From a single working woman to stay-at-home Mom!

Oh! I still miss the days when I could just go ahead and do whatever I wanted without having to worry about anything; but time has a flare to change. One moment you are free of all worries and the next you are married with one or more kids, wishing if only the day had a few more hours!

The transition takes a heavy toll on those who are not prepared for it. Once you are married, your priorities are bound to change. You start thinking in terms of what your husband and in-laws would like or dislike, before your own likes. And then when a child enters, your life takes a totally different spin, you end up being so exhausted to have any opinion about yourself. To make matters worse there is always someone around you to show pity and reminding you of your loss. “Oh, you are wasting all those years of education and hard work” they will tell you. Once a shining suit, motherhood will start losing its luster and you will start feeling burdened under its weight or rather (may be) your own heavy weight. Soon you will start losing all the self-confidence you had. The outside world will start doubting your competence in the market as a fulltime working professional.

But wait! Is this all 100% true?

Well I have learned to believe that things happen to you only when you let them. Life has its stages and phases for both men and women; and motherhood has to be one of the good phases, or else evolution must have taken care of it by now. You need to accept your situation first. The child has to be your first priority, but that doesn’t mean there cannot be other things that you can do.

Post pregnancy you may go back to your work or you may choose to stay at home. If you chose to stay at home after you had your baby, that doesn’t mean you have to give up your interaction with the outside world. Staying at home gives you the biggest benefit of ACTUALLY STAYING AT HOME! You can have a well-rounded life with lots of time to take care of your little angel; be there for all their firsts (including sick days and emergencies!). It gives you a lot of flexibility in time, especially when you have support from family or sitters. You can just sit by the TV and drool over all those yummy looking cookery shows or dig through some old novel over a cup of simmering coffee. But if even doing all this doesn’t help you keep your sense of self, you may even consider working from home.

Nowadays working from home has become such convenient and trendy thing to do. You can try different avenues, starting from blogging, consulting, designing, to owning your own business. But even to do that you need to have a proper plan. Work from home is still work so you need to keep your baby’s schedule in mind and chalk out your routine accordingly. Try to have a dedicated work space, to manage things better. Not only does working from home give you some intense “Me Time”, it also has monitory perks.

Most important for a mother is a healthy and happy child, and for that she herself needs to be happy. You need to believe there are no good or bad decisions. There are only choices; once you make them, you live with them and make the most of them.  To be happy and satisfied you must not be dependent on the social norms. Only once you accept your new situation, can you start enjoying (not just coping with!) all these wonderfully breathtaking phases of life.