Deep Fat Fryer Fantasies

on fantasising about being back in the worse job I have ever had, just to not be at home

When I was a teenager I worked weekends and holidays in McDonald’s around my A-levels and my year in art college before I went away to University. I regularly worked 20-hour weekends and went home starving, legs aching from standing all day and my uniform and hair coated in a layer of grease you could smell through my coat.

It was easily the worst job I have ever done, but last year I fantasised about working there again and not for old time’s sake.

I hadn’t really wanted to work there but by the time I was seventeen, I was about to lose my paper round for being “too old” and I was desperate. I had tried every other shop on at the local shopping centre and I needed money to pay my mum rent and save for my eventual escape from home.

When I looked into applying to work there again last year, desperation was very much again at the heart of the reason why.

This time it wasn’t my parents I was wanting to escape from, but my children.

At the time, I had two children under four years old and I spent most of the week with them alone. They bored me, they tested me and I didn’t feel myself when I was with them. We did nice things, sometimes, but when I look back on that time, I mostly see struggle and exhaustion.

Many other Mums or friends would tell me that it was clear that I needed something other than the kids. They weren’t enough alone to be my raison d’être. I love them, but I needed to find me again. I needed to work. I agreed and thought even to just be out of the house without them - I need an aspect of my life that didn’t involve them.
I needed something.

The issue was I could only work weekends as that was the only time my partner could take the kids consistently, but I struggled to get much freelance work. (I’m a graphic designer which should be a dreamy remote flexible job, but that’s a story for another day!) In place of my current career, I needed an alternative: a trusty high street chain store - somewhere that would offer flexible shifts, somewhere that was busiest on the weekends. I thought back to those days and I thought, Yes. McDonald's.

I had worked there before and I had hated it - but maybe it wasn't that bad.

I looked to it fondly like you would a friend who you have forgotten has wronged you. Like looking back exclusively to the good times of an abusive relationship.

I wanted to be anywhere but home, so much so I was prepared to volunteer myself for a job at an establishment that I knew would overwork me and under-appreciate me - where I had spent days of my life scraping food off the floor and grease off machinery, back and legs aching from the long hours of hard physical labour.

I fantasised about the lunch breaks I would have sat reading on top of a box of happy meal toys in the stock room where other staff members would bring leaking bin bags from the restaurant. To be alone for a few moments was all that I wanted. It didn’t seem to matter to me that to get that minimum lunch break, I would have to endure hours of stress.

I craved that 15 minute legally mandated break for every four hours I worked in McDonald’s. I rarely got that at home. Some days it felt like every time I sat down there would be a reason I would have to get up again. I could go hours hungry or needing the toilet. My senses on high alert for hours, poised and ready to disperse a fight - my stress levels rarely came down. It wasn’t always bad but when it was I started plotting how I could be somewhere else.

Of course working in McDonald’s was far from a spa break and even as a customer I still find I get a PTSD type reaction from the incessant beeping you hear from the kitchen as fryer calls go unanswered and queues form far down and out of the restaurant. But perhaps the fact I even considered applying for a job there, knowing full well what it would be like, gives a sense of how overwhelmed I felt at home, how really my children were just like the beeping timers in McDonald’s kitchen, except some days they couldn’t be switched off.

I craved escape but does that make me a bad mother?

“When my son was an infant, I often imagined getting gently hit by a bus so that I could go to a hospital and get some sleep. I didn’t know that fantasy is so common among mothers of newborns that it has a name. It is accurately, if not creatively, called “the hospital fantasy.””

Miranda Rake, Inside Matrescence,¹ The Cut

My fantasy of stepping back into my McJob is a personal version of the hospital fantasy and to hear it is normal is a huge relief. I have so much compassion now for the mother I was then. I see that need and want of isolation as a sign I was in need of a break. I was overstimulated. It was all too much. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my kids or that I regretted my choice to have children. It was my mind trying to tell me - look; you need a break.

I feel the need to say that I don’t hate my children, I love spending time with them, but I can honestly say that now I work more and spend a lot less time with them, I am cherishing the time with them much more and I don’t think thinking it or even saying it out loud makes me a bad mother at all. Fantasies like mine are common and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. I would love to know what yours was if you had one?
What was your “hospital fantasy”?

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1. Inside Matrescence, Miranda Rake, the Cut (June 2024)