Why I Made the Transition from Full Time Working Mom to Stay at Home Mom

After being a full-time working girl for over 11 years, I am now dedicating my life to being a wife and mom. Whaaat?! After giving birth and coming to terms with motherhood, it’s crazy how priorities change. Everyone tells you about it but you can’t feel the weight of it all until it happens to you.

At first, I was hesitant about making this change. Can we afford it? Am I sabotaging my career’s future? What will I do with my time (what time?) It was a real internal struggle. There were a lot of tears, self fabricated excuses and countless conversations with my incredibly supportive husband who kept saying “whatever you want to do is fine with me”. How I love that man! I wanted him to give me the answer since I was so indecisive, but of course he knows better. The decision was entirely up to me.

The more I thought about it, the more sense leaving my job made. I wanted to enjoy my baby boy and my situation at the moment wasn’t allowing me to embrace that wholeheartedly. Work was stressing me out a lot and I had already experienced several instances or “signs” telling me that a change in career/life was coming.

Alfie and I at my previous job
Alfie and I at my previous job

I started digging deep and and asked myself some juicy questions like; Do I want to continue down this career path? What is the right thing to do? Will I be able to survive emotionally/mentally, without a full-time job? And then ultimately taking a deep breath and asking myself; Is this how I want to live my life? The answer was simply NO. Continue reading “Why I Made the Transition from Full Time Working Mom to Stay at Home Mom”

Don’t Leave Before You Leave

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg discusses women, leadership and success in her book Lean Inn released back in 2013. Among all of the important and valuable messages that she mentions there was one in particular that resonated with me simply because I thought it adequately described a particular situation I was going through. The message was the following; “Don’t leave before you leave.”

I heard this at the precise moment when I was dead set on resigning from my corporate job. She explains the phrase “Don’t leave before you leave” as the moment in a woman’s life when she thinks it’s time to give up her job because she sees not being able to attend to her future, unborn children if she remains working. In other words, it is “looking for the exit before it’s time” says Sheryl. Whoa. Light bulb moment!

The reason why it resonated with me so much was because I was going through both a future resignation and a plan to start a family. As I looked at my situation I thought, “Oh man! Am I doing exactly what Sheryl says NOT to do? Am I leaving because I want to start a family inthe future and I don’t see myself wanting to come back to this job?” It hit me hard and it started to take over my mind until I quickly decided to let it go. I realized that it was in my best interest not to fret and let time take care of it. Continue reading “Don’t Leave Before You Leave”