Looking Back I Made the Right Choices After All!

When I became a mom, I immediately felt the push-pull between making the right career choices and doing what was best for my kids. On the career side, it was a time when flexible schedules, job sharing, or work from home were concepts, just beginning to creep into the work environment…and that’s if you were lucky enough to be working for a forward-thinking enterprise. No, if you wanted to become upper management material (and I did), you had to arrive before everyone else, and leave when you looked up from your desk and saw the janitor coming down the hallway. Then there was the pull from wanting to be a good mom…no a great mom…and I was overwhelmed with all the endless decisions I had to make in my quest to raise emotionally healthy kids.

My husband would have been happy to be a stay-at-home-dad (even when it was unheard of), but we just fell into somewhat traditional roles and he became the primary family income generator and I was the revenue back up. For child rearing, I was the play-by-play family caregiver and he the color commentary (had to throw in a sports analogy : ). And though I had CEO dreams pre-kids, it just seemed natural to put my career in the back seat in order to be happy.

Looking back, I see that I chose my kids well-being over career climbing. I was lucky enough to do what I do as a freelancer, and could ebb and flow my workload, depending upon my family’s needs. So I chose PTA president over a Fortune 500 exec…I sat through every run of their shows over working on major campaigns…I spent hours as non-judgmental listener as they tried to figure out the complexities and challenges of growing up over board rooms and strategic planning sessions.

At the time, I didn’t labor over my choices or give them much thought. It’s just what I wanted to do. Reflecting on it now, I know I did the right thing for me and my family. My 23 year old daughter and 27 year old son are genuinely nice, wonderful, creative, thoughtful human beings. I really like them, and more importantly, I believe that you would too! And though they are adults building their own independent lives, they enjoy being around mom and dad and they still use me as their trusted advisor. I have a life beyond measure.