Girl-  A youthful female 

Lady-  A woman

Wife-  A married woman

Mother- A woman who has given birth to a child

Working Mother- What’s that?

Truly, what I believe is that a working mother is cannot be defined or put into words. A mother herself is one who is working 24 x 7 and a working mom, to top it all, gets too much to handle.

Someone has rightly said, “every working mother needs a wife”.

What I thought it would be and what it was

My life saw smooth transitions from a girl to a lady to a wife. I was always in my own world of dreams and as all married women do, I too dreamt of becoming the Mum  of a cute baby someday. Well, as the saying goes “for everything else in life, nobody can describe to you what sugar tastes like – you got to eat and see for yourself.”

As planned, I became a mother when I felt ready for it and birthing a baby was undoubtedly a beautiful experience. I was so overwhelmed by it that I blogged about it to share my newfound happiness with other mothers and mothers-to-be.

Having left my previous job since I conceived, I planned to enjoy my pregnancy and have the most laid back 9 months of my life. As I look back now, I feel good about having taken that decision. The baby happened as scheduled and by God’s grace everything went well and healthily.

Post- delivery, 8 months flew by in the blink of an eye and I again started feeling the need to give my brain some work. I wanted to do some work and not just the regular cleaning-cooking-shopping stuff. I wanted to work as a professional.

My motherly feelings though pulled me back somewhere and the thought of letting my son stay away from me, even for a couple of hours was frightening and depressing. Immediately, feelings of guilt, carelessness and shaking off my primary responsibility off my shoulders set in.

The beginning of my career as working mom

One day I just decided to fight all my feelings and settle for something in between. I made up my mind to work from home. I decided to look for jobs that would give me the flexibility of working from home and in the process, let me be with my son as well.

The infamous job search began and luck favored me very soon. I got a great job that gave me everything I wanted: sense of achievement, recognition, satisfaction, flexibility to choose my working hours and most importantly the golden option of working from home.

Life as a working Mom has begun and I love it. I am with my son day in and day out and don’t miss out even a single moment of his growing up, playing around and yearning for me. I am there for him all the time and work when he is fast asleep or busy talking to his cars and stuffed toys like they were alive.

Life would have been slightly different had I been working in a regular office environment. Here’s a possible picture of how my life would have been as a full-time working Mom and this is how I would have been blogging about it then…

I get up early in the morning (and I know now what ‘early’ actually means. Yawn!). Making every effort to not disturb my son’s sleep, I finish my morning rituals and laundry in the most silent manner possible, as if I was sneaking into my own home.

I have a cook to help me with the breakfast and lunch but I prefer cooking my baby’s food myself. Boiling eggs, cooking veg and fruit purees, preparing milk and preparing the diaper bag is what follows then. I rush then to finish my breakfast, supposedly the most important meal of the day, which is usually an on-the-go affair for me as it goes alongside doing my hair, packing my tiffin and cleaning up the pantry.

By then my son gets up and I am back to the ‘I-am-a-Super Mom’ mode, pretending to have ten hands. I give him a massage and bath, get him ready to survive through another week day with me and then plant him in his high chair praying to God to let him be in a good mood to finish his breakfast quickly.

I play the role of a caretaker, story-teller, food feeder, joker – in short, a true mother, while struggling to make him eat.

I leave for work soon after taking care of other trivial things like checking the mail, attending the answering machine, locking up the doors and the like. On my way to office, I drop the baby at the company’s on-site daycare and see him crying every day while parting from me.

With a guilt-filled and heavy heart I bid him good bye, handover his essentials to the lady there, and promise to come to see him during lunch hours, though am never able to do this due to my busy schedule.

I then go to office and start work. Work, the one that I chose over my child and family.Family does suffer because of it and I know it well. My son will just be fine at the daycare and enjoy with other baby friends of his age there. He would anyway get bored staying at home with me all day had I not been working.

As I try to justify my guilt with these thoughts, I check mails, sip on coffee, accept meeting invites, go through tons of files and struggle to finish the day’s work. With every passing hour I look at the ticking clock and wait to meet my little one. After a good nine mentally exhausting hours at work, I grab my bag filled with renewed energy and rush to the daycare to relieve my son.

We drive back home with me narrating the whole day’s happenings to him and finally reach home after a long day out. After stepping in, I feel like playing and running around with my baby but am too tired to do anything and simply hate the feeling. Naturally, my son also gets tired due to staying out the whole day and gets sleepy the moment we finish dinner.

I bathe him again and put him to bed. Hardly left with any energy then, this working Mom proud to have been working all day finally calls it a day, wondering how life would have been had she been a stay-at-home Mom.

I wonder, had I not been working and had I stayed back I could have woken up with my son cuddling him good morning in bed, fed him at leisure, prepared fresh food for him instead of packing it since morning, enjoyed diapering his cute tush, and spoken cute nothings to him in baby language.

I could have enjoyed some splish splashing with him in the bath, taught him his ABCs and nursery rhymes despite knowing he won’t be able to learn so soon, would have had a relaxing afternoon nap with him hugging him tight and sleeping by his side till he didn’t wake up.

Most importantly I would have been there all the time to shower my love on him. The kind of love that only I could give him – mother’s love.

Thankfully, I am not a working Mom but a working-from-home Mom and all those lovely things that are in thoughts of the working mom are reality for me. Life as a mother is too short and wonderful to be wasted working on office desks or travelling for work. Life as a mom is to be embraced gracefully, enjoyed and relished forever – just as I do.