Necessarily Unconventional as Many Others: A Family Portrait

The difficulty of reconciling work and family is undoubtedly a major problem in my experience as a working mother and wife, and one of the problems to be solved on a daily basis. So I thought that as a photographer there was no better story to tell than the one belonging to for talking about work-life balance issue! My work takes me abroad quite often, my partner and father of Margot is himself sometimes traveling and during the week away anyhow till 7e30, so Margot has often to go to visit her grandparents, who fortunately provide an indispensable hand ... In such situation, sharing family duties between me and my partner in an unconventional way is definitely essential, and so it's up to him to do laundry and to me to cook, to both to tidy up as possible even if, given the nature of my work, the time of my partner’s work and Margot’s playing left as free as possible given a specific educational choice we made, the word "tidiness" can hardly be used to describe our house! Given the many business trips I and sometime my partner do, the most definite characteristic of our house is the constant presence of suitcases at the entrance: mine above all, the one that I do not always have time to undo from the previous trip, the one that I'm packing up for the next trip ... then there is that of Margot, for the days spent with her grandparents and, at times, that we use for our pleasure travels all together over the week ends. The moments to be together are therefore essentially those in the evenings, when all the 3 of us are in Milan and during the weekend ... obviously in these moments often we are tired from a day of work and we still have to attend to the household chores, thereby reducing playtime with Margot ... for this our little secret (surely quite common) is to try to involve Margot with the housework, stimulating his game that has as much as possible to do with what we are doing: to prepare lunch and dinner allows her to pretend to cook and use cookware and utensils and real food not normally used, to do the laundry allows her to use the washing machine, stain removers and detergents and to jump between the dirty clothes (often confusing instead separating them), to undo or pack allows her to play in our room often dressed as a princess with my clothes and makeup and get ready for some imaginative dance ... this of course means once again sacrificing the tidiness! After a day of kindergarten, she, like us, is very tired, and so during the week in the evening the grant (a virtue of necessity!) is to look at a cartoon and all the 3 of us relax on the couch before lulling here to sleep in our bed, another moment that we try as much as possible to spend together before transferring her to her room for the night ...