I bet you hate this book already. I bet you think it confirms that (a) you need work–life balance and don’t have it, and (b) you aren’t getting enough of a balance because you are doing it wrong. If this was a diet book (and I have picked up plenty in my time), at this point you’d be wishing something would change about the way you eat, or think about food. You’d be longing somewhere, however secretly, for transformation.

I don’t know about you, but I think about work–life balance a lot. I have to. If my life were a household budget I’d be down to zero every month at best, overdrawn every week at worst.

My day work seems, by comparison, less stressful and more predictable, although technically it is hard to see where the ‘day’ of the job ends. I created and nurtured my business like a child. I shared its growing pains and take enormous pride in every new development. My team is like family, and my board are quite like brothers. Business families certainly fall somewhere in between strangers, friends, and siblings. I spend as much time with them in person and by email as with my own flesh and blood. In order to keep the various shows on the road, and because I’m in my mid-forties, I need to spend time I’d rather not have to spend, keeping the mid-life sag and tiredness levels fractionally at bay. This involves as little exercise as I can get away with, as much retail therapy as I can justify for clothes and make-up to make me look un-saggy generally, as well as to hide the eye bags, and reasonably close attention to haircuts, highlights, and, last but by no means least, manicures. It nearly kills me to sit still for the time it takes for them to dry and I always think I should be doing ‘something else’, but needs must and, to coin a well-known phrase, I’m worth it.

Fantasy Me is someone who glides and doesn’t rush, who gets to the end of her To Do List with a flourishing tick at the end of each day and has the energy to focus fully on the loved offspring her non-stressed gaze alights upon (that’s before she plans world domination in business and after she has made her husband glad as glad can be that she is home). Fantasy Me knows where everything is at any given time, because everything has a neat place and is not in a disordered heap somewhere. Fantasy Me is, well, a fantasy. The truth is distinctly more chaotic than I dare admit.

In short, I veer between extremes like most working parents, just as I multitask not just because I’m good at it but because I have to do it, like it or not. Women and men are driven by all sorts of feelings as we juggle and struggle and muddle along, including fear: that someone else will take our job; that there won’t be enough money; that if we don’t organize a million things for our children they will be denied some kind of Personal Development holy grail; or that we will ‘forget’ how to do it. Either way, we generally don’t feel we have a choice because often we have only limited choices.