My Journey to Become a Working Stay at Home Mom
A couple months ago I started to notice an acronym that I didn’t recognize show up on Facebook and other social medias, SAHM. I didn’t think much of it when I first saw it, but soon I did become very curious as I saw it more and more especially in my Mom-to-be and working from home groups. I remember the moment I figured SAHM out, it actually had a bigger impact on me than I expected, Stay at Home Mom.
I had always wanted to be a mother since before I could even remember. Even as I got older and added to the never-ending list of things I wanted to be when I grew up I always knew I would also want to be a Mom.
I’ve had the incredible blessing to have a wonderful Mom who chose to be a stay at home mother. Her and my Dad made numerous sacrifices so that she could stay home with us which I will forever be grateful for. As I reached my late teens I started noticing a lot of the things that my Mom had given up in order to be a full-time Mom and started to wonder how I could do everything I wanted to do in my life and still be the mother I wanted to be.
Fast-forward several years to 2015 and I was about to get married to my best friend, JJ. I was also a year and a half away from graduating in Visual Communication and I knew that I wanted to work when I graduated. As JJ and I talked about our plans as a couple and our future I was always impressed at how supportive he was of me pursuing and fulfilling my dreams. He wanted to support me in both having a career and in being a mother. In a way though, it made me even more anxious about what I would do when we did choose to have children. How could I have it all?
Becoming a Mom
In October, JJ and I will be expecting our first child and I will finally become a mother. The first few months of my pregnancy my worries started to resurface again but with a increased fervor. I was falling head-over-heels in love with the child that developing inside of me and wanted to just completely dedicate my life to him, but as I realized this new love and desire I also started to feel all of my hopes and dreams of any type of career slipping out of my fingers.
I started feeling so torn. I wanted to dedicate everything to the little guy developing inside of me, but at the same time I was feeling so selfish as I didn’t want to give up any dreams of my own. I was looking at the situation as an either/or situation without any type of compromise. I was working a few different jobs, most of which were from home, but I was still thinking I would give most of them up when our baby arrived.
SAHM, Stay at Home Mom. I don’t know why figuring out that one acronym made such a huge difference for me but suddenly everything started to click and I actually thought a little more about what it could mean to be a stay at home mom. I had been thinking in extremes(something I’m always telling other people not to do) and was completely missing the middle ground. I wasn’t even considering doing both.
Marketable Skills
As I moved to the middle ground of being a working stay at home mom I started to become even more grateful for my Mother and what she had done for me. She had frequently talked about developing “marketable skills” while we were growing up and helped me learn how to do everything from sewing, cooking, cleaning to teaching music lessons and selling art I had created. At the time, I thought of it as mostly odd jobs to be doing in high school. We talked about how we could always do it as mothers when we grew up to earn money but I honestly thought of them mostly as hobbies that I might use for the occasional dollar. Over the years I had talked about so much that I think in a way it had become white noise to me.
Through this change of perspective I also started to look at my degree a little differently. Visual Communications is a bit of a hybrid degree that taught me graphic design and web design while also teaching me a lot about public relations and advertising. I had loved the degree for the amount of flexibility that it would give me in a career but for some reason I had not really thought about pairing it with all of the “marketable skills” that I had developed in high school. I had technically talked about it before, but had never really thought through the logistics of it.
Suddenly, I was realizing that I had always looked at my major, hobbies and marketable skills like separate tubs of paint that I could only use one at a time and couldn’t mix, but suddenly with this new perspective I was realizing that if I mixed them together I could create even more colors and my work could be a much more colorful and interesting piece of art.
Fitting it all together
As this special little baby comes and joins my family in October I know that I will have to make sacrifices in order for me to be the mother that I want to be, but I’m excited to try to also continue to pursue some of my passions as well. I hope that I can find a balance in being a Working SAHM and create a masterpiece of my life.
