation for full time school in September. He went in to breakfast club with his brothers at 8am, and I didn’t see him, or the other two again until 3pm that afternoon.

Bliss.

I had already had an idea of what I was going to do that day. As I said, it’s the first time in at least three years, and probably since he was born, to be honest, that I have had that length of time to myself. Apart from a day next week, and one the following week, it is likely to be the last one until baby girl is doing the same thing in five years time. I wanted to make the most of it! I managed to get the majority of Wednesday’s work done on Tuesday evening (by working my arse off) so I only had 1000 words to write. I had planned to do that, do a big clean up of downstairs and then spend some much needed time relaxing in the afternoon with a cup of tea and several episodes of Suits.

I put a little poll on my Facebook and Instagram, asking my lovely followers what they would do – a) spend the day relaxing or b) doing a shit load of housework. All but three people (and one messaged to say she clicked the wrong option!) said a – relax. However, I did get a DM on Instagram from someone with no profile picture, no posts and just a load of numbers as their username ask me if I felt guilty ‘sitting on my arse while my husband was at work all day?’. So, to Mr or Mrs. TrollFace, here is what I want to say to that:

ABSOLUTELY NOT

First of all, he’s not my husband, so y’know, get your facts straight. Petty detail, but you pissed me off.

Secondly, why the hell would I feel guilty? Let’s examine stuff, eh?

I am a working mum of three kids. Yes. I work. I work bloody hard most days. I’m not ‘just’ a blogger, nor am I a stay at home mum, not that it matters either way anyway because even if I was one of those, I am entitled to sit on my arse all day for one day if I wanted to. I am a freelance content writer – I write shit for other people. I write A LOT of shit for other people. When I’m not writing shit for other people, I am writing shit for myself, earning money to support my family. It is pretty much a full-time job Monday to Friday, more often than not creeping into the weekend as well. I do this job around my three children, three six-mile round trip school runs a day. We are rapidly coming up to the long summer holidays, where my workload is still the same, but I have three kids at home all day that will need entertaining. Oh, and I’ll be in the last few weeks of pregnancy as well.

I am heavily pregnant. I’m not using that an excuse, and as I said above, I don’t have to justify chilling out for a day to anyone, but if anyone has an excuse to put their feet up for a day and watch crap on TV, it’s a pregnant, full time working mum. A pregnant full-time working mum that will be working full time until the day she goes into labour, and will only be having a two-week ‘maternity leave’ once baby is here.

Thirdly – has anyone ever died from not putting a few loads of washing on or mopping the floor? Nope.

My house is clean enough. We have three kids – it gets untidy sometimes, but it’s clean enough that no one is going to get ill from it. The only injury that might occur is someone being buried alive under the pile of clean washing that always needs putting away. ‘Sitting on my arse while my (not) husband works’ would mean that I’d have two loads of washing to do the next day instead of one and that the slight coffee ring on the floor where I put my mug last night has to stay there another few hours. All life and death matters, of course.

Finally, none of the above points actually matter one shit. It doesn’t matter if I was a non-working, single, childless person with an absolute shit hole of a house – having a ‘day off’ from housework does not make anyone lazy or bad. Sometimes, there are more important things to life than doing housework, like concentrating on your mental health (and physical health – I’m also supposed to be putting my feet up above my heart for at least an hour every day at the moment!) and having a little bit of time to yourself. If that means sacking off everything else and spend the day having a Netflix binge, so be it. It’s probably not healthy if you do that every day but once in a while? Nah. It’s cool.

So, do I feel guilty about sitting on my arse for a day and doing nothing?

Abso-fucking-lutely not.